What Has Your Place Taught You?
Five Characteristics of a Redeemed Appalachian Spirituality
Every place forms its people. The land, the work, the hard season, and the neighbors who show up when it matters all shape how we understand God and how we care for one another.
Nathan Daniel Blake writes about what his place has formed in him. Nathan is a writer, storyteller, and spiritual wildling from post-industrial Appalachia, and one of our Residents in Place, rooted in Victorian Old Town in Wheeling, West Virginia. He's the founder of Seven Story Studio and Abbot of The Appalachian Order, a dispersed everyday monastic community shaped by Celtic, contemplative, and place-based Christian spirituality.
In 2024, Nathan shared five characteristics of a redeemed Appalachian spirituality on his Substack, The Laurel Hells. The list belongs to the hills that raised him. We think it's also an invitation to ask what the place you live has been teaching you all along.
Below we’re sharing the intro and the list of the five characteristics, plus the full explanation of one of the five.
Theology is experiential. It’s not only a lived experience, but also shaped by where we’re from and the people who raised us.
About a year ago, I began thinking about my home in Post-Industrial Appalachia and the ways it formed me, from the drafty farmhouses where I lived in Christian community with three other families to my earliest trips into the Dolly Sods Wilderness in my home state of West Virginia where I encountered what I’d later learn were called “thin spaces” by the ancient Celts.
And as I tried to dream of her redeemed spirituality, free of mountaintop removal and snake handling white clapboard churches, I couldn’t help but feel a little removed from her, because that’s a part of the problem.
We’ve been removed.
We’ve been desensitized to the violence.
We’ve been given our bowl of soup and told to call it inheritance.
But then, one day as I was in the middle of midday prayers, the thoughts started to come, and I was smart enough to write it down, which I’m rarely smart enough to do.
The Five Characteristics of an Appalachian Spirituality
A return to the land, rooted in ritual
Fast in charity; slow in discernment
Service to the dignity of all life
Relationship over rightness
Solidarity in suffering
Fast in Charity; Slow in Discernment
Life in Appalachia teaches if a person needs help, and you can help, you help. You change a tire. You offer a hot meal. You give them a fresh change of clothes. You do it without the question of context.
This isn’t on account of a native naivety or simpleness as it’s often portrayed in media. It’s because Appalachians know what it is to be in want and need. We grew up experiencing it. Threads of scarcity and abundance peppered the stories our parents and grandparents told us. They were context, not the subject. In an unforgiving climate, the rhythmic seasons having and wanting change often and sometimes without warning.
When you have, you are quick to give because it may be only a short time until you too may need a hand held out in help.
But when it comes to making big decisions, when it comes to “testin’ the spirits” toward something bigger than the moment, you slow way down.
I remember my Pawpaw Art sitting at the kitchen table with his head in his hands for days before he’d come to the family with a decision. The bigger the decision, the bigger the consequences might be, and in the spaces between unforgiving hill and hollow, those consequences can ripple out for generations.
We should live a spirituality fast to help with little regard for our own selves while still maintaining an appreciation for the slow wisdom of tree and mountain — that like the creeks that run toward the river, we should be fast to quench the thirst of those who stop by our banks to be refreshed but slow to smooth the rocks that line our bed and shape our path.
Reflection
Nathan's list is specific on purpose. It comes from a place where you help when you can because you know what it is to need help. It's also a place where you make big decisions slowly, because their consequences can ripple out for generations.
That specificity is the gift. It shows what it looks like to notice how a place forms a people, and to name both what's worth keeping and what still needs redeeming.
Your block has a spirituality too, whether you've put words to it or not.
What has the place you live taught you about caring for your neighbors?
Where is your neighborhood already fast in charity, and where might it be asking you to slow down?
Next Step
Nathan named what his place taught him. Try it with yours:
➤ Take a walk around your block this week and notice what it values. Who lends a hand? What gets tended, and what gets left behind?
➤ Write your own short list. Name three characteristics of the spirituality your place has formed in you, including one that still needs redeeming.
➤ Practice being fast in charity. When a neighbor needs help you can give, offer it without needing the whole story first.
