God of the Hills

According to Pew research Vermont residents have the lowest rate of religious service attendance in the country. It is also the first or second most educated state in the country by population, depending on which poll you read. There may well be a supporting correlation between these two facts, but I wonder if there is something else at play, something in the hills and valleys of this state. Ethan Allen’s famous admonition to New York land barons, “The Gods of the valleys are not the Gods of the hills, and you shall know it!” seems a metaphysical truth to me as I ramble through forests, across fields, and along the rutted dirt roads of this state.

If these Green Mountains invite us to encounters with the Gods of hills and valleys, why would we shut ourselves away in the smallness of a building to search for what is holy? Nothing holy is tame. Every year like clockwork in mid to late July through August, I become haunted with a longing for the in-between time of early autumn. It is this time of year when I am most drawn to mountain trails, to push myself through thickets and the briar walls of multiflora roses. Spending childhood summers in East Tennessee, losing myself in the cool shadows of mountain laurels, deep in the coves where the ashes of my people are scattered, I came to know the beautiful haunting that is Appalachia. It is a world of old memory; old memories embedded in the land and ancestral memories reflected upon the faces of its people - in our songs, our food, our customs. To use an old English term, we are a people hefted to the land.

I now live in a valley in Pownal surrounded by Appalachian mountains. In the mornings as I watch the mist roll off the mountains, into our pasture and on to the next ridge, I feel the pull of this haunted place deep in my bones. The first time I stepped foot in the pasture adjacent to my home I swear it shimmered, and in the sacred grove of conifers the ravens and crows tell the stories of all they’ve seen. There could be no finer waters for baptism than the brook back in the woods, you know the one that floods its banks in the fall and washes over the roots of the ancient apple tree. If we can be mountain haunted, valley haunted, river haunted, then maybe we have stumbled upon the truest route to being God haunted. The hymns of this church are older than words, and their hum echoes through these valleys leaving me struck with a sense of awe, a sense of holy dread that cannot be translated or transferred from any religious text. I have never felt closer to the mountains, closer to God, than in the Appalachian hills of Vermont. And make no mistake, this is Appalachia. My ancestors gaze down from our ancestors alter with approval that I have finally come home.

               -Rev. Jeannie Alexander

Originally published in the Bennington Banner