Appalachian Apostasy

Noah built his ark in my great-grandfather’s hay barn. And among the filthy pigs penned up outside, the prodigal son sweated out his shameful hermitage. There was no concordance or chronology, no orderly testament to shepherd my mind’s eye. I traced every parable and Bible story wandering my family’s wilderness.

I imagined Baby Moses delivered from the Nile of the South Holston River’s marshy margin, near the green shade where hidden Eden still blooms. There is the hilltop where every miracle happened: fishes and loaves, water into wine, ascension and burning bush, Lazarus blinking like a lizard in the born-again sun. There’s another hill that stands in place of Ararat, the hill where Judas hanged himself, the hill where Abraham nearly butchered Isaac, the hill beyond where the blood red moon of Revelation rose above sacred ground.

To abandon home and break my covenant would excise every lesson’s landmark, uproot the hilltop fence where Lot’s wife turned and turned to salt. To leave would clog the cow-pasture well where the Samaritan woman met her Savior. I’d make my purgatory of betrayal, reshape the landscape where I worshipped, erase the beatitudes my grandmother taught me. I would relinquish my birthright, to imagine Esau at the kitchen table eating his fill of pinto beans. I would have to destroy the tva dam, unleash the lake where Jesus walked on water above drowned farmhouses. I would have to heed Satan’s offers to disown my own and snake my tangled exodus from home.

Beyond the deed-line I was warned never to cross, I would have to shun the sight of the steep mountain blue where even Jesus faced temptation and barely side-stepped the Devil’s argument.

As a child I couldn’t imagine wandering forty days to see nothing but brown rocks, red rocks, the seduction of sand for desiccated miles. But now I have put away nearly every childish thing. I have been to the desert to see its sky proffering eternal blue, the delicate persuasions far from my nativity. Now I have stood beside the ocean so wide Christ is barely a speck, uncertain among those waves. I have wept to witness glaciers and tundra, the summer prairie with uncomplicated promise. Now I have trembled to see mountain volcanoes so vast they would swallow up the Golgotha of my childhood.