Flannery O'Connor - Dirty, gritty Spirituality

Here is my first official post post-exams. Maybe not exciting for anyone else, but for me….. So, to relax, I read the complete stories of Flannery O’Connor. I have already written about one of O’Connor’s stories (a Good Man…), but I think the entire volume deserves some attention. I will not presume to write as a critique, for that is not my training. I cannot speak to O’Connor’s literary style, influences, technique, etc… I will not presume to think that I really have anything to offer to the world of literature concerning O’Connor, so I write about her book with some humility. I do write as a Baptist theologian who has been studying the American Catholic experience for a number of years, and I think that brings a specific insight to O’Connor’s writings (a catholic who uses Baptist as her subjects in the south). The only thing I am missing is the Southern background, but I can only do so much.
Before I go any farther, I should remind the reader(s) and myself that we cannot try to read O’Connor’s mind. After writing my bit on “A Good Man…” I realized that I was working hard to try to understand what O’Connor was trying to say in her powerful story. This is a pursuit that will drive all mad, including the author. Need I remind the post-modern audience that the writer’s intent is a modernistic truth that is illusive. Read Stanley Fish (early or late) and you will know what I mean (hopefully). I cannot read O’Connor’s mind, nor can I ask her (she is in no position to answer) what she intended (she may not know herself). All I can do is react to her writings from my own horizion of experience.
It is good to get that off my chest.
I don’t think any of the stories were bad, but a couple really stood out as I read them:
The Turkey
Enoch and the Gorilla
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
The River
The Displaced Person
Good Country People
A View of the Woods
Everything The Rises Must Converge
The Partridge Festival
Revelation
Parker’s Back

O’Connor seems to end many of her stories with a sacramental moment when reality blurs with the kingdom of God; sometimes this feels forced, and sometimes this moves well. Her Catholicism is clear and obvious in a subdued (and sometimes not so subdued) kind of way. Her theology is deeply sacramental, often occurring in the mundane and the profane. It seems that O’Connor is putting down those who see themselves as religious and pious and lifts up the honest and authentic. The Misfit in “A Good Man….” may actually be the good man as he kills the grandmother. There is something gritty and earthy about O’Connor’s spirituality that transcends to the kingdom of God.
After reading the volume, I find a picture of the Kingdom of God challenged, deconstructed and reconstructed by O’Connor’s stories. The Kingdom of God does not seem to be a place where the pious, the holy, the socially acceptable will live, but a place where the poor, the cripple, the simple and the sinful will be found (see the end of Revelation). When I talk to some of my parishioners, I hear an image of heaven that is all white and perfect and full of only the holy people. O’Connor is challenging this. O’Connor is challenging the gritty and dirty and profane aspects of life as places where God’s presence can actually be found. O’Connor is challenging the sanctuaries as clean places and showing them as only half-saved. O’Connor is challenging the class, economic, societal structure that is so prevalent in the church as something that is upside down when it comes to the Lord’s economy of grace and salvation. Her stories are rich, engaging and challenging. Someone once told me (I think it was my sister-in-law) that a good writer can be read again and again. O’Connor is this kind of writer, who I know will continue to challenge and push me again and again.