These are old mountains. See how round and soft and smooth they are? Oh, it’s true that a few of them are jagged and raw, but those are the exception. There is a spirit in these mountains that has matured over the ages through pain and suffering and joy and anticipation and hope. There is a brutal sweetness here that flows from ancient sources, a sweetness that for ages has attracted troubled, searching souls who sometimes through those ages have found their peace, their life, their Jesus. Round, and soft and smooth — a place where a man, or a woman, or a man and a woman, can make a home.
These are old mountains, where one can, and should, live by the seasons. Plant and tend the crop in this season and one will have food to eat in the next season. Here, the crop grows better to the sound of the dulcimer and the fiddle and the banjo. These old mountains proclaim that as truth. But they also proclaim that one should not, cannot, live by bread alone. And here, perhaps more than anywhere, one can find that elusive nourishment that sustains and protects Homo in his inevitable journey through the valley of the shadow of death.
Here reconciliation of the brutal sweetness of independence with the slavery of economic advancement is impossible. They cannot be reconciled. Perhaps some form of détente, or compromise, is possible. Time will tell. But until it dies, which will not happen, the human spirit will demand, and have, something greater than the illusory security of material wealth. Here the painters and the poets and the prophets celebrate that spirit; in the desolate regions they bemoan its loss. In the rich country many of them mock this spirit and celebrate its loss; but they spit against the wind, and their sputum flies back into their faces and soils them and slimes them. And yet even then, there are some in the rich country in whom the spark survives who do bemoan the loss of that spirit; they go into the metropolitan mine shafts that we call the subways, and they paint their pictures there, and the poets and the prophets write their moans and their groans there on the subway walls as they long for eternity. And the Holy Spirit of God hears those moans and groans and translates them and presents them to the Unnamable: Abba, Abba, save us! And Abba says Come to me, and most do not heed that call.
But there are those who do. They flee the cesspools and come to bathe and swim in crystal waters where life abounds. Their neighborhood is a thousand miles from top to bottom. But as time passes they come to see that their hood is not measured in units of distance. Their hood is the community of the free, the society of sapiens. They have escaped the prison of materiality and have come to a realm where they can have peace and rest. That is the real Appalachia. That is the real archdiocese that you will encounter here. It is not an archdiocese where life is always pretty, and easy, and without trouble, but it is a place where glitter is not glory in the view of most who live and die here, and that sets it apart from most of this land.