From “What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman” by Lerita Coleman Brown
I have not yet read about a nature-based custom common among the enslaved Gullah people, African Americans who lived along the coast of and on the islands near South Carolina. Gullah youth would go out into nature to find God in a spiritual coming-of-age ritual. In Gullah communities, the Praise House was a central fixture. To be baptized and assume full membership in the church and the community, a young candidate had to provide testimony in the Praise House about a spiritual experience they had. This time of preparation was called “seekin.” Although the term is derived in part from Methodist missionaries who, after preaching and teaching, inquired if anyone wanted to “seek Jesus,” the Gullah culture adapted the term to describe their own notion about potential believers. Margaret Creel, in her outstanding book on slave religion in Gullah culture, writes “A candidate’s acceptance into the church and subsequently into the Praise House depended upon relating a satisfactory experience, which was the result of a soul-grappling experience, traumatic confrontation between the individual and a higher power, culminating, if successful, in a sensation of rebirth and full membership in the religious community.