Religion & Spirituality – Mysteries and Manners

“Christ-Haunted” and Flannery-Haunted

November 6, 2013

She would probably hate that title.

The only thing Flannery wanted us to be haunted by is Jesus, as she so disturbingly and movingly describes in Wise Blood:

Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. (O’Connor, Wise Blood, via goodreads.com)

Flannery O'Conner — source: ahsartgallery.blogspot.com

I need to go read her first novel, Wise Blood, again– but even as a Catholic I am afraid. That’s when you know you’ve confronted good literature, when it makes you afraid–not in the superficial sense, but the deep sense. Afraid because when you read it you have to face the truth whether you like it or not.

Anyway –

I just read another article about this new book that has been published, consisting of her personal prayers she wrote while she was in her 20’s — that is, my age.

The article I read is very good, and you should read it too: “7 Reasons to Read A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor.”

The author Cybulski says, quite rightly: “The journal is a cry of the heart so deeply intimate I wondered at times whether I should be reading it at all.”

That’s why I haven’t read it yet. Having read her letters several times over in The Habit of Being, I am pretty confident that Flannery would really hate it if her private prayers were published. Hans Urs von Balthasar might describe it as a violation of the unveiling of being — a kind of violation whereby the truth is forced or snatched from someone without her consent. (The Greek word for Truth – aletheia – means “unveiling” or “disclosedness”).

Then again, however, Flannery in heaven may not care very much or may, indeed, be quite open to the idea if she knew it might help those of us bumbling along the road down here.

But I haven’t read the letters yet. It seems indecent. But if I am really honest with myself, I would have to say that I am afraid to read them.

Yes, afraid.

I remember reading Mother Teresa’s Come Be My Light in the midst of a time (a very long time, mind you) in which I was really struggling to believe in God. This book was a very painful sort of comfort, and I highly recommend it–but I recommend it with fear and trembling, because if you really read it, that’s how it should affect you. Mother Teresa was one of the holiest women of the 20th century (and, perhaps, ever). Even most nonbelievers accept that (except silly people like Christopher Hitchens). Yet her belief in God, though the center of her life, was also most certainly the most painful part of her life. Joy and sorrow are not two separate things here.

And I suspect the same is true of Flannery O’Connor. You get hints of this struggle all over the place in The Habit of Being and in her fiction, which is populated by all sorts of nonbelievers–whether they be outright honest atheists, amiable agnostics, or Pharisaical Christians of the most disgusting type.

One of her characters, Hazel Motes, experiences a radical de-conversion in which he abandons his biblical faith. He is tired of the demands of Christ. He is tired of running from Christ. So he decides to begin his own Church Without Christ (a rather interesting version of the New Atheism a’la Dawkins et. al) and proceeds to preach his new disbelief with abandon. He says, “I don’t have to run from anything because I don’t believe in anything.”

As you read, however, you see he is still running.

See if you can hear the echo of O’Connor’s own possible struggle with faith in his tirade:

“Leave!’ Hazel Motes cried. ‘Go ahead and leave! The truth don’t matter to you. Listen,’ he said, pointing his finger at the rest of them, ‘the truth don’t matter to you. If Jesus had redeemed you, what difference would it make to you? You wouldn’t do nothing about it. Your faces wouldn’t move, neither this way nor that, and if it was three crosses there and Him hung on the middle one, that wouldn’t mean no more to you and me than the other two. Listen here. What you need is something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don’t have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that’s all man, without blood to waste, and it needs one that don’t look like any other man so you’ll look at him. Give me such a jesus, you people. Give me such a new jesus and you’ll see how far the Church Without Christ can go!” (O’Connor, Wise Blood via goodreads.com)

Notice, that what bothers Motes the most, (and, I suspect, Flannery), is that to some people, “the truth don’t matter to you.” They just don’t care about what’s true. God exists. Whatever. God doesn’t exist. Whatever. It simply just does not matter to them. And that’s what’s really horrifying. Because of course it matters. It’s really the only thing that matters–either side you choose.

But back to her published prayers.

From the article:

It is the rare 22-year-old who describes God as “the slim crescent of a moon . . . [which] is very beautiful,” while viewing herself as “the earth’s shadow . . . [which threatens to] grow so large that it blocks the whole moon.” Flannery confesses to being “afraid of insidious hands . . . which grope into the darkness of my soul,” begging God to be her protector, shielding her against those things which would tear her away from Him. (Cybulski)

If that isn’t faith, I don’t know what is.

And I am afraid like Moses was afraid of the burning bush. You see it, you can barely believe it, you clumsily take off your sandals–aware that your filthy feet are still touching Sacred Ground–and you know that if you come any closer you will probably be burned by something or Someone more terrible than you had supposed.

I will read that book eventually. Perhaps soon.

“I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You.” (O’Connor, from her prayer journal via goodreads.com)

Try inserting your vocation in place of “artist.”

I must write down that I am to be a teacher. Not in the sense of educational frippery but in the sense of academic scholarship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually… I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be a teacher, please let it lead to You.

Amen.

My Mouth is Dry

August 9, 2013

I have moved to Denver!

I am sitting in my new classroom, imagining the faces that will occupy the empty desks, the colors I will use to mitigate the overwhelming whiteness of the walls, the procedures I intend to begin practicing with them on day one…

…and my mouth is dry.

It will probably feel a whole lot dryer on the first day when I have to speak to my new students (whom, I hear, have been informed that I am a very hard-core scary teacher by my ACE predecessor).

Or the first time a student doesn’t follow directions, and I have to administer a consequence.

Or that first parent phone-call I make… even though I plan on the first one being very positive–a reaching out and introducing myself to all the parents before they know what hit ’em .

Or that first summer reading assignment I hand back… their first taste of my high expectations.

But right now, sitting here, typing and imagining and predicting, my mouth is dry.

They tell you when you move to Denver, you should drink a lot of water. Something about the high altitude and the climate makes dehydration pretty common, especially for newcomers. So I’ve been carrying a water bottle everywhere I go.

And my mouth is still dry.

When I was in Louisiana, sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe because of all the moisture in the air. Every time it rained, the water flooded the streets because it had nowhere to go — I guess the ground was saturated already.

Richard Wilbur’s beautiful poem, “Grasse: The Olive Trees,” was floating in my waterlogged thoughts all the time these past two years:

Here luxury’s the common lot. The light

Lies on the rain-pocked rocks like yellow wool

And around the rocks the soil is rusty bright

From too much wealth of water, so that the grass

Mashes under the foot, and all is full

Of heat and juice and a heavy jammed excess.

If that ain’t Louisiana, I don’t know what is.

Funny, because Wilbur is from Massachusetts like me, and lives a couple of hours away from where I grew up. Apparently the South made a big impression on him though (as it has with me). Look at how beautifully he describes the stillness, brought about by the thick heat. I was warned that people in the South walk more slowly, and talk more slowly. Sometimes, during my first year teaching, my kids would ask me to slow down. And it makes perfect sense that they think we rush around so quickly:

Whatever moves moves with the slow complete
Gestures of statuary. Flower smells
Are set in the golden day, and shelled in heat,
Pine and columnar cypress stand. The palm
Sinks its combs in the sky. The whole South swells
To a soft rigor, a rich and crowded calm.

And then, to my Northern delight, Wilbur notices something that protests the South, and all it’s sticky hot sweetness. And, to my even greater delight, it’s an olive tree — evoking images of that golden time I spent in Italy during college, biblical images, this whole idea of thirst….

Only the olive contradicts. My eye,
Traveling slopes of rust and green, arrests
And rests from plenitude where olives lie
Like clouds of doubt against the earth’s array.
Their faint disheveled foliage divests
The sunlight of its color and its sway.

Take a look at this olive tree, and then reread that stanza again:

Yup. It “contradicts” the landscape, the richness, the “excess.” The olive tree is still thirsty, for all of that water and warm sunshine.

But then this, as well:

Not that the olive spurns the sun; its leaves
Scatter and point to every part of the sky,
Like famished fingers waving. Brilliance weaves
And sombers down among them, and among
The anxious silver branches, down to the dry
And tsisted tgrunk, by rooted hunger wrung.

And then he ends his poem, in this incomparably beautiful way, gently evoking images that make you thirsty too, but perhaps for something else:

Even when seen from near, the olive shows
A hue of far away. Perhaps for this
The dove brought olive back, a tree which grows
Unearthly pale, which ever dims and dries,
And whose great thirst, exceeding all excess,
Teaches the South it is not paradise.

And you think of Noah in that sea of water, after that great excess of the great flood, searching the horizon for the little dove he had sent away. And eventually the dove comes back… bearing an olive branch, and the hope of dry land. (Genesis 8:11)

The South indeed “is not paradise,” but neither is Colorado, as beautiful as it is. I can’t really imagine two places more different from one another than Colorado and Louisiana, but here they are, juxtaposed, and here am I in the middle of them, missing the humidity but loving the clearer air.

And my mouth is dry, it seems no matter how much water I drink.

Or, I guess, no matter where I go.

Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” (John 4:13-15)