In the spring of 2008 I was a senior in college sitting in the backyard of a little white rental house near campus and I was weeping because an old man in a book had made the sign of the cross.
I was reading “Brideshead Revisited” for my 20th-century novel class. I had been delighted by its colorful characters and the author Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant humor, but slightly confused about where the story was going or why the book was hailed as a Catholic masterpiece.
The Catholic characters all seemed to be a mess, with failed marriages and scandalous decisions and addictions they knew were wrong. They were bad Catholics, people who could barely hold on to the cultural trappings of their faith. They were haunted by their sins, but they didn’t even attempt to hide them under a veneer of respectability. As a lifelong Protestant, I wondered: If Catholicism is true, wouldn’t Catholics behave better? What I wasn’t prepared for was the flood of grace waiting to overwhelm my heart in the final pages.
“Brideshead Revisited” is about the lost sheep of the historically Catholic and wealthy Flyte family and is narrated by their friend, agnostic Charles Ryder (fiance to the Flyte’s oldest daughter, Julia). When the family congregates because of the final illness of their patriarch, Lord Marchmain, the specter of death becomes a catalyst of grace.
Following years of self-imposed exile after abandoning his devout Catholic wife, now deceased, for a life of “freedom” with an Italian mistress, Lord Marchmain returns to the family estate in England to die. After firmly refusing the sacraments from the local parish priest and claiming that he has “not been a practicing member of your Church for twenty-five years,” the old man’s health further declines. The two Flyte children still practicing, Cordelia and Bridey, desperately desire him to die in a state of grace, hoping he will not refuse last rites before he expires. But to Charles’ great surprise, Julia Flyte, who left the Church years ago, is also determined that her father should not die estranged from God.
Can’t the old man who has scoffed at the faith be left to die in peace? Charles wonders. Why would Julia, whose life seems to deny every doctrine of the Church she has abandoned, become anxious for the soul of her dying father? Surely she doesn’t think it’s all true? If Lord Marchmain is losing consciousness, what’s the point of performing the sacrament at all? And if the crux of the matter is a soul’s contrition, why is it so important that a priest shows up? It all baffles Charles, and he interrogates the family regarding this sudden obsession with the sacraments and Lord Marchmain’s soul.
Charles is shocked to discover that the family members and Cara, Lord Marchmain’s mistress, have varying levels of devotion and understanding of Church teaching, yet all seem to agree that the sacraments matter. Cara, who has lived in sin for decades with Lord Marchmain and cannot be criticized for scrupulosity, closes the question by saying simply that when her death comes, “All I know is that I shall take very good care to have a priest.”
How is it possible that these bad Catholics would still, despite their wandering, be compelled to believe? Could the mark of baptism and the pull of sacramentals still draw them with the powerful residual effects of grace? With Cordelia and Bridey both absent, Julia makes the decision to call for the priest when it’s clear that Lord Marchmain is in his final hours. Charles watches the priest begins asking Lord Marchmain, who is too ill to speak, to give a sign that he is sorry for his sins and to receive God’s grace in the sacrament of the anointing of the sick.
Charles, despite his lack of faith, finds himself praying with Julia and Cara kneeling by the deathbed, “Oh God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.” His hostility to the faith is no match for the grace being poured out through a very ordinary priest in Lord Marchmain’s last rites. Once he is anointed Charles sees the old man bring a trembling hand to his forehead, and Charles worries that Lord Marchmain is about to obstinately wipe away the chrism oil in a final rejection of the Church. Instead, with his last ounce of strength, Lord Marchmain makes the sign of the cross.
This moment of grace will bring Julia back to her faith and bring Charles to it for the first time as he embraces prayers “ancient” and “newly learned.” But that powerful exhibition of grace didn’t just set their conversions in motion – it set mine in motion, too.
As I sat in my backyard weeping over a fictional character’s receptivity to God’s mercy, something clicked. Grace, sin, the sacraments, human failure and redemption – an indescribable awakening in my heart. I wanted that kind of powerful grace. I understood that the scandalous wandering of the Flytes was also my own wandering. Maybe my faults weren’t the cause of public scandal, but like the Flytes, I had chosen my sins over God, and like Charles, I was an outside observer being drawn against my will to the grace being offered me.
If the sacraments were real and powerful enough to change lives and restore lost souls, then the grace of God was waiting for me too. And I didn’t want to wait until my deathbed to receive it. Cordelia, the youngest Flyte daughter with the most charity and therefore the most clarity of vision, always has hope for her wandering siblings, knowing that “God won’t let them go for long, you know.” She compares the grace that will draw them home to an image from one of Chesterton’s Father
Brown stories about a thief who has been caught by “an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”
I didn’t finish “Brideshead Revisited” and immediately sign up for RCIA. It wasn’t until a year later, when my son was born, that my husband and I were pushed across the Tiber by the desire for our firstborn to receive the sacrament of baptism. But Lord Marchmain’s holy death was a twitch upon the thread drawing my wandering heart, by God’s grace, closer to His mercy.
Haley Stewart is the managing editor of Word on Fire Spark and the author of “The Grace of Enough, Jane Austen’s Genius Guide to Life,” and “The Sister Seraphina Mysteries.” She lives in Florida with her husband and four children. This article originally appeared on www.wordonfire.org.
March 25 marks the 98th birthday of the late Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor is seen in this undated photo. (CNS | courtesy 11th Street Lot)Reading Flannery O’Connor requires a stout heart and a strong stomach.
In her short life before she died of lupus, she wrote two novels and roughly two dozen short stories that continue to shock and unsettle us. With a wicked pen, she gleefully maims and kills off her characters in a million disturbing ways: They get drowned, hanged, run over by cars (twice in a row), wrapped in barbed wire and beaten to death. Her characters are prostitutes, pedophiles, arsonists, murderers, nihilists, and (worst of all for O’Connor), salesmen. But if you read her biography, she’s practically the patron saint of Catholic fiction: a devout, daily Mass Catholic who read St. Thomas Aquinas in her spare time and made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes.
As readers, we wonder, “Is there something I’m missing?” How should we read O’Connor’s writing, and where is her faith in the pages of such brutal fiction?
Readers of O’Connor will notice that most of her stories follow one basic biblical narrative: St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Again and again, she depicts an event of searing violence in which divine grace shocks a hard-hearted, wicked or selfish person into a moment of recognition. In this terrible moment O’Connor offers her characters a choice, a flash of self-knowledge and an encounter with God that utterly burns away their illusions.
O’Connor does this best in one of my favorite tales, “Good Country People,” where she tells the story of Hulga, a nihilist with a Ph.D. in philosophy and a wooden leg. Convinced of the meaninglessness of life and that morality means nothing, the atheist Hulga lives consumed by pride and anger until she meets a traveling
Bible salesman who seduces her and steals her wooden leg, leaving her stranded and legless in the loft of a barn.
On his way down the ladder, the salesman sneers, “You ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” Horrified to find a man who actually lives out the philosophy she claims to believe, Hulga now faces a pivotal choice as the story ends. And indeed the choice is ours as well: Do we accept this painful revelation of the truth, or do we return to a life of emptiness and sin? O’Connor’s tales do not always reveal what her characters decide: sometimes she leaves it to us to choose.
What O’Connor does in “Good Country People” is to reveal to Hulga (and to us) the true face of evil. O’Connor knew as she wrote her fiction that in an age of relativism we have lost a proper sense of right and wrong. Dulled by our own sins and by the de-Christianization of Western culture, we have lost the will and the ability to distinguish between good and evil. As she once wrote in an essay:
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
In a Western culture that accepts sin as personal preference and dismisses moral truth-claims as ideology or bigotry, modern man needs an arresting, visceral depiction of evil that can shock everyone into agreeing, “This is wrong.” For O’Connor, the logical extreme of godlessness is a pervert with a fetish for artificial body parts. As the Misfit, a serial killer in her story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” says: “It’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness….”
But we can see a deeper truth behind O’Connor’s terrific fictional violence: she wants to show us the way that Divine Providence can bring good even out of terrible evil. To many of us, the problem of evil remains perhaps the most compelling argument against the existence of a loving and all-powerful God. O’Connor answers this by showing how God incorporates the violent sins of men into His plan. In O’Connor’s novel “Wise Blood,” Hazel Motes, an atheist preacher of the “Church without Christ” runs over a rival prophet named Solace Layfield with his car. Although Layfield was only pretending to be a prophet to make money on street corners, he is forced to confront the ultimate things when he gets murdered by Motes. In his last moments, he confesses his sins and calls out the name of Jesus. Just minutes after working as a false prophet for three dollars a night, Layfield receives one of O’Connor’s famous wake-up calls and finally responds to grace. Little wonder, then, that she named him “Solace.”
In O’Connor’s fiction, God allows acts of violence to bring about spiritual healing in wounded and sinful characters because she believes that violent encounters strip away the nonessential and make us confront the Truth of things. “It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially,” O’Connor told an audience once. “The man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable to his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him; and since the characters in this story are all on the verge of eternity, it is appropriate to think of what they take with them.”
There’s nothing like being about to die to help you reassess your priorities.
Finally, the events in O’Connor’s fiction should remind us that God brought about the redemption of all human beings precisely through permitting an act of unspeakable violence: the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. If God can bring cosmic victory out of the apparently senseless, spiteful torture and execution of His innocent Son, then He can, as St. Paul says in Romans 8:28, make “all things work together unto good.”
The truth is that the strange art of Flannery O’Connor will continue to puzzle and provoke us. As she once wrote, “We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn’t have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery.” In her brief but fierce career as an American Catholic writer, O’Connor left us a vivid, challenging collection of works, her stark characters and plots standing out in sharp relief from the pages of her books. It’s a body of work not easy to encounter, but it’s one that is impossible to forget. So buckle up: If you read O’Connor’s stories of grace, the life you save may be your own.
Dr. Kelly Scott Franklin is a writer and associate professor of English at Hillsdale College. This article first appeared in Catholic World Report.