If It's a Symbol, To Hell With It!

This is an old post of mine from a few years ago, that I stumbled across today. It's from my era of 'post a quote, discuss the quote' blogging. It seems to bear some relevance to recent conversations about the Eucharist and Who May Receive It and How. Anyhow, I re-post it for your enjoyment (?):

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She just wrote that book, A Charmed Life). She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual.

We went at eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.

I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.

Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

Reflection – Another famous and beloved quote from Flannery O’Connor here – if it’s a symbol, to hell with it! The ‘story’ in question is the early gem “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” in which a little girl grapples with the question of purity of heart and sanctity, beginning with reckoning that she could probably make it as a martyr if they ‘killed her quick’, but coming to a deeper understanding of these matters through encounters with her two stupid Catholic schoolgirl cousins, a mischievous nun, and a hermaphrodite employed as a circus freak (it is an O’Connor short story, and it will get weird).

The climax of the story occurs at Benediction, as the girl’s fumbling, distracted and rather grumpy efforts to pray give way to the words spoken by the circus freak, “I am what He made me to be. I don’t question His ways. Praise Him.” Leaving the convent school, she is embraced by the nun who she had earlier fended off from hugging her, and the nun’s crucifix is mashed into her face, leaving a mark. On the drive home, the sun sets over the horizon, ‘blood red, like a Host.’

The story is immensely comic (unlike many of O’Connor’s stories, nobody dies a violent death!), but in it the very mystery of this gift of God is expressed in the deep symbolism of narrative fiction. The Eucharist, the very presence of God, the body and blood of Christ, is given to us: silly, grumpy, distracted, uncharitable, broken circus freaks. It is given to addicts and sexual deviants, misers and gossips, to the angry and the lazy and the gluttonous and the prideful. It’s even given to the few saints among us, who perhaps understand these things better than you and I.

All are made the temple of the Holy Ghost. All are called to be fit temples, suitable temples, which means the constant battle against sin in our lives. But the field of this battle lies deeply in the way of acceptance, of abandonment to divine providence, of realizing that it is into my face and your face, as they are, the real reality of what you and I really really are, that the Cross of Christ has been ‘mashed’. The mark of the Crucified One has been imprinted on your soul and on mine… not the way we would have it, but according to the precise configuration of your life and mine, the battle we have been given to fight, the burdens and wounds we have been given to carry.

If it’s just a symbol, to Hell with it, really. This is why the Eucharist must be the true body and true blood of Jesus. He has to really come to us, not in some vague notional way, but physically and utterly. Because the reality of our life is lived there: in our physical concrete circumstance. We don’t live our lives notionally, but in our bodies, in time and space and history. If Jesus does not come to us bodily, in time and space and history, He’s not very real, then, is He?

But He does. He is not a symbol. He is the Lord, and is given to us that we may praise Him and bear witness to His provident love. How crucial it is for us to believe this, live it, and find some way to proclaim it to all the freaks and failures, the sinners and stumblers, the addicts and deviants and all the poor struggling people, who are all of us, who are all of us.

It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and it is the hope of the world.

Upsetting the Balance of the Universe

Faith’s new way of seeing things is centered on Christ. Faith in Christ brings salvation because in him our lives become radically open to a love that precedes us, a love that transforms us from within, acting in us and through us. This is clearly seen in Saint Paul’s exegesis of a text from Deuteronomy, an exegesis consonant with the heart of the Old Testament message. Moses tells the people that God’s command is neither too high nor too far away. There is no need to say: "Who will go up for us to heaven and bring it to us?" or "Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us?" (Dt 30:11-14).

Paul interprets this nearness of God’s word in terms of Christ’s presence in the Christian. "Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down), or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead)" (Rom 10:6-7). Christ came down to earth and rose from the dead; by his incarnation and resurrection, the Son of God embraced the whole of human life and history, and now dwells in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Faith knows that God has drawn close to us, that Christ has been given to us as a great gift which inwardly transforms us, dwells within us and thus bestows on us the light that illumines the origin and the end of life.

Lumen Fidei 20

Reflection – One of my favorite new authors, Heather King, wrote that it is precisely this which drew her to Christianity after a long time journeying in the wilderness of alcoholism and despair. Namely, that the Christian God had drawn that close to humanity, had come down to us, had met us where we are. She writes in her memoir Redeemed that by the time she came to know her need for some kind of faith in her life, nothing less would have done for her. God had to know what it was like to be brought as low as she had been brought right then.

This is genuinely the unique quality of Christianity. God as understood in both Judaism and Islam is indeed a God of love and mercy, and I firmly believe we all worship the same God, but in their understanding He certainly did not come to share our human lot with all its genuine poverty, suffering, lowliness.

This is specifically Christian, this idea of the God become man for love of us, to raise us up to His divine state. If it is true, it changes everything, doesn’t it? That’s what the Pope means here by faith giving us an entirely new way of seeing things. God is just not ‘up there’ in some distant divine realm to which we must labor and struggle somehow. God is not even just pouring down graces upon us from that divine realm like some fairy godfather giving magic beans or cups or cloaks to his charges that will get them through our quest.

God came down—this is the central and fundamental proclamation of Christianity—and shouldered the burden of humanity upon his own divinity.

God sweated in the heat and shivered in the cold of the night. God wept, and laughed too. God bled, and when he stubbed his toe, it hurt. God was surprised (a most novel experience if you’re God, I guess!), and upset, and angry, and sad, and amused. Not one of these things is proper to the divine nature; all of this flows from humanity, from finitude, from the physical and temporal limitations and conditions of a spiritual being living a material life.

And of course, God died, and it was all for love of us, and God’s love for us is so strong that it proves itself to be stronger than death, so He rose from the dead, and because of that you and I and every other human being we can mention has a hope of defeating death and escaping the trap of futility and defeat.

We need to meditate long and hard on this essential Christian proclamation. It does factually change everything: our sense of who God is, what a human being is, what life is about, the whole calculus of risks and benefits, our whole sorting out of how we are to live and move in the world. As the Misfit, the depraved serial killer in Flannery O’Connor’s story A Good Man is Hard to Find, put it (I quote from memory, and thus badly), “He shouldn’t have done it. He upset the balance. If it’s true, there’s nothing to do but leave everything and follow Him. If it ain’t true, there’s nothing to do but get whatever fun you can killing people.”

Except for the killing people part, I wholly endorse that statement. And (ahem) I do believe it to be true, and God-help-me am trying each day to leave everything to follow Jesus. It’s such a wonderful religion! It’s such a wonderful life! Believing this does change everything. Faith is an extraordinary thing, like having the lights of the universe all turned on at once—a bit dazzling, but oh what a view!

Well, that’s quite enough for one day. I’m heading into Ottawa today for a book launch for I-Choice, so prayers are gratefully received for that (and attendance, if you’re in the Ottawa area). Blessings to you all, meantime.

The Laws of the Flesh

To see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has always been, even if today there seem to be more reasons to doubt. For you it may be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the laws of the flesh and the physical, but for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, I will know what God is.

We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws.

I am always astounded at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul that she says that will rise but the body, glorified. I have always thought that purity was the most mysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never have entered the human consciousness to conceive of purity if we were not to look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and spirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ. The resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature…

Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

Reflection – Again, much to ponder here. This will be my last day with Flannery O’Connor, in the interest of blog variety. As always when I am thoroughly enjoying an author, I want to just keep going with her, but too bad for me – gotta do something different, starting Tuesday (Monday is my day off, as you may have noticed).

Flannery is a deep woman, and she is going deep here. The idea that the true nature of the physical and the fleshly can only be understood in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ—events which we call ‘miraculous’ and in our modern scientific consciousness deem violations of nature and the physical—this idea has deep implications.

It means that it is the nature of the physical and of the flesh to be completed, fulfilled, by the reception of God, the receiving of the Spirit. Far from some weird and inherently violent imposition of the Divine upon our unwilling and resistant humanity, it is the very essence of our humanity in its physicality to be penetrated and permeated and utterly transformed by divinity.

I believe that. This means, then, that we cannot talk about who we are and what our nature is and what fulfills us and how we are to be happy and have love in our lives and all those good things that people (rightly) get very worked up about, and expect to get anywhere in our discussions unless we gain this transcendent and divine perspective.

We think we know what we need to be happy. We think we know what it means to be a complete human being with a complete human life. But our thoughts are so utterly mired in the level of ‘the laws of nature and the flesh’ as we understand them—and we don’t understand them, not really.

So we think… we have to have sex. Or we have to have an intimate sexual love relationship, to put it more positively, which may or may not include marriage as we currently understand it. Or we have to have maximum autonomy in our personal choices. Or we have to have access to whatever career we wish. Or we have to have a level of economic security or freedom. Or we have to have… well, sex! This one does seem to come up an awfully lot in our modern notions of the laws of the flesh and the physical and what they demand of us.

It seems to me that this is why the life of poverty, chastity, and obedience is so important in the world. Those of us called to this way of life are called to bear witness to all flesh that there is a whole dimension to human fulfillment, human freedom, human security, and human love that is utterly beyond our normal human understandings and what appear to be our normal human capacities. The joyful, faithful life of a poor, chaste, and obedient man or woman preaches the Gospel of Christ to an unbelieving world with a unique power and conviction.

But this Gospel of Christ is true for all men and women. We are called, all of us, to receive the life of God into our human flesh. The nuptial imagery that fills our scriptures and our spiritual tradition truly is the heart of the matter. We receive God, as Mary received Jesus into her womb, giving her own human flesh to the matter, but the deeper reality being the divine person in this flesh.

As we ponder questions of same-sex marriage and abortion and euthanasia (I know, a complete grab-bag of unrelated issues, but the news is full of them right now), we who are Christians need to at the very least go to this depth of understanding in our own personal being. How to communicate this to unbelievers or people in anguish or in anger is another story altogether, but we have to get there ourselves first, and I think we often don’t.

Happiness, love, fulfillment, freedom, the nature of humanity—all of it is only found in the communion of love of the Trinity which becomes our communion of love in the Church on earth (imperfectly), and in the kingdom of heaven (perfectly). And that’s all for now, folks.

If It's a Symbol, To Hell With It!

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She just wrote that book, A Charmed Life). She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual.

We went at eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. The people who took me were Robert Lowell and his now wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.

I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.

Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

Reflection – Another famous and beloved quote from Flannery O’Connor here – if it’s a symbol, to hell with it! The ‘story’ in question is the early gem “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” in which a little girl grapples with the question of purity of heart and sanctity, beginning with reckoning that she could probably make it as a martyr if they ‘killed her quick’, but coming to a deeper understanding of these matters through encounters with her two stupid Catholic schoolgirl cousins, a mischievous nun, and a hermaphrodite employed as a circus freak (it is an O’Connor short story, and it will get weird).

The climax of the story occurs at Benediction, as the girl’s fumbling, distracted and rather grumpy efforts to pray give way to the words spoken by the circus freak, “I am what He made me to be. I don’t question His ways. Praise Him.” Leaving the convent school, she is embraced by the nun who she had earlier fended off from hugging her, and the nun’s crucifix is mashed into her face, leaving a mark. On the drive home, the sun sets over the horizon, ‘blood red, like a Host.’

The story is immensely comic (unlike many of O’Connor’s stories, nobody dies a violent death!), but in it the very mystery of this gift of God is expressed in the deep symbolism of narrative fiction. The Eucharist, the very presence of God, the body and blood of Christ, is given to us: silly, grumpy, distracted, uncharitable, broken circus freaks. It is given to addicts and sexual deviants, misers and gossips, to the angry and the lazy and the gluttonous and the prideful. It’s even given to the few saints among us, who perhaps understand these things better than you and I.

All are made the temple of the Holy Ghost. All are called to be fit temples, suitable temples, which means the constant battle against sin in our lives. But the field of this battle lies deeply in the way of acceptance, of abandonment to divine providence, of realizing that it is into my face and your face, as they are, the real reality of what you and I really really are, that the Cross of Christ has been ‘mashed’. The mark of the Crucified One has been imprinted on your soul and on mine… not the way we would have it, but according to the precise configuration of your life and mine, the battle we have been given to fight, the burdens and wounds we have been given to carry.

If it’s just a symbol, to Hell with it, really. This is why the Eucharist must be the true body and true blood of Jesus. He has to really come to us, not in some vague notional way, but physically and utterly. Because the reality of our life is lived there: in our physical concrete circumstance. We don’t live our lives notionally, but in our bodies, in time and space and history. If Jesus does not come to us bodily, in time and space and history, He’s not very real, then, is He?

But He does. He is not a symbol. He is the Lord, and is given to us that we may praise Him and bear witness to His provident love. How crucial it is for us to believe this, live it, and find some way to proclaim it to all the freaks and failures, the sinners and stumblers, the addicts and deviants and all the poor struggling people, who are all of us, who are all of us.

It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and it is the hope of the world.

Faith Comes, Faith Goes

[This letter was written to her friend ‘A’, who was a convert, who had decided to leave the Church].

I don’t know anything that could grieve us here like this news. I know that what you do you do because you think it is right, and I don’t think any the less of you outside the Church than in it, but what is painful is the realization that this means a narrowing of life for you and a lessening of the desire for life.

Faith is a gift, but the will has a great deal to do with it. The loss of it is basically a failure of appetite, assisted by sterile intellect. Some people, when they lose their faith in Christ, substitute a swollen faith in themselves. I think you are too honest for that, that you never had much faith in yourself in the first place and that now that you don’t believe in Christ, you will believe even less in yourself; which in itself is regrettable.

But let me tell you this: faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will. Leaving the Church is not the solution, but since you think it is, all I can suggest to you, as your one-time sponsor, is that if you find in yourself the least return of a desire for faith, to go back to the Church with a light heart and without the conscience-raking to which you are probably subject. Subtlety is the curse of man. It is not found in the deity.

Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

Reflection – O’Connor’s compassion and concern for her friend is very touching in this letter, as it is touching in many of the letters in this collection. Her friend did indeed go on to have a most difficult life, which ended in suicide some years after Flannery’s death in 1964 from lupus.

‘A’, because of her keen intellect and deep spiritual hunger, brought out of Flannery some of her most profound reflections on faith and life. ‘Faith comes and goes’ – this alone is something to ponder quite deeply. Our interior experience of faith, of course, is what is meant here. The theological virtue of faith infused in us in baptism is a bit more durable since it is God’s and not ours primarily.

But our inner experience of certainty, of the reality of God, of the truth of what we say we believe and do really believe, in spite of all our struggles and sins—this comes and goes, rises and falls. And this is why our decisions about religion and its practice, the Church and our fidelity to it, simply cannot rest primarily or solely on our current emotional and psychological experience.

Yesterday I wrote about the wingless chickens and our experience of what I guess is a calamitous loss of faith and turning away from God and the Gospel in our world today. Today, then, I want to highlight this whole business of returning to God and to the Church with a light heart. This is really important, you know. We can contort and twist ourselves into a terrible mess of complications and difficulties. Some of them are real; many of them exist only in our own minds.

But God doesn’t need us to have everything figured out before we can return to Him. He doesn’t need us to be perfect—He needs us to make an act of will towards Him, that’s all. His grace rushes up to meet us, like the Prodigal Father to the Prodigal Son. Mercy—that’s the key to enduring this world of ours and our own complicity in it, our own failures to believe and love in it.

In this midst of all our complex times and their complex questions and the complex emotions and the whole general tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive ourselves about God and the moral law, we need to remember that God Himself is supremely, sublimely simple. He loves us; He wants us to receive His love; His grace will help us to repent what needs repenting, change what needs changing, and do what needs doing, with great tenderness and compassion.

The way back is there for all of us. The Prodigal Son didn’t agonize about where to find a dry cleaner to get the pig muck off his clothes or try to sort out exactly why and how he did what he did. He was hungry, so he went home. We too can go home when and as we please, and this Simple God will welcome us. And that is part of the message of love and hope we need to carry to the world in our time.