Refiner’s Fire: A Talent Increased

I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith … in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if it is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have written me about this.”

A pastor writing to a young parishioner away at college? Not at all. Instead, the opening sentence of a letter sent by fiction writer Flannery O’Connor to a young poet who wrote to her expressing his faith struggles. Her letter to him is one among hundreds contained in The Habit of Being, a collection of O’Connor’s correspondence from 1948 to 1964, the year of her early death.

O’Connor’s career was complicated by her struggle with lupus, the debilitating disease that eventually killed her. In her letters she wrote about its effects with honesty and self-deprecating humor: “I’m informed that it’s crutches for me from now on.… I will henceforth be a structure with flying buttresses.” The courageous encounter with illness manifested in her letters is reason enough to read the book.

Her letters are anything but dull. Restricted from extensive travel because of her illness, O’Connor’s lively correspondence sustained friendships that became increasingly important to her. Editor Sally Fitzgerald notes that the letters offer a “self-portrait in words.”

Unapologetically Roman Catholic, O’Connor was by no means provincial in matters of faith. She constantly fought against being cast in the role of apologist for the church in her fiction. To novelist friend John Hawkes she wrote: “People are always asking me if I am a Catholic writer and I am afraid that I sometimes say no and sometimes say yes, depending on who the visitor is.” Her special province as a writer, she believed, was grace. And she shared Bonhoeffer’s abhorrence of “cheap grace.” She noted that her later stories concerned themselves with “the presentation of love and charity or better call it grace, as love suggests tenderness, whereas grace can be violent.…”

The Habit of Being will delight even readers unfamiliar with O’Connor’s fiction. Her letters reveal a keen sense of the absurd and an appreciation of the caprices of human personality. Whether describing the farm help, her neighbors, or visitors to her home, O’Connor demonstrated an unerring ability to spot the comic in human affairs. She told of a man who phoned and announced, “I have written a novel,” and asked if he could come and discuss publication possibilities. Though O’Connor had “never heard of him but that is not unusual,” she consented. He turned out to be “87 years old with a wife about 40 who calls him ‘sweetheart.’ He is writing a book about ‘a modern woman.’ My mother asked what was a modern woman. ‘One without scruples,’ he says.”

Although O’Connor had justifiable confidence in her talent, she confided doubts and dry spells to her friends. She sent the best critics among them drafts of her work, inviting serious review and suggestions for improvement. Once she had finished a story or novel to her satisfaction, however, she was ready to take on all comers. At first puzzled, she was finally resigned to the fact that many critics found her fiction depressing. One reviewer faulted her novel The Violent Bear It Away for not offering the reader courage and hope. Commenting, O’Connor wondered why he had settled on those two virtues. Why not include as well charity, peace, patience, joy, benignity, long-suffering, and fear of the Lord?

O’Connor believed it was unfair for readers who knew she was a Christian to expect her work to be full of sweetness and light, and wished her critics would stop demanding her novels to provide gifts that only faith can give. She recognized that the medium of grace is often “the imperfect, purely human, and even hypocritical,” and that it was not only possible, but extremely likely, that people will turn their backs on grace. Though she believed that at its roots, grace meant “healing,” she was concerned that many modern believers romanticized the work of grace. “This notion that grace is healing omits the fact that before it heals, it cuts with the sword Christ said he came to bring.”

She had even less tolerance for interpretations of her fiction that made what were to her ridiculous attempts to uncover deeply symbolic meanings in every phrase. She insisted that her intention was chiefly to tell a story and to tell it well. Sometimes she resorted to devastating humor to make her point. A young teacher once asked why the hat of one of her characters was black. She replied that most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. “He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, ‘Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?’ ‘He does not,’ I said. He looked crushed. ‘Well, Miss O’Connor,’ he said, ‘what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?’ I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone.”

In her letters, O’Connor could be more direct about her convictions than in her other writings. These convictions were deeply felt and strongly affirmed, perhaps never so powerfully as in a letter to a fellow writer, discouraged because of criticism. While the words apply to writing, they are relevant to anyone who believes vocation is, at heart, a faith matter:

“No matter how just the criticism, any criticism at all which depresses you to the extent that you feel you cannot write anything is from the Devil and to subject yourself to it is … sin. In you the talent is there and you are expected to use it. Whether the work itself is completely successful, or whether you get any worldly success out of it, is a matter of no concern to you.… The human comes before art. You do not write the best you can for the sake of art but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God to use or not to use as he sees fit. Resignation to the will of God … means that you leave the outcome out of your personal considerations.”

There can be no doubt that in Flannery O’Connor’s case, a “talent increased” was returned to her Creator.

Mr. Gibble is associate pastor of the Ridgeway Community Church of the Brethren, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Cinema

WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY?

Screenplay by Brian Clark and Reginald Rose; directed by John Badham.

Ken Harrison is a talented sculptor whose dream dies hard—with the sickening crunch of metal and glass as his car jams underneath a carelessly driven truck. The story of Whose Life Is It Anyway? proceeds six months later when the artist, still hospitalized, learns he will never again use his legs, arms, or hands. A quadraplegic, he considers himself no more than “an object that has to be taken care of the rest of my life.” In clear and rational mind, Harrison the sculptor wants to leave the hospital and die.

This forthrightly polemic film takes the despairing sculptor’s side of the argument. Richard Dreyfuss, as the broken Harrison, turns in another first-rate performance. He is pitted against John Cassevetes, who portrays a physician totally (and blindly) committed to his Hippocratic Oath.

Whose Life is a provocative film, rendering a disturbing statement with cogent logic and emotional intensity. Oddly, it is also an entertaining movie. Dreyfuss’s character is, as Cassevetes puts it, an “intelligent, articulate, wonderful person,” brimming with vitality and humor.

As an artist, the sculptor should know the value of the immaterial and nonutilitarian. Love cannot be molded with fingers like the sculptor’s clay, or hope caught in a museum’s glass box. These things of the heart and soul and beyond the five physical senses of crippled (or healthy) bodies. They are also useless. They exist for their own sake, outside any question of their utility. We grow to love the Dreyfuss character because he exemplifies many of these noble human traits. His courageous determination to die inspires a stubborn urge to live. Though Harrison’s body may indeed be useless, this indomitable man still has much to offer us.

So it is that this motion picture, in spite of itself, delivers a persuasive apologetic for life—even life under terrible and grievous circumstances.

A final note: although this film has no specific Christian message, it ably demonstrates how intangibles like ideas and convictions can be made compelling. One hopes Christian film makers will take it as an object lesson.

RODNEY CLAPP

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.