Jitterbugging for Jesus

Flannery O’Connor was one of the Americans in that literary pantheon of great Catholic writers, those who have produced great literature with Catholic undertones and themes. In these daily posts through Easter, I’ll be citing the words and works of others in the said pantheon.

I’ll lift up writers, living and dead, like the Brits T.S. Eliot and Graham Greene and Americans like the many Southern Catholics like Percy Walker of Louisiana (and O’Connor, of Georgia).

Also, contemporary Catholics like the Pulitzer winner and hard-bitten Texas writer Mary Carr, and Ron Hansen, author of such (violent) fiction as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a story chock-full of Catholic theology that was made into a great and vastly underrated film with Brad Pitt. (Pitt called it his favorite film role at the time; the writer Ron Hansen said that Casey Affleck was so good as Robert Ford that he was “born to play this role.”)

Out of the American lot of greatest American novelists, short story writers, and Christian thinkers, many–if not most–rank the very Southern/gothic O’Connor as the best of the best Catholics.

“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal,” O’Connor once said.

Indeed, her novels are fool of gritty, violent characters who commit bloody, god-awful acts. But then, consider that people who don’t know how to read and interpret the Bible through a theological lens–or who aren’t willing to do so– think of the Bible as a “hard, hopeless and brutal” book.

Any great literature that explores the depths of violence, like the Bible itself, is always subject to blanket condemnation for that very violence. Some see the crucifixion of Christ on the cross as an act of “divine child abuse.” It can certainly be interpreted that way on the face of it. Based on my study of the Bible and the Christian tradition with all its many and varied “atonement” theories, I don’t see the cross as an act of divine child abuse at all.

It takes a certain kind of guidance and disciplined study for a Bible reader to understand that even the God of the largely nasty Old Testament was a God whose will was for love of neighbor, grace, peace, and social justice. It takes a certain kind of guidance and disciplined study to understand any great, lasting piece of literature.

So its small wonder that O’Connor’s work is subject to so much misunderstanding. I’ll have more from O’Connor here during Lent, but for now I’ll just leave you with this quote of hers, about the high cost of discipleship, from “The Habit of Being,” a collection of her wonderful and often delightfully funny letters.

And oh by the way, keep in mind that the delightful, joy-filled O’Connor was handicapped and died all too young from lupus.

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened.

“What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”

Go here to learn more about O’Connor and her deep faith in the face of so much suffering.

Go here to order “The Habit of Being” or other works.