Courtney McGrailWe can still learn valuable lessons about the dangers of self-satisfaction from Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor says Fr Thomas G. Casey
Sometimes we can spend so much time looking down on others that we never look up to God. We can care so much about appearing good on the outside that we can neglect being good on the inside. If any of this rings true for you, it could be worth your while reading some short stories by Flannery O’Connor.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the death of this gifted U.S. short story writer from Savannah, Georgia.
Born to a father and mother who were both of Irish Catholic origin, O’Connor remained a devout Catholic all her life. In a letter to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald of March 15, 1963 she describes a symposium on religion and art at which she gave a speech: “I waded in and gave them a nasty dose of orthodoxy, which I am sure they thought was pretty quaint.”
But this does not mean that her fiction was comfortable reading. After the daily ritual of early morning Mass, O’Connor would return home and compose stories about shady Bible salesmen, smug grandmothers, and other unlikeable people, characters who, on closer examination, turn out to be a lot like us. Many of these characters only come to their senses and experience grace through undergoing the brutality of violence and suffering.
As a talented young artist O’Connor wanted to leave Georgia so that she could really develop her talents. But after she was diagnosed at the age of 26 with lupus, the autoimmune disease that was eventually to lead to her death on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39, she began to realise that she could work best in her native environment.
Let’s see what we can learn from one of her well-known short stories, Revelation. It unfolds on a hot summer’s day, during which the self-satisfied woman Ruby Turpin is shocked into a new awareness and vision of things after a disturbed teenage girl attacks her in a doctor’s waiting room.
Prejudice
Ruby Turpin sees herself as a model and caring Christian: “to help anybody out that needed it was her philosophy of life”. But she is oblivious to the fact that she is blinded by prejudice, and full of malice and bigotry. Ruby Turpin is thankful for the blessings she has received, and especially grateful for the blessings that distinguish her from the other patients in the waiting room. She reflects happily that God has not made her “white-trash or ugly!” He had made her herself and given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! She said. Thank you thank you thank you.”
Ruby bolsters her inflated sense of herself by downgrading others. Black people are at the bottom of the ladder, poor whites although a separate category, are on the same level.
Further up are homeowners, home and property owners (herself and her husband Claude), and at the very top owners of even more homes and lands.
As Ruby looks at a poor woman in the waiting room whom she mentally labels as “white-trashy”, she thinks to herself: “too lazy to light a fire… If you gave them everything, in two weeks it would be broken or filthy or they would have chopped it up for lightwood.” Someone in the waiting room suggests they should send black people “back to Africa”, but Ruby says they would never agree, because “they got it too good here”.
Suddenly, out of the blue, a teenage girl throws a book at her face, and then digs her fingers into Ruby’s neck, in an apparent effort to choke her. Ruby feels “entirely hollow”, and has the certain feeling that this strange girl knows her intimately. “‘What you got to say to me?’ she asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting, as for a revelation.” The girl replies, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog”.
A moment later the doctor injects the girl and she passes out.
Ruby fights against the girl’s severe judgement. She feels she is “a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman”, but confuses propriety, respectability, hard work and religious practice with real inner goodness.
Ruby has constructed the kind of religion which suits her, a religion made in her own image.
Although it will turn out that Ruby does not belong in hell, she is nevertheless a “wart hog”. Because she has judged with little mercy, she will be judged with little mercy herself – as a wart hog.
At the end of the story, it seems that Ruby may indeed get to heaven. She has a vision of herself in the procession of those making their way upwards among the hordes of the saved. She is walking, as always, “with great dignity… accountable… for good order and common sense and respectable behaviour.”
But she is not at the front of the line. Instead, marching well ahead of her are those she looked down on socially and racially, and even “battalions of freaks and lunatics”. She, who has prided herself on her superior position, on being always first, is now at the end of the procession. On the Day of the Lord, she will be last.
This story, like many of O’Connor’s, teaches us that being respectable Christians and part of the Church are useless if we slander and speak badly of others, if we tenaciously hold prejudices and look down on our neighbour. However upright we may appear on the outside, God always looks on the heart.
Putting ourselves first and being always in the right are danger signs, clear signals that we are on the road to pride. The solutions are not always the kind we would freely choose. Ruby Turpin finds an unexpected (and unwelcome) remedy in the pain of being humiliated by a mentally disturbed and acne-scarred girl, who has the revealing name of “Mary Grace”.
Self-satisfaction
When it comes to pride and self-satisfaction, perhaps the greatest lesson for all of us is that we can only be knocked off a pedestal if we’re standing on it.
We need to get the insight that Flannery O’Connor had: “Everybody, as far as I am concerned, is the poor.”
When we are poor in spirit, we can cope more easily with finding ourselves in a lowly place. One way to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Flannery O’Connor, who famously said “smugness is the great Catholic sin”, is by getting off our pedestals before we’re unceremoniously toppled from them.
Fr Thomas G. Casey is a Jesuit priest and director of the diploma in philosophy and arts at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth.