“We’re a non-violent Catholic lay community, but we try to get it right,” says Brayton Shanley, hands on his hips in the front yard of Agape. “There are a lot of folks out there who don’t do it right. We always say, ‘you gotta do it right’.”
The most striking thing about Brayton is his deep commitment to the ideals of his faith, especially when living intentionally on, as he calls it, “ the margins”.
Brayton and Suzanne Shanley are the cofounders of the Agape Community, outside of Hardwick, Massachusetts. Agape is a lay community—meaning religious but not part of the church. Pronounced ‘ah-gah-pay’, the name is a Greek term which in Christian theology means unconditional love, specifically spiritual love that expands to all people. It was this name, and the fact that Agape has been around for so long, that drew me to their community in the first place.
Photo from the Agape Website
For many who have been hurt by the Church through oppression or rejection on the basis of gender, race, or sexual orientation, many images of organized religion create a hostile environment. Much of the work that Agape does is to counter that legacy of harm, to “do it right” and live in line with Jesus’s teachings of non-violence and activism.
I have always been interested in intentional communities, places where people try to live everyday life both together and in line with their values. Many intentional communities were founded in the late 1960s and 1970s, as part of the Back to the Land Movement, and while a few remain active, the vast majority have dissolved.
Agape remains. And the main question on my mind as I took the three hour journey there was: why?
Agape was founded in 1987, but Suzanne and Brayton – the founders and my hosts – began their work in the mid-1970s, drawing on their Catholic and Quaker faith traditions. Inspired by the work of Milwaukee Fourteen, a group of Catholic priests who protested the VietNam war and Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, also nonviolent Catholic activists, they organized for disarmament and non-violence throughout the 1970s-90s.
When I arrived in the early evening, there were several cars in the steep driveway that leads to Agape. Next to the late fall garden, still volunteering some late rainbow chard and a truly astonishing amount of parsley, two houses stand, woodsmoke drifting up from their chimneys. Above the doorway of the main house was a rainbow flag that read: “Peace”. It felt like home.
I stood in the yard for a bit, taking in the surroundings. Small placards beneath most trees offered dedications to lost loved ones, calls for peace, prayers for healing. A keffiyeh, a scarf symbolizing solidarity with Palestine, winding between pumpkins on the porch. A St. Francis statue sat next to the door, a small bird perched on his shoulder. Every corner revealed symbols of the deep calling for peace and non-violence that are the founding light of Agape.
Photo taken at Agape
As I walked up to the main building, and ventured a timid knock, a shout from behind me brought my attention to an older man with a shock white hair, half jogging towards me, with a cordless phone in his hand. “We’ll be right with ya’! Glad you could make it.” He gave me a hug and then hustled back into the house behind him. This was my first introduction to Brayton Shanley.
After a tour of St. Brigid House, where Brayton and Suzanne live, we went into the main house for dinner. Symbols of faith decorated every surface, from the mantle above the fireplace, to the door which leads to a small one-room chapel, complete with a beautiful stained glass window mounted above a natural driftwood cross.
I offered to help with dinner, feeling sheepish about their open hospitality that asked nothing of me, while offering so much. Instead, Suzanne simply offered a hug in greeting, and shepherrded me down to their office to chat. Here, too, were countless photographs of Swamis and Catholic priests, clippings of newspapers, portraits of leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Suzanne sat me down with a plate of chips and homemade salsa verde, and said, “So what would you like to know?”
I asked her to tell me about Agape. And with a twinkle in her eye, she began with its founding in the 1980s and their fight against nuclear arms, and then moved on to talk about their push against the death penalty in the U.S. and towards interfaith peace in the Middle East. The stories Suzanne told affirmed that what Brayton had said outside was true: these were people who were walking the walk, ‘the real deal’, you might say.
Agape’s ministry extended to death row, where Suzanne and Brayton developed a long-term relationship with Billy Neal Moore, a formerly incarcerated man who would become the first confessed murderer to receive a full commutation of a death sentence as a result of the Shanelys’ support. In fact, as I was sitting in an Uber on my way to Agape, Billy and Suzanne were in their kitchen, on the phone with Moore, sharing the most recent events and struggles in their lives.
Agape prioritizes non-violence in all things, in community, in activism, in speech, in food and lifestyle. Any conflicts within the group were addressed by sitting down and trying to find common ground. Even though it can be difficult, sometimes, to avoid harm, it is time for community members to part ways, Suzanne said.
The Agape houses are built and heated with wood harvested from the property around it. All of the logging is done with conscious choice and respect to the natural world. Before dinner, Brayton’s tour took me through the design of the St. Brigid House, with its straw bale construction and solar panels. Agape has been vegetarian for years, but recently, went vegan to further reduce harm to the environment and animals.
At Agape, alcohol is not allowed and intimate sexual relationships are discouraged on the premises, even for guests. Despite all of these restrictions and the challenges of experimental living, people love to experience Agape: Some come for a weekend. Others stay for years. As Brayton says, “it’s a calling…it’s not easy, but it’s a calling.”
I have looked at dozens of intentional communities, many of which were also founded in the 1970s and 1980s but have since dissolved. Interns and volunteers help keep Agape afloat, along with long term support from a network of religious and secular partners, but it did lead me to wonder how Suzanne and Brayton cope with the transience, the flow of people, interns, workers, friends, in and out of their community.
Unbeknownst to me, Agape was facing that exact question, as she and Brayton enter their 80s. “People come and they stay and they get nurtured and so welled up with the beauty of intentional community …and they don’t land,” she said, with a sigh. Despite a lively community and hundreds, if not thousands, of supporters, Suzanne and Brayton are the only original two that remain full-time residents.
Eventually, Brayton came down and interrupted my conversation with Suzanne. It was time for dinner. Around the table and over some of the best vegan food I have had in years, Sister Judy from Ipswich and Dixon, who had prepared the lovely meal for us. I had been there for all of an hour or so, and yet I sat around their table, chatting and laughing with them. We talked about the struggles of raising children in intentional communities and about the related phenomenon that Suzanne describes as “launch, but not land” that characterizes so much communal living.
The idea of a “calling” kept coming up throughout the night, as we gradually moved from discussions of meaning and compassion, religious and otherwise, to the more concrete, as I asked about how Agape handles healthcare, conflict resolution meetings and all the other nuts and bolts of communal living. The calling required to live this kind of life—a life dedicated to love, peace, and deep, deep non-violence—isn’t one that can be brought down by loss or insecurity, especially at points of transition.
I had come to Agape, curious about how they had managed to have the longevity that they have had over the years, and was almost disheartened to see how small the actual residential community is. Children raised and moved out, interns gone for the season, the Agape I visited was one of deep love, support, compassion and very few people.
As the night went along, I started to question the assumptions I had coming to Agape. As Brayton and Suzanne retired to bed, and I lay in one of the cold upper rooms, warm under a quilt blanket, I realized that the sorrow and fear of loss, the idea of a failed community, just because of the number of lasting residents, was of my own creation. Things don’t have to be permanent to be valuable. They don’t have to be unchanging to be impactful. Agape is living proof.