“June Star said her hair was naturally curly.”
Hear this, and all the other moments of glory and wonder that are, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” read by Flannery O’Connor herself.
Here’s a recording made apparently shortly before her death:
Tag Archive - Flannery O’Connor
He Shouldn’t Have Done It
Reflections on resurrection from the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”:
“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” the Misfit continued, “and he shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do now but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can–by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said, and his voice had become almost a snarl.
How much more if Jesus himself is raised.
Happy Easter!
Faith and Doubt
In a letter to young man in college who had written to her about losing his faith,
Flannery O’Connor had this to say:
I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have written me about this. (The Habit of Being, 476)
What do you think: is an experience of losing faith something that does, or at least can, belong to faith?
“Revelation”
As many of you know, Flannery O’Connor is not only the greatest theologian of the 20th century, she is also one to whose writings I return regularly. In particular, I read the story “Revelation” to my class each time I teach on Revelation in an attempt to demystify the world-inverting message of apocalyptic literature.
This time around I noticed something I hadn’t before: how a theme or two from Job works its way in. At one point, Ms. Turpin, who has been given a startling revelation from God in the form of a book thrown at her head, is described as defending herself against it in these words:
Occasionally she raised her fist and made a small stabbing motion over her chest as if she was defending her innocence to invisible guests wh were like the comforters of Job, reasonable-seeming but wrong.
Ok, so that part is obvious enough. We’re immediately told that her protuberance is turning a greenish blue. Hmmm…
Perhaps because I have so recently watched A Serious Man, the following Joban allusion jumped out at me for the first time, at the end of the next scene:
The dark protuberance over her eye looked like a miniature tornado cloud which might any moment sweep across the horizon of her brow.
She then marches off, as to battle–a fight with God over her revelation. And from her own mouth will come the words of God’s self-defense, such as it is. She will provide her own answer when her question echoes back to her from the heavenly-earthy throne.
Flannery O’Connor on Stories and Abstractions
“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experience meaning, the the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.”
–Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 96.
I was going to say something about why this is so profound, pointed, and correct–not just about fiction stories but religious stories as well. But then, that seemed to be an exercise in precisely the sort of abstraction that the quote invites us to eschew.
So I’ll just go back to writing about Paul as a narrative theologian, abstracting for the purpose of inviting people back into a storied theology…
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