Swan Song XXVIX--Ms. Flannery O'Connor

I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer.  I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy.  This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world as its relation to that.

Those words aren't cheap, but there are umpteen thousands, even millions of people, of Americans, who would willing volunteer them in testimony.  Shoot, count me among 'em.  The way I see the world is forever altered because of my deep-seeded belief--sometimes strong, sometimes not--that once upon a time a hippy Galilean suffered and died and then, Good Lord, rose again.  

But it takes someone special to do something about it, to live by it, to make his or her life's work into that kind of testimony. 

Two generations ago, my colleagues stuck an lit book in my hand when I came to Dordt College to teach, an anthology put together by someone named Perrine.  Wasn't all the big really, two-toned, and I remember the first day's assignment:  two short stories, one of them really gamey, plot-driven, a fast read, a story titled "The Most Dangerous Game"; and the other a Faulkner, "That Evening Sun."  Both were about fear.

The trick was to get students to read both and then talk about which is best--the genre of lit or the genre of adventure.  Brilliant idea, but a miserable failure because every time I tried it, I had to pin the entire class to the floor to make them think Faulkner was "art" and therefore "better."  Never once worked.

But I liked the class, "Responding to Lit," and I liked the stories in Perrine too.  Teaching was fun.  I remember walking home with my friend, Hugh Cook--we lived in the same neighborhood. We'd yak about what had happened that day in class, a feast of joy, honestly.  "Just think," Hugh said one day as we reached his place, "and we get paid for this too."  Such heady joy was ours--young and charged with love for Faulkner and Fitzgerald, and a woman I knew only faintly back then, a woman named Flannery O'Connor.

She was in Perrine too, a story titled "Greenleaf," a story that contains the n-word and therefore doesn't appear in many anthologies anymore.  Last semester I took it out of mothballs because I waxed nostalgic--I remembered it from 35 years ago. I ran off copies and assigned it once again for old time's sake, but we didn't talk about it in class because it became the basis of an assignment.

 Today, this morning, we do.  Today, I've got to talk about "Greenleaf" again, 35 years later.  I wanted to come back to that story, n-word or not, because all really good stories end somewhere in the neighborhood of where they began.

Truth is, there's things about O'Connor that bug me.  What I hate most is being an English teacher about it, the know-it-all up in front of the room to students who are stunned to learn, for instance, that the woman who wrote "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," with its brutal mass-murder shoot-'em-up ending, is really an orthodox Christian believer.  What I hate is this "I'm-a-genius-and-you-aren't thing" that happens automatically when I say, "But wait!--there's this whole substrata of symbols--and if you play the story backwards at a slow speed or look at it with 3-D glasses or something--you'll see the REAL meaning."  Aren't I a smarty-pants?  You can be brilliant too if you majored in English.

Hate that, really. 

But I love the story.  It's such a joy to read, even though that dang bull gets Mrs. May right in the heart, just kills her in the end.  I read "Greenleaf" again last night and was floored again by that woman's art.  Dang it.  It is all there--this meticulously choreographed dance of hints and images beneath the action, something Ms. O'Connor herself would call, I suppose, the movement of the spirit--and be not mistaken, we're talking about the Holy one.  In "Greenleaf," Jesus himself is a scrub bull who's been eating away at the hedge of spiritual pride that Mrs. May surrounds herself with, a woman so blasted sure of herself and so blind that her salvation requires divine intervention by the lethal horns of one butt-ugly bull.  Only then can she come to understand her damned self.  

I read "Greenleaf" again last night--maybe for the last time--and when I did I know dang well why it is that I've loved teaching for lo, these many years.  The students are fun, if you don't take yourself too seriously; but what I get to work with, day after day, is the beauty of God's world.  Good night, sometimes that beauty is treacherously ugly--because life is.  But everyday there's more testimony, everyday there's more life.

And then there's Flannery O'Connor, a fiction writer who saw the innocent face of her Savior like a divine watermark over every last page of the world in front of her--always there, always searching, always wanting his own--even if sometimes he comes along in the leathery hide of a scrub bull. 

And I got paid for it too.  For the last 35 years, I got paid for it.  Isn't that something?

This morning's thanks--this morning's humble thanks--are for a woman's brilliant achievement in story-telling, work that's inspired me for 35 years, that's made it worth being a teacher, even if, one more time this morning, I'll have to act like some kind of weird magician English teacher.  "Ah, class, but what you didn't see was the way that bull wears a wreath like a crown."  For years, I've seen engineers roll their eyes.

No matter.  She's worth it--Ms. O'Connor is.  Trust me.  I've been doing this for a lifetime.