This is my 200th
post on this blog, created in 2011 to encourage and enhance the spirituality of
progressive Christians. Thanks to 500 subscribers and an additional 3000
monthly visitors from all over the world! And thanks to Metropolitan Community Churches for including it among the denomination’s Emerging Ministries in 2012.
Please consider a gift to support this ministry today, either as an individual or a congregation. Your
tax-deductible contributions are its only source of funding. Thanks to this
year’s donors of nearly $1200 to date!
A
few weeks ago I was reading one of Southern writer Flannery O’Connor’s last
short stories, entitled “Revelation,” published posthumously in her collection All That Rises Must Converge. She takes
the book’s title from Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings as both a scientist
and a mystic she greatly admired.
The
story is written from the perspective of an older woman who finds herself in a
doctor’s waiting room, looking from person to person, engaging in small talk. Her
judgmentalism is in high gear as she silently evaluates their appearance, their
interactions and lack thereof, as well as sharing aloud the foibles of people
in general with another woman. I was especially put off by her frequent use of
the “n-word.” In that brief story I saw
the unabbreviated word more often than I have seen it in recent decades.
Needless
to say, I too was frothing with judgment (of the protagonist) as the story came
to a surprising twist. Without giving the story away, something happens that upsets
her certainty about things, and later, watching the sun set, she has an unsettling
vision of what was to come: all the people she routinely judged marching nonetheless
toward heaven, “battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and
leaping like frogs.” The story continues:
And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.
I
cried with recognition. I was her. Flannery O’Connor tricked me, even as grace
tricks us all. We think we will be saved by our many words—prayers, sermons,
posts—or our many deeds—charitable, political, religious. But it’s grace that
really saves us.
In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.
Copyright © 2014 by
Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of
author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.
