Thoughts on Advent III
Flannery O' Connor and the Violence of Grace
I don't remember when I first encountered the works of Flannery O’Connor but so much of my thinking and faith has been marked by her writings. Her output was small and her short life was marked by illness and suffering and yet, her impact in my own life is enormous. She was a Southern Gothic prophet, preaching to a group of religiously numb, white, “good Christian” Southerners who needed to be shocked into recognizing their own guilt and needed an awakening to see their deep prejudices, whether that came by way of a waiting room, a statue in a lawn, the horn of a bull, or the barrel of a gun. Her works are violent and gratuitous, hardly what you would expect from a Christian Southern lady. And yet, sometimes we all need the violence of grace to awaken us to reality.
For this reason, Flannery is the perfect Advent author. Her stories are rich with the realities of the darkness and brokenness of the world, including most often, the “Christ-haunted South.” But grace always find a way to break in and shock characters into a moment of self-recognition and repentance. Her stories are also marked by violence. She explained that she didn’t enjoy violence but used it as a means to shock her readers into seeing themselves for who they really are. “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”1 Her solution to the deafness of the modern age was to shout about the work of grace and our dire need for it.
She rooted her defense of the use of violence in the center piece of the Christian faith: the crucifixion. As Jessica Hooten Williams wrote “God works through the tradegies we cause for our redemption. What is the crucifixion but the bloody mess we make when God offers us his love? Yet we praise him for the salvation and resurrection that he works through our destructiveness.”2 This is the same way by which grace works itself into the lives of her own characters.
O’Connor’s works are deeply creative and imaginative. They are set in this world, but have a sort of magical realism, heaven meets earth, feel. They are also sacramental. Like other Catholic writers, (think Tolkien) grace is not a physical object, but meaning is often found in the things themselves- a prosthetic leg, a tattooed back, a visit to the doctor’s office, a bus ride. Flannery saw the physical world as a testament to spiritual realities and her characters often encounter grace by these unlikely physical means. She saw her own work as a “hymn to the Eucharist,” pointing to the very real physical and spiritual realities in the everyday lives of her characters. On O’Connor’s understanding of grace, Jordan, A. Haddad writes “While grace does not arise as the product of nature, God has so ordained it that grace is communicated in and through the mediation of nature, which is wholly consistent with the reality found in the Son of God’s Incarnation.”3 For O’Connor this was the connection point between her work, the spiritual realities of the Eucharist, and the everyday breaking in of the grace of God into our world.
So what does this have to do with Advent? Everything, I would argue. Advent is a time to take a hard look at the darkness and sin of the world. For O’Connor, sin isn’t something to be taken lightly but the fatal enemy at the core of all that is broken and wrong with the world. She saw fiction as a necessary means of exposing the darkness and pointing to the hope beyond it. “It is almost impossible to write about supernatural grace in fiction,” she once wrote. “We almost have to approach it negatively. As to natural grace, we have to take that the way it comes – through nature. In any case, it [grace] operates surrounded by evil.” 4 And sometimes it’s this very darkness that shows us our need for grace. “Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.”5 she wrote in Mystery and Manners.
For O’ Connor, “reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost.”6 The cost of her characters’ faith and repentance is often great and painful, but it is a cost and pain worth enduring. Her use of the profane doesn't seek to explain away or sweeten the dark realities of our world, or our deepest selves, but the violent episodes are “invasions of God’s grace”7 and are meant to shine a light on our need for redemption and creation’s restoration. Our hope isn’t in ourselves but in this work of grace that breaks in and shows us who we really are and points us to a hope outside of ourselves.
Advent’s goal is the same. Advent begins in the dark and moves to the breaking in of grace into our world through the Incarnation. What began as the very real and bloody entry of human birth and ended with a shocking and violent death, the Incarnation of Christ is God’s way of jolting us out of our apathy and self-centeredness, exposing us not only to the reality of our fallen world and selves but to the utter depths of his love and pursuit of us and creation. Advent is a time to return to this reality and once again, renew our hope in the grace of the One who came and who is coming again.
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PS- If you have never read any of Flannery O’Connor’s work, I love this audio recording of her reading her short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find.
Flannery O’ Connor, Mystery and Manners, “The Fiction Writer & His Country,” 33-34.
Jessica Hooten Wilson, O'Connor or Robinson: The Gargoyle and the Cathedral https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/oconnor-or-robinson-the-gargoyle-and-the-cathedral/
Jordan A. Haddad, Faith is Not a Big Electric Blanket, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/advent-faith-is-not-a-big-electric-blanket/#_edn4
Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, pg. 144
Flannery O’ Connor, Mystery and Manners, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” pg 204
Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, pg 354.
Fleming Rutledge, Grace in a Violent World, The Once and Coming Future of Jesus Christ, pg. 326,