Where Has the Blood Touched You?
Notes from a Summer of Flannery O'Connor
“When I read Flannery,” wrote Thomas Merton in his elegy for Flannery O’Connor after her death, “I don’t think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can be said of a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.”
And yet, more than just knowing our fall and our dishonor, she knew, with the deepest intimacy, that most awful of events, our redemption. Sophocles, for his part, certainly knew man’s fall and his dishonor, and the divine wisdom that comes through suffering, but he did not know our ultimate redemption. Aged Oedipus knew the power of blood, but not yet of the power of blood to fully deify us:
Dearest son of Aegeus, to the gods alone old age and death never come, but everything else sinks into chaos from time which overpowers all. Earth's strength decays, and so too the strength of the body; trust dies; distrust is born; and the same spirit is never steadfast among friends, or between city and city. For some now, for others tomorrow, sweet feelings turn to bitter, and then once more to being dear. And if now the sun shines brightly between Thebes and you, yet time in his course gives birth to days and nights untold, in which from a small cause they will scatter with the spear today's pledges of concord. Then one day my slumbering and buried corpse, cold in death, will drink their warm blood, if Zeus is still Zeus, and Phoebus, the son of Zeus, speaks clear. (Oedipus at Colonus, lines 607-625)
But what Flannery, more than Sophocles, sees, with clear and unflinching vision, is the strange and terrible power of the blood of Christ.
My wife and I started the summer by watching the new film about the life of Flannery O’Connor, Wildcat. O’Connor’s stories have long been favorites of mine, ever since I read “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” in a high school American Literature class. On the whole, Wildcat was a fairly good film about O’Connor’s life, interwoven with dramatizations of her stories. Maya Hawke’s performance as O’Connor (and as the main female characters in the depicted stories) is particularly excellent. In its form, the film could have used more work; it’s unevenly edited, and the ending feels abrupt. And I could quibble with the ways some of the stories were interpreted, especially the depiction of the tattoo of the icon of Christ in “Parker’s Back.” But on the whole, it was a fine film—especially in that it took seriously O’Connor’s Catholicism, and her embrace of suffering for holiness.
That is what distinguishes O’Connor’s fiction, and, I suppose, her life: her awareness of faith, of the life of holiness, as something visceral, as a passion, as something suffered, bloody. My wife and I followed up watching Wildcat by reading her novel, Wise Blood. We had both, over the years, read The Violent Bear It Away and most of her short stories, but neither of us had read her first novel. (We recently purchased the fragments of her unfinished novel Why Do the Heathen Rage? just published by Jessica Hooten Wilson, but we haven’t read that yet.) Wise Blood tells the story of a young man, Hazel Motes. Raised in part by a preacher, Hazel has now (according to himself) lost his faith and has set out to “preach the Church without Christ […] where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way […] it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption” (54).
O’Connor knows that the life of faith and holiness is no mere adherence to a set of beliefs or an attempt to adhere to a bunch of morals; it is the agony of deification, the life of dying with Christ and rising with Christ every hour. The longing for God, for more than this life, gets into your blood whether you like it or not. The historical fact of the redemption, however much one rages against it or seeks to bury the memory of it, pursues you like a murderer intent on hunting you down (as in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”) or like an ornery, lawless, destructive policeman (in this novel). As Hazel Motes’ grandfather, the preacher, says of him: “That boy had been redeemed and Jesus wasn’t going to leave him ever. Jesus would never let him forget he had been redeemed” (10).
Most of O’Connor’s “heroes” are like this. The Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Mr. Shiflet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (to mention two stories I read to my kids on a road trip this summer), Parker in “Parker’s Back”—they are haunted by Christ. They flee from Him, they resort to the wildest violence and theft—but they cannot escape the face of Christ.
One of the most famous stories about O’Connor (which she told about herself), and one that is depicted quite well in Wildcat, took place at a dinner party. The conversation turned to the Eucharist, and someone at the party expressed the view that the Eucharist is a nice symbol. O’Connor’s response was “if it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.”
Wise Blood is, in many ways, a dramatization of that response, of her conviction that the Eucharist—the very presence of Christ’s sacrificed body and blood given to us to eat and drink—is no symbol. The Eucharist as such is never mentioned in Wise Blood. (The only time anything Catholic is mentioned is when “a Lapsed Catholic” goes with Hazel Motes to a brothel, explains afterwards that what they just did was a mortal sin, and (of course) enjoyed himself far more than Hazel did, inviting Hazel to go again the next night—a depiction that gets everything about that sort of situation exactly right, as anyone who knows Catholics, lapsed or otherwise, will immediately recognize.) But though it never directly mentions the Eucharist, the whole novel is an account of how religion is worthless without a physical encounter with God. “Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God,” says Job (19:26).
Hazel is desperately trying to escape from Christ, but he is also desperately trying to get others to realize, in their flesh, what it is they are saying when they glibly and meaninglessly profess Christianity. He cries out to the people to whom he is preaching: “Where has the blood you think you be redeemed by touched you?” (53)
Where in your time and your body has Jesus redeemed you? Show me the place because I don’t see the place. If there was a place where Jesus had redeemed you, that would be the place to be, but which of you can find it? (84)
If you had been redeemed […] you would care about redemption, but you don’t. […] There’s no peace for the redeemed […] and I preach peace, I preach the Church without Christ, the church peaceful and satisfied. […] The Church without Christ don’t have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that’s all man, without blood to waste […] (84)
To be redeemed is to be restless, unsatisfied with anything here and now. To be redeemed is to have encountered Christ’s blood, the blood that He was willing to “waste,” to pour out with wild prodigality. Christianity is a sacrificial faith: I am constantly haunted by the passage “almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission [of sin]” (Hebrews 9:22). To be redeemed is to be deified; to be deified is to be taken up, soul and body, into divinity. This is no bloodless intellectual or moral or spiritualized union; if I am to be redeemed from my fallenness and my dishonor, the very blood of God must flow in my veins. I must receive God not just in thought or imagination or desire, but in very fact. God’s life, the life that is blood, must become my life; the glory of self-sacrificial love, directly manifested in the blood of the Cross, must be my glory, the self-sacrifice of my blood. I must drink the life that contains all things, all of God and all of creation; that life must become my life. Christ’s blood must touch me, here, now, in a definite place. But to be touched by sacrificial blood is to be continually troubled, to long for peace but not have it.
Strangely, even as a child, Hazel Motes knew, in his flesh if not in his mind, that it is more worthwhile to suffer with Christ, to join our blood with His, than to feel satisfied and happy and peaceful. After a secret sin, Hazel is moved to corporeal penance:
The next day he took his shoes in secret out into the woods […] He took them out of the box and filled the bottoms of them with stones and small rocks and then he put them on. He laced them up tight and walked in them through the woods for what he knew to be a mile […] He thought, that ought to satisfy Him. Nothing happened. If a stone had happened, he would have taken it as a sign. After a while […] he put the shoes on again with the rocks still in them and he walked a half-mile back before he took them off. (10)
This bloody union with Christ, despite his best conscious efforts to avoid it, continues to the end of his life. He is driven by a Eucharistic instinct more powerful than the strongest skeptical arguments. Self-satisfied approaches to reality based on mere reason—like symbolic approaches to the Eucharist—are, in the end, hell. Union with God in bloody, bodily passion is the only Way.
Among the best of the visceral expressions of religious longing is the pilgrimage. Blinded Oedipus is driven out of Thebes to wander, but his wandering becomes a pilgrimage to Colonus. Hazel Motes is driven on a pilgrimage he knows not whither. From time to time, my family and I set out on pilgrimages as well.
This summer, it was a literary, as well as a spiritual, pilgrimage. Among other places, we visited Flannery O’Connor’s house in Milledgeville, Georgia. (We also went to the grave of Walker Percy in Covington, Louisiana, and to the Winding Stair Mountains in Oklahoma and Ft. Smith, Arkansas, where True Grit, a favorite novel of ours, takes place.) We had to touch with our own hands and see with our own eyes the things and places so dear to one who knew so well the value of things and places and bodies and blood.
At the end of Wildcat, in agony from the pain of her lupus, Flannery O’Connor is shown pushing her writing desk so that it faces away from the window. The suggestion is that she is doing this to sacrifice having a nice view out the window while she works. In all of her senses, in all of her flesh, she embraced the self-emptying blood of God. At the house where she lived with her mother, we saw her desk still in that position, shoved up against the back of her wardrobe. We saw the lovely view across the yard that she would have seen. But the most key thing in a pilgrimage is not the sights or experiences or memories. It is to be present in the place where the holy one (or, in this case, the writer) was present. To go on pilgrimage is to seek to have one’s blood flow in the same place where holy blood has flowed, to join the stream of one’s life to the stream of life that is the very presence of divinity.
Where has the blood that I think I have been redeemed by touched me? It has touched me here, in this body, on these lips, in these veins. I have received it not in the abstract realms of the spirit, but, for the first time, at the church of St. Francis of Assisi in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and after that in other, definite places. On our pilgrimage, I received that blood in a small church in Clarkesville, Georgia, and in the modern cathedral in Pensacola, Florida, in a tiny chapel outside Tyler, Texas, and in two Gothic churches in St. Louis, Missouri. I can show you the places where this blood has touched me, and you can make pilgrimage to the same places. Together, we can know in our flesh the unsettled agony of redemption.