Grace and Sin in Flannery O'Connor
Virtually all of Flannery O'Connor's short stories contain the receiving of grace by an unworthy protagonist at the tale's climatic moment. The hero of "Parker's Back" gets a Catholic, Byzantine tattoo of Christ on his back to please (unsuccessfully) his fundamentalist Protestant wife. The grandmother of "A Good Man is Hard to find" sees the face of the divine in the escaped convict known only as the 'misfit.' Even in the hearts of the most sinful of O'Connor's characters, it is possible for human beings, the author suggests, to receive grace. Grace comes unexpectedly to these characters, as it does to all human beings in O'Connor's theological understanding of the world, but it does come, blessedly and however briefly, and the human heart is changed for the better as a result.
According to the Flannery O'Connor scholar Karen Bernardo, "all of O'Connor's stories deal with the workings of grace in the everyday world. O'Connor saw grace all around her, but no radiant angels 'sent by God' appear in her fiction," instead these angels tend to be ugly and unlikely, like the homely epileptic and hostile child Mary Grace of O'Connor's short story "Revelation." (Bernardo, "Flannery O'Connor," 2003) Rather, O'Connor believed that grace more often than not came as a rude shock, like the revelation of the title, "if not an outright trauma." (Bernardo, "Flannery O'Connor," 2003) This was necessary because people had to be jolted out of "complacency and into an awareness of their need for salvation. In both 'Revelation' and 'Greenleaf,' this comes through the encounter of smug, self-righteous female protagonists with secondary characters they consider to be inferior," and in some stories like "Everything rises must converge," the encounter of a smug and self righteous male protagonist who thought himself educated with the workings of reality in a false sense of intellectual superiority. (Bernardo, "Flannery O'Connor," 2003)
It is particularly interesting to read O'Connor with her religion in mind, given that modern critics "tend to read literature [only] from a secular viewpoint," and want the central question in the story to be whether bourgeois propriety gives one the right to demean others," as in "Revelation," rather than how grace works in the world (Bernardo, "Flannery O'Connor," 2003) But grace comes to rich and poor, ignorant and educated in the whole of the O'Connor cannon, so to presume an economic or caste reading of "Revelation" is fundamentally misguided.
Grace is sudden, democratic and traumatic, in O'Connor's terms. Even the epileptic girl who attacks Mrs. Turpin in "Revelation," is a catalyst "in the process of spiritual redemption." (Bernardo, "Flannery O'Connor," 2003) Like her counterparts in other O'Connor stories, she jars Mrs. Turpin out of her easy assumptions about life, and catapults Mrs. Turpin into a newer and more profound relationship with the Divine power of God to work miracles in the world, that the woman previously and smugly assumed as a given, something she already knew and was well versed in because of her superior lifestyle and economic gifts. (Bernardo, "Flannery O'Connor," 2003)
But what is grace in theological terms? The dictionary definition of the theological understanding of grace is "the state of grace is a state of sanctification by God; the state of one who under such divine influence;" as, in O'Connor's stories, however momentarily, the most sinful protagonists can labor under -- the divine influence through physical interventions in the world, such as Mary Grace's attack and calling Mrs. Turpin a "hog." In Christianity, "the conception of grace developed alongside the conception of sin" and in Catholicism "it was debated whether saving grace could be obtained outside the membership of the church" In Catholicism as well, although Christ, the saints and "the Virgin lived in a state of grace" in perpetuity, most of humanity will sin, fall from grace, and return to a state of grace through the sacraments...
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