back to Issue 19
by Brandon McNeice
The melody comes when my hands are busy. It rises while I am wiping down the kitchen counter, or loading the dishwasher, or carrying a basket of laundry upstairs. I do not sing the whole thing, and certainly not well. Usually, it is only the first phrase, or the little turn in the tune that seems to lift and settle at once, as if it already knows its way home. It enters the room lightly. It does not demand attention. It accompanies ordinary work and then recedes.
Like many American children, I met the tune on the recorder, that oddly useless instrument of youth that serves as a rite of passage, a communal endurance test masquerading as music education. The recorder is democratic in the worst way: everyone gets one, everyone is bad at it, and everyone is forced to listen. We were handed our beige pipes and taught to cover holes with the soft pads of our fingers, and we squeaked our way toward something that almost resembled a song.
In that classroom, “Simple Gifts” was not sacred. It was not history. It was just one more piece of sheet music clipped to a folder, a tidy melody with a predictable rhythm. But I remember the sheet clearly. The title was printed in a confident font at the top. Beneath it, in smaller letters, an alternate title felt almost like an aside: “Shaker Tune.”
I do not remember anyone explaining what that meant. If someone did, the explanation did not stick. What stayed was the melody itself, the way it rose and fell, the way it turned back on itself like a person returning home. I can still feel the concentration of trying to cover the holes correctly, the effort of producing something that was not pure squeal, the classroom’s restless noise becoming briefly focused as the teacher counted and we all tried to enter at the same time.
That small-print subtitle lodged somewhere anyway. Not as knowledge, exactly. Just as a label. A faint marker. A whole people reduced to a parenthetical beneath a tune.
That may be how religious things often survive. Not first as commandments or disciplines, but as fragments. A prayer becomes an idiom. A fast becomes a custom. A doctrine leaves behind a mood. What remains easiest to carry is usually what can be detached from obedience. We keep what is lovely and portable. We let go of what asks to govern a day.
The Shakers have survived in American memory in that reduced way. For many of us they persist as a handful of beautiful remainders: clean furniture, plain craftsmanship, a severe grace in wood and line, and this tune that still drifts through school music programs, church basements, and old anthologies of American song. They remain as style, as atmosphere, as moral design language. Even the word most associated with them, simple, has had an enviable afterlife. It flatters modern people. It suggests uncluttered rooms, modest appetites, honest work, clean surfaces, fewer notifications. It sounds like relief. We praise simple meals, simple pleasures, simple living. The word arrives trailing approval.
But simple is not the same thing as easy. Some of the hardest things in the world are simple. To tell the truth is simple. To keep one’s word is simple. To forgive is simple. To return, day after day, to a practice one has chosen is simple. Simplicity, rightly understood, is not softness. It is not the attractive arrangement of minimal effort. Often it is what difficulty looks like when all decoration has been stripped away.
I did not understand any of this well enough until I watched The Testament of Ann Lee. What startled me about the film was not merely that it informed me. I had known, vaguely, that the Shakers were not just furniture and hymnody. I knew they were a sect. I knew they had strict practices. I knew enough to know that the song came trailing history. But there is a difference between possessing a fact and feeling its weight. The film closes that distance.
There is a scene I have not been able to shake. The believers are gathered close, the room plain and crowded, their bodies moving in a rhythm that is somewhere between dance and ordeal. Feet strike the floor. Skirts whip and settle. Faces shine with fervor and strain. Nothing in it is tasteful. Nothing in it is curated for later admiration. The worship is forceful, even frightening. It is also unmistakably communal. No one there appears to be inventing a private spirituality out of preference. They are yielding themselves to a form, to a pattern of life and praise that has claims on them. Watching it, I felt both drawn and embarrassed, which is often how one feels in the presence of a seriousness one has learned to keep at arm’s length.
What the film restores is not quaintness but force. The people behind the tune do not appear as tasteful ancestors of modern minimalism. They appear as bodies under discipline: moving together, stamping, singing, laboring, yielding themselves to forms they did not invent each morning according to preference. Their faith is not merely held but enacted. It exists in posture, repetition, rhythm, and shared order. Watching them, one is reminded that devotion, if it is serious, eventually asks to become visible.
That is what the song had allowed me to forget. “Simple Gifts,” encountered at a safe historical distance, can sound almost like a pastoral wish. Simplicity as innocence. Simplicity as release. Simplicity as an old American virtue now translated into the key of nostalgia. The film restores a sterner meaning. Simplicity there is not the gentle absence of complication. It is discipline. It is rule. It is repetition. It is a clarity purchased through renunciation. It is the hard labor of consenting to limits.
Once that older meaning begins to return, the tune itself changes. Not in its melody, which remains as lovely as ever, but in what it carries. One begins to hear behind it the lives of people who meant by simple something much sterner than charm. The hymn no longer drifts free of its origins. It points back to a way of living.
That, I think, is why the film stayed with me. It did more than make the Shakers real again. It showed me a preference in myself that is probably not mine alone.
I like religion when it can be carried lightly. I like its songs, its old cadences, its grave beauty. I like the way it can deepen ordinary life without seeming to interfere with it too much. I like what it leaves behind in language, memory, and feeling.
What I am less eager for is religion when it starts making claims. I mean the moment when belief stops being something one admires and becomes something one obeys. When it asks for a fixed hour, a repeated practice, a habit one keeps whether one feels like it or not. When it begins to touch the calendar, the body, the budget, the appetites. It is one thing to love devotion in theory. It is another to let it interrupt your life.
That may be one of the bargains modern people prefer. We are willing to inherit religion as beauty, symbol, even consolation. We are less comfortable with it as command.
Christians, of course, are not exempt from this. Perhaps we are especially vulnerable to it, since we know enough of the tradition to feel its beauty while becoming expert at softening its demands. Bonhoeffer gave one name to this tendency when he wrote of cheap grace, the desire for the consolations of faith without the costly reordering claims of discipleship. I do not want to force that phrase too hard onto this essay, but the temptation he identified feels close at hand here. We want the loveliness of devotion without too much of its shape. We want to be moved, and if possible improved, without being too thoroughly rearranged.
That is why the Shakers, or at least the film’s rendering of them, begin to feel less like historical curiosities and more like a rebuke. They expose the modern habit of sentimentalizing simplicity. We imagine the simple life as uncluttered, breathable, calm. We picture fewer possessions, fewer distractions, cleaner lines. We do not always picture obedience. We do not picture the long sameness of repeated acts. We do not picture what it costs to submit desire to form. We do not picture how difficult it is to inhabit a rule that cannot be constantly renegotiated.
The difficulty of simplicity is that it leaves fewer places to hide.
Complicated lives afford endless evasions. One can always say there are too many moving parts, too many competing demands, too much ambiguity. But a simple command reveals a person quickly. Tell the truth in this manner. Keep faith with this vow. Return to prayer at this hour. Give this up. Forgive this injury. There may be many reasons to fail, but the demand itself is plain. One cannot pretend not to understand it.
The moral clarity of simple demands may be a reason the products of simple disciplines age into charm so readily. Once detached from the disciplines that made them possible, those products become pleasant. A Shaker chair can be admired without celibacy, communal labor, or ecstatic worship tagging along behind it. A hymn can be sung over dishes. An old phrase can be quoted for its wisdom while the practices that sustained it are quietly dropped. We inherit the fruits more readily than the labor.
This is not an argument for becoming Shaker, or for romanticizing any severe religious movement simply because it was severe. Hardness is not holiness. A demanding life can become vain, distorted, or cruel. The point is not that the Shakers got everything right. The point is that their witness, and the film’s recovery of its bodily force, makes one of our evasions harder to maintain. It reminds us that devotion, if it is real, eventually asks to become concrete.
That concreteness need not look dramatic. Most of us are not about to whirl in ecstatic worship or organize our lives around communal celibacy. Our question is smaller and less theatrical. What shape does faith take in an ordinary house, in an ordinary week, among the repeated motions that make up most of a life? What would it mean for belief to move from atmosphere into habit? What would it mean for old words and melodies not merely to accompany life, but to order it?
These are the questions that unsettled me in the film’s crowded room. Not that I wanted their life, exactly, but that I could see how much of mine depends on remaining unruled. I want meaning, but I also want wide discretion. I want depth, but I want to retain veto power over any practice that presses too hard on comfort, appetite, or self-definition. I want devotion as a source of illumination, not always as a structure of command. Put that baldly, it sounds worse than I would like.
If anything, the film made me feel how thoroughly I have learned the modern art of preferring inspiration to submission. It is easier to carry a melody than a discipline. Easier to treasure the emotional and symbolic inheritance of religion than to consent to the losses by which a life takes form. Easier to praise simplicity than to discover what it forbids.
And yet forbidding is not the whole of it. The reason “Simple Gifts” has endured is not simply that the tune is lovely. It has endured because the song names something people continue to want, even if we have translated that want into softer terms. A gift to be simple. A gift to be free. We hear those words now and tend to translate them immediately into the language of ease: freedom from clutter, freedom from overstimulation, freedom from noise. But perhaps the older hope was sterner and more sustaining than that. Perhaps freedom is not freedom from all claim, but freedom from the endless tyranny of undisciplined wants. Perhaps simplicity is not the absence of burden, but the reduction of internal division. Perhaps a life given shape is not merely smaller, but more inhabitable.
There may even be relief in that. Not the relief of having nothing asked of us, but the relief of no longer needing to invent ourselves from scratch each day. The relief of consent. The relief of being answerable to something more durable than preference. This, at least, is one of the intuitions the tune seems still to carry, however faintly. It enters a room and changes the air because it suggests that a human life might yet be ordered toward more than appetite and improvisation.
I am not sure I know exactly what to do with that intuition beyond noticing it. The film did not hand me a program. It did not persuade me that holiness lies in recovering some vanished sectarian rigor. What it did do was restore a pressure the melody alone had allowed me to evade. The film made it harder to mistake religious beauty for religious seriousness. It made it harder to use the word simple as though it meant merely gentle, picturesque, and easy on the nerves. It reminded me that some of the most demanding things in the world arrive under plain names.
Now when “Simple Gifts” comes into the house, it still comes lightly. It still accompanies ordinary labor. It still rises while my hands are busy, the way an old phrase returns almost before one has decided to think it. But behind the melody I now hear, if not exactly the whole life that produced it, then at least the outline of that life: bodies under discipline, worship made visible, plainness purchased through cost.
Brandon McNeice is a Philadelphia-based writer and educator. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Commonweal, Plough, Hunger Mountain, SmokeLong Quarterly, BULL, and Terrain.org. A two-time Best Small Fictions nominee, he writes about the daily negotiations by which people seek dignity, faith, and decency inside systems that are anything but simple.