"Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away." Revelation by Flannery O'Connor
I recently half-heard a talk in which the speaker extensively spoke on this short story, and I was so thankful to be reminded of it, even if his point was not what I brought away.
The "they" implied by the pronoun in the above quote refers to the moral, upright Christian folk spied in a religious vision by a woman cut of that same moral cloth. The good folk are at the tail end of a parade following all manner of undesirables into the kingdom of Heaven. Prim and proper, they are the only ones marching in an orderly fashion, singing on key, and generally following the rules--but as they march, they are changed, to their consternation. I don't want anyone to be deprived of the privilege of reading the story, so I won't tell you more. (But find it today if you can!)
I love Flannery O'Connor's short stories. Acerbic, cutting to the quick of the human condition with an elegant and honest knife, her characters are often not attractive- it's difficult to identify a protagonist, much less a hero in her tales of the South. Her stories are brutally honest and filled with a very uneasy look at grace.
Maybe that's why I love her work. Fairly few of us would qualify as a hero, and my view of myself as protagonist may well be in direct contrast to someone's view of me as antagonist. The grace I would like to experience is often not the grace I am given. And when the drought of my local geography reflects my spiritual state, honesty is all I have.
It is Lenten season again, and I don't know that I have ever inhabited the season so fully before. In January, we blew back into my home turf with our possessions like so many tumbleweeds- home gone, job gone, shaken, sad, confused, ill- driven before a circumstantial whirlwind and helpless before it.
Everything is ashen; gray and hard on the surface, soft and shifting underneath, like the fallout of some recent volcanic blast rather than a gentle smudge on my forehead. This ridiculous cavalcade of misfortune- it grits at the soul, leaves a terrible taste in my mouth, renders my prayers bitter.
After so many months and so many prayers, I am finding it hard to keep at it. God and I just sit and look at each other. He's nearly palpable in his proximity but He just doesn't say much. I would do whatever He wants. It is far more tenuous a thing to sit and let a torrent of trouble just wash over my life, knowing God is sitting there watching it happen. At least He holds my hand. This ashen grace is not, at present, one I would choose, but it is what I am being given.
Miss O'Connor, a Catholic single lady in a bastion of Protestantism, somehow found words to describe to what happens sometimes to tidy, comfortable lives. It is happening to me.
Grace, a brutal, ashen grace.
Honest, not easy, but true nonetheless. All my own "virtue" is being burned away, things I never really thought of as dross, things locusts are eating. As for what remains, I am not sure that the term hope describes what sits in my heart but something more certain.
Easter.
