Christ is Risen in the Appalachian Ridge and Valley region of the Susquehanna Confluence. Truly He is Risen!
This blog is an ongoing reflection on Orthodox Christian life, apologetics, and Bible study in Northern Appalachia, by an unworthy American Russian Orthodox country priest who as a literature professor studies and teaches about Christian ecosemiotics, or the articulation of meaningfulness in Creation. He asks for your prayers. Below is an introduction to the blog.
The Russian Orthodox statesman-writer Konstantin Pobedonostsev wrote, “Let us remember the ancient admonition: ‘know thyself.’ In application to life this means: know the milieu in which you must live and act, know your country, know your nature, your narod [the community of people] with its soul and its way of life, its wants and needs. This is what we should know and what we for the most part do not know. But what a blessing it would be for us and for all of society if we tried to know all this, if only that place, that region, that corner of a region where destiny has placed us” (translated by Thomas Calnan Sorenson).
This can relate to prophecies of the restored Israel as the Church (as in Ezekiel 36)–a place in which Paradise is glimpsed, along with a sense of the Kingdom of God, by illumination in the local parish as fractal for the “One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church.” The mystical unity that Russian Orthodox Christians call sobornost, non-essentialist and from the heart, sparkles in the mystery of the Orthodox Church as the Body of Christ in every place, including in the Northern Appalachia of our parish.
One of Dostoevsky’s characters observed “beauty will save the world.” The beauty of Orthodox Christianity is indicated in the icon above by St. Andrei Rublev, the Hospitality of Abraham, symbolizing the Holy Trinity, and in the accompanying Orthodoxy hymnody of the Trisagion or thrice-holy prayer of the angels. Orthodoxy means “right glorifying,” worship and prayer and living toward theosis or oneness with God’s grace, and “right teaching,” in strengthening our relationship with God. The icon comes from the 15th century, and the 21st-century chanting bears lyrics coming from the ancient Church, and even back to the Old Testament, matched with an old Appalachian folk style. Together the sacred art and music suggest how Orthodoxy presents the full sense of relationality in the Trinity, and how we can glimpse this rooted where we are in God’s Creation in the local Church that is also the “one holy catholic [universal] and apostolic” Church, the Body of Christ, as suggested also in the video below of Russian believers singing the Pascha hymn in Appalachian-style English.
At Home in the Church: The Beauty of God’s Creation
This beauty of Orthodox Christianity is glimpsed significantly too in God’s Creation, including the natural wonders around us in our Appalachian region around the Susquehanna Confluence (where the north and west branches of the Susquehanna River converge). Tall Timbers Nature Preserve in our region (below) is a local landmark that includes partial old-growth hemlock woods. It rests in a patchwork of public and private forest and farmlands and small towns in our area of Northern Appalachia, sometimes dubbed Penn’s Woods. (Tall Timbers was home to the American nature writer and food forager Euell Gibbons, who named his house there “It Wonders Me,” and is a place where I have taught classes on nature literature, and where our mission members have picnicked, experiencing the blessings of God’s Creation.)
Also in our region, a few minutes drive from our small country Church, rises the Shikellamy State Park overlook (photo below), where the branches of the Susquehanna come together in a scenic panorama whose history has brought together many cultures in the network of the river’s sometimes peaceful yet powerful flow.
The experience of God’s uncreated energies in Creation in Orthodox Christianity invokes the fullest Christian Trinitarian theology with the sparkling of divine light in holy saints and on earth. The modern Russian Orthodox Priest-Martyr Daniel Sysoev spoke of Creation as being in Christ, in effect the Christian panentheism of Orthodoxy. By this he meant neither New Age pantheism nor panentheism, but the experience of glorifying Creation as being in Jesus Christ, the logoi of God being in the Logos of God, linking Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1.
(Above) Our mission’s blessing of the Susquehanna River at Lewisburg, PA, at Theophany in 7533 (2025).
The Saints of Northern Appalachia
In the past century, Northern Appalachia became home to many Orthodox Christian immigrants, who often worked in coal mines and steel mills and in small businesses and farms, and whose lives were inspired also by Orthodox saints of America who traveled through or lived in the region. Now it is home also to an increasing number of Orthodox Christian converts.
Northern Appalachia historically was home to foundational thinkers who developed distinctly American views of nature relating to traditional Christian ideas of Creation, namely the writers James Fenimore and Susan Fenimore Cooper in Cooperstown, NY, and Charles Peirce in Milford, PA, the latter being called the father of the field of ecosemiotics. The region often has been a hidden presence in American history, somewhat off the radar of coastal elites of the old Anglo-American establishment, yet preserving many old ways with echoes of Orthodoxy, which now is growing in the Susquehanna Confluence area.
But most significantly, missionary saints of our Church, Patriarch Martyr Tikhon and St. Alexis Toth, and St. Nikolai Velimirovich, among others, toiled in our region in the late 19th and 20th centuries. They often labored in the coal towns and steel towns of Pennsylvana’s Appalachia, and in effect extended to immigrants here the Russian Orthodox mission to Alaska and northern California from earlier times. A standing Cross from the abandoned coal-town Russian Orthodox Church of St. John the Baptist in Shepton, where Patriarch Martyr Tikhon once served while in America, guards our parish land today. Glory to God! May the saints of the Orthodox mission to America intercede for us sinners in this missionary work in Appalachia today!
(Receiving a convert as a Catechumen in Appalachian Orthodoxy, Lewisburg Pa, 11/11/7533). Below, a new generation born to convert parents in our mission.
A center for Orthodox mission in North America in Northern Appalachia, and our mission’s seminary, Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Monastery in Jordanville, New York, stands on the hydrological source of the Susquehanna watershed, which forms the central valley of Northern Appalachia. Pictured below is the beautiful Holy Trinity Cathedral at the monastery-seminary, with the author during his 40 days of priestly training in the cycle of services there. Another monastic center of our faith in our region is in Wayne, West Virginia, Holy Cross Russian Orthodox Monastery.
In a rural corner of the region, we have built and continue to develop a small Orthodox temple for our mission parish of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. The standing Cross that marked the groundbreaking is made from local hemlock. Driving along Felmey Road easterly toward our site from County Line Road, the wooded ridges in the green season remind one of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which officially end not far south of us, in Carlisle, PA.
We also gather with local community members for worship and Bible study downtown in the small university town of Lewisburg, PA (see photo below).
Planting Roots and Growing the Orthodox Faith in the Appalachian Landscape
Orthodox Christian Northern Appalachia can be considered an “ecosemiosphere,” a term I coined (referenced in the book Ecosemiotics: A Very Short Introduction, by my colleague and friend Timo Maran, of the University of Tartu in Estonia) to describe a region of God’s Creation that has a particular collection of cultural narratives and meaningfulness, interwoven with a specific ecological landscape, shaping “natives.” The Apostle Paul noted (Acts 17) that, while God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth,” He also “hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The Holy Apostle added, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Into Northern Appalachia has come the mission work of the Orthodox Church, Christianly panentheistic in finding all in Christ the Logos, while appreciating always the distinction between the mystery of God and Creation. May this missionary work be blessed, with all glory to God! Come and see!
Three Final Notes: 1) Mapping Northern Appalachia
Since “Appalachia” is simultaneously a mountain range, a cultural region, a landscape, and arguably a state of mind, there are many attempted mappings of it, not always exactly the same. This is especially true for “Northern Appalachia.” Issues of mapping Appalachia appear to geographers, one of whom has presented in an article from which the map below is drawn (on it, we are near the top of the green “Interior Ridgelines” zone).
Then below is a more expansive geologically based mapping.
Here is a slightly different mapping showing counties. Note how many of the Appalachian counties as defined on this map (perhaps nearly half) are technically in the North (West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York).
A similar rendering shows cities in Appalachia, as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission for government purposes (we are in the triangle between State College, Williamsport, and Harrisburg).
Other efforts to map the region follow geological and geographical cues in extending Appalachia further north into Maine. In the map immediately below, we are both in “Appalachia” as a region and in the “Appalachian Mountains,” and in the lower two maps we are in the geological and “natural” boundaries.
Finally, this map below is from Colin Woodard’s book American Nations, and claims to show the cultural zone of Appalachia, in a much different way than the above maps. It short-changes our immediate area and upstate New York: While his “Greater Appalachia” extends into south central Pennsylvania near us, our neighborhood is in the “Midlands” cultural zone. But he also leave out much of Northern Appalachia and includes much of Texas in “Greater Appalachia.: Still, it illustrates how too “Appalachia is a state of mind” view. It alsosuggests how Appalachia as a “heartland” cultural region that relates to much of America, in terms of how the Midlands extends from our area into Iowa and the Great Plains in his mapping.
Northern Appalachia geographically and historically would be that area of the mountain range and valleys north of Maryland and in what is now West Virginia, including eastern Ohio, that lies to the north of the former Confederacy. Maps above show the actual Appalachian mountains and landscape extend all the way to Newfoundland in Canada.
Taking the long view typical of Orthodoxy, we can remember also that the explorer called the first Orthodox Christian in America, the Viking Leif Erikson, apparently landed at the northern tip of Appalachia around AD 1000 (6508 in Byzantine reckoning). The Vikings culturally were closely connected with Kievan-Rus from which Orthodox Russia emerged, as well as through trade and mercenary warrior work with the ancient Orthodox center of Constantinople.
Geologists also claim an ancient connection between the American Appalachian Range and the Scottish Highlands, an interesting coincidence given the connection of Scots-Irish culture to Appalachian America. The Jacobite tendencies of the Scots-Irish Appalachians paradoxically helped support a nascent monarchism in the U.S. republic according to some historical accounts (notably Eric Nelson’s “Neo-Stuartist” model for the strong presidency in the U.S.; think Andrew Jackson). This also favored the “King James” edition of the Bible appropriately for Jacobitist Stuart affections, despite the apparent contradiction with the anti-monarchist American Revolution. Such are indicators for Orthodox apologetics in a region known for loyalty to “King Jesus” and today ripe for evangelism. The Appalachian Scots-Irish Stonewall Jackson, from what is now West Virginia, a Presbyterian deacon often considered one of the best tactical commanders in U.S. military history, typified the fighting spirit and faith associated with the Scots-Irish on both sides of the Civil War and in U.S. history. In the Orthodox Church, the patron saint of the Scots-Irish, the Venerable Columba of Iona, was exiled from northern Ireland to Scotland in pre-Schism times according to one account as a result of a war over a borrowed Gospel book.
Appropriately, a growing Appalachian center of the Russian Orthodox mission to North America today is at Holy Cross Monastery in West Virginia near Christ the Savior Church in Wayne, WV (see the video below about the monastery). Both are in the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, like our humble mission.
Here in central Pennsylvania, in our own local adjoining Union and Snyder Counties, the number of Orthodox parishes has grown from zero in 2015 to two today. Appalachian Orthodoxy is a growing presence.
(Below) Pentecost at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Jordanville, NY, at the Northern Appalachian monastery whose land includes cypress marshes that hydrologists have identified as the source of the Susquehanna River that forms the region’s main valley.
The controversial Russian Orthodox Old Believer philosopher and polemicist Alexander Dugin adapted earlier geopolitical theories about civilizations as either “thassalocratic” (based on the sea) or (in his term) “tellurocratic,” based around inland heartlands. America can be both/and (as seen in cultural and voting patterns on the “coasts” versus “flyover country” although not a perfect division by any means), with Appalachia exemplifying America’s heartland side. Considering large regions in this way relates to ideas of even larger civilizational tectonic plates advanced by historians such as Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, and more recently Stephen Huntington. In the model of world civilizations, Orthodox Christianity emerged from a “Byzantine” zone that encompassed the Eastern Mediterranean and Holy Land and flowed up into the Slavic regions, but which is often invisible or not legible to Westerners given its lack of a clear political region given the end of Byzantium and more recently the rise and fall of Communism that sought to obliterate Orthodoxy. Yet that Byzantine Orthodox civilizational zone had a foundational influence on areas in the west related to Northern Appalachia, notably around the Irish Sea, where Eastern desert monasticism and early Roman Christianity set down deep roots in the homelands of Irish, Scots-Irish, English, and Welsh immigrants to our region in America.
2. Spiritual Landscape: The Blood of the Martyrs as the Seed of the Church Everywhere and Here
In our local region, in God’s Creation and in His beyond-time, we as Orthodox Christians strive unworthily with His grace to live in sobornost, the mystical unity of His Body, the Church. Even our little country Church offers a fractal or portal for the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Orthodoxy, amid the world’s spiritual battles, as history flickers by in the shadow of the mystery of God’s plan. The royal doors open, the Eucharist comes out, and the gates of the renewed Paradise welcome us. The icon of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia at our Church, a gift from Archimandrite Cyprian of Jordanville, reminds us of what Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of blessed memory, an American Orthodox missionary, warned students at the University of California at Santa Cruz of in 1981: “Peace, brotherhood, harmony: all those things which look good, but unless they have a solid Christian foundation are not God-pleasing. They will be used by the Antichrist.”
As Hieromonk Seraphim indicated from the Gospel, demonic forces seek out nihilistic vacuums amid manmade chiliastic-utopian intents, even in what may seem the best of American cultural traditions in old shallow Protestant-based civil religion. The house swept clean becomes a place to which the demons return in greater numbers, the Gospel notes. We see this today in demonic online culture and deteriorating society, despite the best efforts at heterodox religious revival. This indicates the urgency of the Orthodox Christian mission to an increasingly techno-pagan U.S. society, from which the heartland region of Appalachia is not immune. In the Body of Christ, His Church, we find protection for ourselves and our families and neighbors, with God’s grace, in the Ark of His new covenant. The blood of the martyrs of the universal Church across the earth also waters the mission work of our seemingly “back country” region.
The last Orthodox Tsar-Martyr of Russia, Nicholas II, last of the great Orthodox emperors going back to Byzantium, just before the Revolution in the image below seems to stare into the nihilistic abyss of the modern world. That had been articulated prophetically a generation before by the Russian Orthodox writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, a friend of the Tsar-Martyr’s childhood tutor, the afore-quoted Pobedonostsev. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR), of which our mission is part, recognized the urgency of the threat early. Accepting exile in 1920 from the Red Terror in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, for the sake of preserving and spreading the faith in diaspora, with a blessing from Patriarch-Saint Tikhon, in 1981 she became the first Church in Orthodoxy to recognize the Tsar-Matyr as a saint with his family, among the New Martyrs and Confessors of the faith in the bloody 20th century. By that time our Synod had become permanently headquartered in North America.
Earlier, in the late 18th century the Orthodox Russian Empire had birthed the first permanent Orthodox mission on our continent, in Alaska and northern California, then touching Slavic immigrant communities in the coal and steel communities of Pennsylvania. The Tsar-Martyr had helped fund historic parishes in our anthracite region in Pennsylvania, such as in Mount Carmel, where a Cross gifted by him stands on the altar at St. Michael’s Orthodox Church. May the Russian New Martyrs and Confessors and the Holy Royal Martyrs intercede for us in our twenty-first-century mission work at the Susquehanna Confluence!
Above, Colorized photo of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II arriving from the Imperial train at the station of Dvinsk, near the Northwestern Front, Jan. 30, 1916. (Photo: Central State Archive of Film and St. Petersburg.) Figuratively it looks as though he contemplates the future, from which would come the massive tragedy of tens of millions killed and the persecuted Church under Communism. Below, prayers at Stalingrad, 1942 (painting by Andrey Lysenko, Blessing of Soviet troops in Stalingrad that year). It illustrates how the persecuted faithful answered the call to pray for their country and neighbors, even amid the greatest martyring of Christians since the pagan Roman era . Today, a different kind of persecution occurs amid globalization, the spread of what Irish Orthodox writer Paul Kingsnorth calls “The Machine.”
3. Borderlands, Border Times, and Frontier Mission Work Today
A few final maps below show us how Appalachia comprises historical borderlands from the last era of English monarchy in America proper, between the Transatlantic colonial coast and the heartland “Indian Reserve.” The second and third more Anglo-centric maps (which don’t account for Indigenous inhabitants) indicate the historical demographic borderland of our region. Irish Orthodox writer Paul Kingsnorth, who spoke at an event co-sponsored by our mission in fall of 7533 (2024), provides perspective at this link on why Orthodoxy finds affinity with such borderlands spiritually. The documentary Sacred Alaska, shown by our mission at a local movie theater that same fall, affords insight into the interactions between Orthodoxy and Indigenous culture historically, starting also in the late 18th century, in Alaska, different from those on the Anglo frontier.
(Above) The painting “The Mirror” by the Russian artist Vladimir Kireev, suggests the experience today of a different kind of cultural persecution–isolation in the Machine of global techno-culture.
The forced secular universalism that affected the Anglo frontier early on was marked by how, during the mid-18th century, the British Empire switched onto the Western Gregorian calendar, reflecting an effort to create a new global sense of allegedly scientific time, reflected also in Greenwich Mean Time, different from Orthodox Athonite time. The “old calendar” continued in folklore in the Appalachian region, seen in “Appalachian Christmas” that continued on the Julian calendar. An ancient Christian sacred sense of time is renewed again in our region by Orthodox Christian communities like ours on that traditional Church calendar. We celebrate Christmas on what is labeled by today’s moderns as January 7 (December 25 still in Church reckoning), commemorating the coming of the hope of all the world, our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, even in the hollows of Northern Appalachia, as he came as a baby in a cave in rural Bethlehem amid the farm animals despite the efforts of Herod.
In the beginning and end that is Jesus Christ, the Alpha and Omega as described in the opening of His revelation to the Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian, all the beauty and trials of our lives and mission work in Northern Appalachia rest in Him. In his final sermon in 1982, Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of blessed memory, a pioneering evangelizer of modern America, and spiritual son of our mission’s patron St. John, said this about our relation to the land of our home and our true home.
Beholding the majesty of God’s creation, we catch a glimpse, however vague and shadowy, of the beauty of God’s eternal Kingdom, for which we were all created .We must always remember that our home is in the heavens; we must shake off all the vain and petty passions and worries that keep us tied to the ground, to the fallen earthly world, that keep us from realizing the purpose of our creation. How easily we forget the very reason for our existence…. The end-times are already here; we see clearly the preparation of this world for the Antichrist. Christians will be faced with an unprecedented trail of their faith and love for God. We will have to hide in the wilderness–in land like we see before us here. Of course, in the end they will find us even there. The purpose of hiding is not just for the preservation of our earthly life, but to gain time to strengthen our souls for the final trial. And this must begin even now. Let us therefore at least begin to struggle against the fetters of petty passions, and to remember that our true home is not here, but in the heavens. Let us ‘strive towards our heavenly homeland,’ as St. Herman [of Alaska] used to say….. Ad astera! Ad astera!*
*From the saying Per aspera ad astera, “through difficulties to the stars.” From Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, by Hieromonk Damascene, p. 1013.
Apostle Symeon, Apostle Aristobulus of the Seventy, the Righteous Joseph of Arimathea, and even the Apostle Paul have been associated by tradition with the origins of Christianity in the British Isles, and thus with the mother country of foundational Anglo-American and Celtic-American Christian culture in America, although by the time of the British colonies here already long heterodox. Contemporaneously with the founding era of the United States, in the Russian mission to America starting in Alaska and the West Coast, of which the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia of our mission represents the latest wave, came Orthodox Christianity to renew those ancient roots. May God speed the spread and rooting of the true Orthodox Church and Gospel in these American lands!
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Below: An appendix of additional map suggests how our region was an historical-cultural borderland historically, as today spiritually in a wholly different dimension.
