It is easy for people whose job it is to pay attention to public affairs, teach them, or write about them, to exaggerate the importance of this or that current event. What is going on in Israel? What does the coming election portend for the country? How will states vote on abortion in the coming months? What is the sociological importance of Caitlyn Clark? There is the temptation to see earthshaking ramifications in the most evanescent of events.
Especially given the reign of social media, it is especially easy today to succumb to the seductive appeal of the news. Jeff Bilbro discusses the political and theological problems with the modern obsession with the trivial in his excellent work Reading the Times. The temptation to overread the sensational news is especially destructive to the Church. In addition to ordinary politics and popular culture, Christians can sometimes get too immured by church politics. For Catholics such as me, we follow the travails of the pope and Vatican insider reports. For Protestants it might be large denominational meetings, such as the goings on at the recent Southern Baptist convention or the controversies over the Presbyterian Church in America rescinding an invitation offered to David French.
One wouldn’t want to minimize such matters, but they can distract us from paying attention to our own parish or congregation. Is the latest confounding statement by Pope Francis really more important than the fellow parishioner whose spouse just died? Are bombastic statements by Doug Wilson more central to our lives than what is happening in our own schools and the education of our own children?
We can fall prey to the notion that the really important matters are happening “out there,” in big news stories populated by big personalities who probably live in big cities. We become convinced that the real problems are not the sinfulness of my own heart but what “they” are doing to “us.” It’s not my sin or the sin in my congregation that is undermining the Church’s mission, it’s Disney, or Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, or Fox News, or MSNBC.
I suppose it is now commonplace to quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the effect that, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.” It is apparently apocryphal that G.K. once responded to the question of “What is wrong with the world today,” with the terse response, “I am.” It’s the kind of thing Chesterton would say, even if he never actually said it. And it’s a good reminder to us all. I once chatted with an evangelical friend of mind about his thoughts concerning end times and the efforts of some Christians, sometimes using numerology, to identify the Anti-Christ alluded to in St. John’s Revelation. My friend gave a simple response: “I know who the Anti-Christ is. It’s me. I am against Christ a dozen ways every day.” No need to go hunting in the headlines for what we could find in the mirror each morning.
This is part of the power, I think, of the stories of Flannery O’Connor. Her deeply Christian stories are not sweet tales of pious believers doing the right thing and shaming the heathens into belief. No, they are awful stories of deeply flawed people haunted by their own sinfulness. Yet, in most O’Connor stories there is an offer of grace. Typically, it is rejected, often with tragic results. Sometimes the grace is accepted, resulting not the immediate conversion of a sinner into a “holier than thou” saint, but with a deeply flawed person humbled by his or her own sinfulness and unworthiness.
One of my favorite O’Connor stories, and one that nicely illustrates the point, is “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” found in the collection A Good Man Is Hard To Find. Mr. Shiftlet, a man of some seeming piety and perhaps a flawed Christ-figure (if that is not an oxymoron), goes to work for Mrs. Crater. Well, short story shorter, Shiftlet is persuaded to marry Mrs. Crater’s mentally disabled daughter, Lucynell, who is described as an angel. The day of the wedding Shiftlet, off supposedly on his honeymoon, strands Lucynell at a diner and runs off. The angelic Lucynell is his offer of grace, and Shiflet runs away as fast as his broken-down car will let him. Passing a billboard that warns him to drive safely for “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Shiftlet heads for Mobile pursued by a storm. Does the storm represent God’s judgment hunting down Shiftlet, or is it the hound of Heaven, seeking out Shiftlet to claim God’s own?
Here is what I like about O’Connor’s stories. There are no uncomplicatedly good characters that the reader can identify with, allowing us the easy comfort that we are so good and everyone else is so bad. No, just about everyone in O’Connor’s stories is something of a jerk, reminding us of Lyle Lovett’s admonition that if you look around you will see the world is full of creeps like me, and you. Even an unmitigatedly good character like Lucynell is mentally disabled. How many of us would like to be holy, but, as we said in the old days, retarded? I bet all of us at least hesitate when we answer that question, and most of us answer, “No way.”
O’Connor doesn’t let us off the hook. We are all, in our own way, Mr. Shiflet, or Hulga Hopewell, or Ruby Turpin, or Obadiah Parker, or even the racist Mr. Head. O’Connor gives us a great reminder. The great affairs of nations deserve at least some of our attention. More important, however, is attending to our own soul and the good of our neighbors. Attending to my family, my neighborhood, my school, and my parish or congregation should be my central concern. These are people I actually know, not just some abstraction on the television or computer. My first duty is to care for them before I fret over the looming presidential debate. The stakes are high. The life you save may be your own.