Wild Facts

“The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.” Thomas Merton wrote this in 1966, when the sect of millenarian Christian egalitarians known officially as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing were in the process of dying off, and their resurrection in antique furniture markets had just recently begun. Yet Merton the monk had something greater in mind. The Shakers designed their tables and cabinets for everyday use in dozens of self-sustaining communities which had once spread from Maine to Kentucky. Theirs were not ecclesiastical chairs, to be set aside on the altar. Yet because they suffused the course of their days with deep spiritual conviction—because they believed it possible that an angel might step down to rest beside them—they filled their lives with objects of peculiarly austere beauty. No angels, no chairs.