It’s a truism that people who live in an area tend not to go to the tourist spots.<\/p>\n
I went to one that’s not too far from my house today — The Shaker Museum in Enfield<\/a>.\u00a0 I’ve held a long interest in alternative communities, especially Utopian communes.\u00a0 The thing is they really don’t present what the culture really was, why the Shakers came about or any of that.\u00a0 It’s a fascinating story, but all we get is that the classic view of Shaker furniture was a 15 year period during the “Golden age” of a 200-odd year history.\u00a0 I mean, that’s true as far as it goes.\u00a0 By the late Victorian era they were making and selling Victorian-era furniture.\u00a0 They were not living quite the plain and unornamented lives that their predecessors had.\u00a0 However, like almost all Utopian communities of the time, there was a serious interest in purposeful lives lived in an orderly way.<\/p>\n I was entranced to walk its halls, though and see first-hand large, airy building this particular community had made for its home.<\/p>\n After that, The Bird wanted to visit La Salette<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s\u00a0a shrine diagonally across the road from the Chosen Vale community and was built on land the Roman Catholic church had bought from the Shakers. Talk about a contrast.\u00a0 The restrained ornamentation of a Shaker community gave way to a shrine dedicated to an apparition of the Virgin Mary<\/a> sometime back in the early 1800s to some shepherd\u00a0children in the French Alps.<\/p>\n There was a garden dedicate to the apparition, a series of statues in the Stations of the Cross ending in a tomb-like structure with a truly grisly statue of Jesus lying dead and blood-stained — rather \u00a0shudder-inducing to my general Protestant-trained sensibilities.<\/p>\n The Rosary Garden was kinda neat, though. \u00a0It’s a path and garden surrounding a large fish pond. \u00a0 There’s a chain that surrounds it with iron roses painted in various colors and statues at each Rosary decade.<\/p>\n The varieties of religious expression and what they cause us to create and express is endlessly fascinating to me, even if I don’t join in the game, myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s a truism that people who live in an area tend not to go to the tourist spots. I went to one that’s not too far from my house today — The Shaker Museum in Enfield.\u00a0 I’ve held a long interest in alternative communities, especially Utopian communes.\u00a0 The thing is they really don’t present what … <\/p>\n