Furthermore: Nice Is Not the Point
Sometimes love is sharp, hard-edged, confusing, and seemingly unfair.
By Marilyn Chandler McEntyre | posted 11/13/2000 12:00AM
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My prescription for too much niceness, besides a long look at the New Testament, is to read a few of Flannery O'Connor's vigorous, hilarious, acerbic stories. Her nice Christian ladies are hard to forget or forgive. They have fashioned Jesus in their own image: a Jesus who thoroughly approves their tastes, judgments, and social biases. O'Connor implies there will be no room for their like in the kingdom of heaven. They will have to be purged of their niceness. Insisting that sentimentality was a close kin to obscenity, she used her fiction to expose the sin of self-satisfied niceness in images that recall whited sepulchers.
We are called to be "tenderhearted, forgiving one another," to empathize with one another's pain, to imagine one another's point of view, to reckon with our own limitations, to pray for the grace of the healing word, and to not sidestep the arduous business of acknowledging hurt, anger, or confusion and seeking authentic reconciliation.
That task demands a great deal more than niceness. It demands that we be tough-minded as well as tenderhearted, that we sometimes be "in each other's faces," as well as cherished in each other's hearts. It may even demand that we be downright eccentric, at least if we are to believe O'Connor's word on the subject: "You shall know the truth," she warned, "and the truth shall make you odd."
Related Elsewhere
Learn more about Flannery O'Connor's life at this site, or visit the Special Collections at the Ina Dillard Russell Library, Georgia College, Milledgeville.
Read up on O'Connor in Flannery O'Connor Collection or The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin.
The December 1994/January 1995 issue of Sojourners featured Flannery O'Connor, with essays by;
Julie Polter, "Obliged to See God"
Shane Helmer, "Stumbling Onto the Spirit's Signposts"
Alice Walker, "A South Without Myths"
Danny Duncan Collum, "Nature and Grace: Flannery O'Connor and the healing of Southern culture"
McEntyre's credentials are available at the Westmont College site, including a list of all her books and articles.
In Quiet Light: Poems on Vermeer's Women
, McEntyre's latest book, is available from Amazon.com.
Previous McEntyre columns for Christianity Today include:
The Fullness of Time (Oct. 12, 2000)
'I've Been Through Things' (Sept. 6, 2000)
Silence Is to Dwell In (Aug. 10, 2000)
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