For Flannery O’Connor, grace at times comes as a pounding force–if the recipient of grace is able to see it.
The Pounding Force of Grace
Flannery O’Connor loved to write about grace.
Now when we think about grace, we think about it in very pietistic ways. We sit before our meal and say grace as another way of saying that we are offering our food to God for His blessing. We are returning the food to its Maker, and asking Him for favour, for His love, and that the food may grant us strength.
Another form of grace is when we have strength or force to rectify a situation, but don’t necessarily show it. We have every right to harshly reprimand someone with a kind of force, but we choose instead to give a soft word, or even ignore it altogether to extend grace to the person.
But sometimes grace comes in ways that blow our understanding of it out of the water. Sometimes grace can come harshly; ways that wake us up; ways that shake us from our moorings; ways that shatter our illusions. Like Jonah thrown into the sea; like King Nebuchadnezzar who went mad in the wilderness only to return to his senses. Like Elijah who slayed the prophets of Baal. Like St Peter who realized he had denied Christ three times as the cock crowed. Grace can come in many ways.
Flannery O’Connor wrote stories about people finding grace by literal force.
Flannery’s Short Stories About Grace
One story, titled Revelation, is about a woman in a doctor’s waiting room who is so full of herself and her own self-righteousness. She addresses the others in the office with great condescension. A young student is sitting waiting to see the doctor. She’s reading a book entitled Human Development. After a long while of nonsense on the part of the stuck-up woman, the young student is so appalled and so enraged by the condescending woman that she hurls the book at her smacking her clear in the head, and then leaps on her clasping at her throat. The attack caused her to reflect, gravely reflect, over the following days. One evening, she receives a heavenly vision of herself and all the riff-raff …
Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. 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.
Their virtues were being burned away … What a beautiful vision of grace.
Another, called Good Country People, is about a girl with a prosthetic leg who leads on a young Bible salesman. She takes him up to the loft of the barn, and proceeds to lead him on. The young man gets frustrated, and tells her that he actually doesn’t believe in the Bible, but just sells them for money. They start to get intimate and he removes her leg. But after a while, when he can tell she is condescending towards him–and she is–he takes her leg and throws it down the ladder, then leaves her, alone, in the loft as he wanders away chuckling to himself.
This is for Flannery a kind of grace. A grace that knocks you in the head or steals something you’ve been holding on to. But you have to be ready for it. You have to be able to rub the wound, the pounding lump on your head. You have to be willing to get yourself together, call for help, and be carried down the ladder–or throw yourself from it–and take the medicine you’ve been given. And that’s just the point: it’s not good to look a gift horse in the mouth …
A Band of Monks Meets A Blaspheming Company of Drunken Hooligans
There is a similar story about the pounding force of grace in the book Everyday Saints and Other Stories (link). I referred to this book in an earlier post (link), but this is one of my favourite stories. The story is called On Humility, tells of a Father Raphael who was a man of great humility–but “could not abide any insults against the Lord God and His Church.”
Once Father Raphael, and a band of monks–each of great size and strength–were walking late at night through Pskov. Their monastic attire drew the attention of a drunken company of hooligans. The hooligans hurled insults and mud and sticks at the monks. At first the hooligans mocked them, but then the mockery turned to threats. Father Raphael was large, and described as “a clumsy bear,” Father Viktor was also of great strength whose time in jail had taught him how to handle physical threats and conflict, Father Seraphim “was simply a giant,” and finally there was the monk Alexander “who was the most outstanding fighter among [the] group, as he had several black belts in Karate.”
The monks continued on their way bearing the insults, mud cakes, and hurled sticks of the hooligans. Father Alexander–the martial artist–burned with indignation, and asked Father Raphael if he could hang back and have a conversation with the hooligans. But Father Raphael continued walking saying nothing.
Finally the hooligans became emboldened, seeing that their insults and mud cakes and sticks provoked no response from the monks. “At this point they began to blaspheme against God and the Virgin Mary. Father Raphael stopped.”
You can only imagine what comes next …
I’ll continue the story thus …
“I may not answer,” sighed [Fr Raphael], “because I am a priest. Father Viktor is a deacon, and is also forbidden to answer. Father Seraphim and Georgiy Alexandrovich will stay in reserve. Ah well, what can we do if you’re the only one left, Father Alexander?”
There was no need to prompt the monk Alexander twice. He ripped off his monastic belt, tore off his robes, and in his long baggy pants, loose long shirt, and boots, he turned on the hooligans with fury. There were several of them and they stopped with surprise. In the next moment the monk Alexander uttered a savage, barbarian war cry and whipped through the air in a whirlwind of kicks. That drunken company received a savage beating. The luckless hooligans scattered every which way, wiping the blood from their noses and holding onto their teeth that had been kicked out of their mouths. … Finally we calmed down our hero with difficulty, though it was like trying to get a bull terrier to release his grip. Once we were certain that it would not be necessary to call an ambulance for the wounded hoodlums, we dressed up the monk Alexander in his robes again and proceeded on our way.
O’ the pounding force of Grace!
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If you’re interested in the intersection of creativity and spiritual practice, check out Creativity and Becoming: On Art, Writing, and Orthodox Spiritual Life (link).
