Consider A

86 Creative Essay

Tucked into a corner of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there is a church. It sits on grave-dappled grass and among trees that, when the season is right, bleed vivid color onto its walls. It is a plainly designed building, small and white with a few windows and an oldstyle campanile, long out of use. On the day we visit the church, perhaps because of the suffocating July heat or simply because we lucked-out with our timing, the grounds are empty and still. The headstones of the graveyard act as sentinels before the doors of the church, sturdy and saying: life only beyond this point. No birds or squirrels, no shiver of leaves today. Just the seven of us, and the church, and the mountain.

Dad makes a joke. “These mountains are holy. Get it?” But it’s true that this section of the park feels somehow more sacred than the other miles of winding roads and old historic buildings scattered across the mountain, and I wonder about this as we walk into the sanctuary. Inside smells like hundreds of years of stagnancy, the dust of those who walked through these doors before us, in search of something they couldn’t put a name to.

Referencing the informational pamphlet I picked up at the entrance of the park, I read that the Missionary Baptist Church was founded in 1830 and its construction acted as the genesis of the Baptist denomination in Cades Cove. The building that still stands on the mountain today was built in 1887.

“They still held services here until the 1960s,” I say to no one in particular. My family has spread out inside the church, each of them gazing in intent silence at some ancient detail of its design. Though we have been here before, I’ve never noticed there are still Bibles in all of the pews and a few hymnbooks with frail, yellowed pages. I sit down and open one up while the rest of my family leaves to wander around the small cemetery and play a game to see who can find the oldest headstone. The hymnbook’s ink is still dark and I imagine not many people have turned these pages in the last fifty years. For a moment I am so lost in the loneliness of the book in my hands that I do not register the words of the hymn:

O, Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed. It is one I’ve sung in church hundreds of times, “How Great Thou Art,” but the words hang differently in this place. Perhaps it is the incomprehensible grandeur of my surroundings—hundreds of miles of mountains and rivers and trees—that causes the lyrics to now stick to my soul. I am suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to take the book of hymns with me as a reminder that here the mountains spoke, and they spoke to me of the hand that made them. But I know the words belong here and they are not mine to take. I put the book back in the pew, next to a thick black Bible with a gold cross etched on the cover, and leave the church to catch up with my family.

Poetry 88

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