#193 Snake Handling

I'm reading a book right now about the snake handling churches of Southern Appalachia. What starts out as a piece of investigative journalism, slowly becomes a biographical spiritual journey for the author. As he moves between relaying the story of his time among the handlers and revealing his personal spiritual struggle, several quotable passages pop up. Here's one of them:

"It occurred to me then that seeing a handler in the ecstasy of an anointing is not like seeing religious ecstasy at all. The expression seems to have more to do with Eros than with God, in the same way that sex often seems to have more to do with death than with pleasure. The similarity is more than coincidence, I thought. In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully come upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face reads exactly the opposite - as though someone, or something, were being violently taken away from her. The paradox of Christianity, one of many of which Jesus speaks, is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves, and perhaps that's why photos of the handlers so often seem to be portraits of loss."

-- Dennis Covington on page 99 of Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia

Somehow I stumbled across profound theology while reading a book about snakes and rednecks. The book itself is about the fact that sometimes, you find God in the strangest of places. Or as my mom suggested, "I am not sure we find God rather than he allows himself to be seen by us in the strangest places." In that vein, here's how Covington closes his account,

"It's late afternoon at the lake. The turtles are moving closer to shore. The surface of the water is undisturbed, an expanse of smooth, gray slate. Most of the children in my neighborhood are called home for supper by their mothers. They open the back doors, wipe their hands on their aprons and yell, "Willie!" or "Joel!" or "Ray!" Either that or they use a bell, bolted to the doorframe and loud enough to start the dogs barking in backyards all along the street. But I was always called home by my father, and he didn't do it the customary way. He walked down the alley all the way to the lake. If I was close, I could hear his shoes on the gravel before he came into sight. If I was far, I would see him across the surface of the water, emerging out of shadows and into the gray light. He would stand with his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker while he looked for me. This is how he got me to come home. He always came to the place where I was before he called my name."