By Daniel B. Gallagher
When I started devouring Catholic fiction in college, I couldn’t understand why J. F. Powers connected with me immediately and Flannery O’Connor (this year marks the centenary of her birth) did not. It wasn’t that one was better than the other. Judging by their prose, both are extraordinary stylists.
What I couldn’t recognize back then is evident to me today. I was born in Pittsburgh, grew up in Chicago, and was educated at the University of Michigan. When I first read O’Connor, I knew much more about trains, factories, and blizzards than about heat waves, fried shrimp, and peacocks. Everything I knew about racial segregation I had read in books, including O’Connor’s.
The Midwest is far from being an egalitarian utopia, but it certainly lacks the Southern class structure around which so many of O’Connor’s arguments revolve. If I had been a more imaginative reader, stories like Everything That Rises Must Converge would have taught me something about a culture and a place of which I had absolutely no experience.
However, I did know something about alcoholic priests and the affected robustness of many Midwestern Catholic institutions, from Notre Dame to the Knights of Columbus. Powers’s stories made me laugh and showed me the narrative possibilities of an author capable of describing Midwestern Catholic and clerical culture with wit through the eyes of the rectory cat.
Since moving to Savannah a couple of years ago and working a few blocks from the house where O’Connor spent her childhood, all that has started to change for me. It didn’t take long to meet people like Manley, the sly Bible salesman from Good Country People, and the self-satisfied grandmother from A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
I’ve seen peacocks spread their plumage on O’Connor’s Andalusia farm in Milledgeville and knelt in the same pew where O’Connor prayed as a child, living a stone’s throw from St. John the Baptist Cathedral. Though I’ll always be a Midwestern man, I’m beginning to understand what it meant for O’Connor to be Southern.
But I don’t think I’ll get very far, and that’s okay. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from rereading O’Connor on this centenary of her birth, it’s that I’ll never have to fully understand her Southern condition to understand her, at least not in the way a Southerner understands her.
Wherever I go, I can’t help being from the Midwest, just as O’Connor couldn’t help being anything other than Southern, whether in Iowa, New York, or Connecticut. Her only trip to Europe only reinforced her desire to stay in the South.
While gathering strength in Rome, she joked that she and her mother Regina—her only travel companion—“would probably end up behind the Iron Curtain asking the way to Lourdes by gestures,” and added that “my will seems made of a feather duster.” Her fourteen years of struggle with lupus would make us think otherwise, but if she simply meant that she lacked the strength not only to endure the discomforts of travel but to adapt to the cultures it took her to, it’s a very apt observation.
In O’Connor’s mind, my childhood home, Chicago—where Powers sets the first part of his great novel Morte d’Urban—is as far from Milledgeville as Rome. Every detail of her five-day stay at the University of Chicago in 1959, “helping” young writers, was unbearable to her. Living in the university residence, O’Connor was forced to give a public lecture that no one attended and then to sit with the girls “having tea every afternoon while they tried to think of something to ask me. The low point was reached when—after a good ten minutes of silence—one girl said: ‘Miss O’Connor, what are the Christmas customs in Georgia?’”
O’Connor found a way to apply this fierce loyalty to home to her soul as well. She did not tolerate a lack of integrity when it came to prayer, whether her own or others’. In a letter to her good friend Janet McKane, she describes her attempt to make her way through Karl Rahner’s On the Theology of Death, finding each sentence an immense struggle, but persevering nonetheless so that “every now and then” the “impact” would “reach” her.
She then confesses a truth that most of us must recognize at some point on our spiritual journey: “I’m not good at meditating. This doesn’t mean I go straight to contemplation. I do neither. If I try to keep my mind on the mysteries of the rosary, I’m soon thinking about something else, completely unrelated to religion. So I say my prayers by reading the book, prime in the morning and compline at night. I like Teilhard’s idea of the Mass upon the World.”
“Mass on the World” is an awe-inspiring prayer composed by Teilhard de Chardin, in which he imagines the consecration of the entire cosmos—with all its particles, its energy, its conflict, and its suffering—upon the altar in the Mass. Teilhard’s avant-garde theology may have earned him a warning from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1962, but that didn’t stop Pope Benedict XVI from praising his “great vision” of a “true cosmic liturgy in which the cosmos becomes a living host.”
Wherever you come from, that’s the only thing you need to understand if you want to understand Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. In fact, it’s the only thing you need to understand if you want to understand Benedict XVI’s theology.
If the entire cosmos is placed upon the altar, it doesn’t matter if you’re from Chicago or Milledgeville. It doesn’t matter if you prefer O’Connor or Powers. All that matters is that—whether in your social disposition or in your prayer—you are “at home” and place yourself upon that altar as well.
About the author
Daniel B. Gallagher teaches philosophy and literature at Ralston College. Previously, he was the Latin secretary to Popes Benedict XVI and Francis.