Mystery, Manners, and Church: Flannery O’Connor’s art

Mystery, Manners, and Church-Reform:  Flannery O’Connor competitive-art

We take “Jesus” for granted. Scholars think 2000 years ago an Aramaic-speaking Jewish family called their firstborn, Yeshua.[1] As a political philosopher, Yeshua invitingly asked, “What are you looking for?”[2] Happily to me, French-Catholic Cynthia[3] prays to the mysterious God-and-Jesus. Flannery O’Connor, who died in 1964, violently promoted the Catholic Eucharist.

O’Connor’s art thrives. For example, a biographical film, “Wildcat” was released in 2023. Selected letters, some to Catholic priests, are in the 2019 book, Good Things Out of Nazareth. In Mystery and Manners, 1957, O’Connor explains her art: faith in the Catholic Church.

Yeshua, reared in Nazareth during a difficult political time, promotes constraint to the bad in order to perfect the good. A minor Jewish faction hopes Yeshua will return to unite the 12 tribes. A larger society promotes Jesus and a faction hopes Christ redeemed elect souls. Yeshua influences successive generations to pursue civic integrity.4]

As a protestant father, I also worshipped with my French-Catholic family. Reading the catechism, I neither wanted nor took the Eucharist. Monsignor Stanley Ott held that priest and parishioner in liturgical prayer produce Christ’s-body-and-blood for personal-consumption. One family’s spiritual diversity did not compete with Church doctrine. I think transubstantiation detracts from Yeshua’s affirmation that humans are gods/judges facing death.[5]

Our teenaged children, at UBC[6] by my request, stopped taking Remembrance after I read Herschel Hobbs’ opinion[7]:  Only believers-who-chose-baptism-by-submersion are invited-to the Lord’s Supper.

O’Connor condemned[8] Unitarian Minister Ralph Waldo Emerson for urging Remembrance without bread and wine.[9]

O’Connor wrote, “The artist uses his-reason to discover an-answering-reason in everything he sees. [He would] intrude upon the timeless . . . by the violence of a single minded respect for the truth.” Bishop Baron recounts[10] O’Connor-violence to her-truth: “Well, if [the Eucharist] is a symbol, I say, to hell with it.” 

Whether spoken or quoted, verbal violence stuns me. Yet I appreciate O’Connor’s quest for ineluctability, which requires three-fold evidence: unavoidable, unchangeable, and irresistible.[11] Ineluctable truth yields to neither opinion nor to violence.

I think both Emerson and O’Connor pursue appreciation for Yeshua of Nazareth. So far, neither writer’s art unites the Church. I think UBC pursues happiness and joy so may and can lead church reform.

PRB, 6/15/2024

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[1] Online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeshua.

[2] John 1:38.

[3] My wife of 54 years and mother to our 3 children.

[4] “Civic” refers to reliable responsibility in human connections and transactions.

[5] John 10:34, which references Psalm 82:6-7.

[6] University Baptist Church, Baton Rouge Louisiana.

[7] Herschel Hobbs, What Baptists Believe, 1964.

[8] Mystery and Manners, page 161-2.

[9] Online at https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/lordsupper.html. Quoting, “[T]he Almighty God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke, and forms were shadows”, September 9, 1832. Emerson resigned as Unitarian minister, 2^nd Church of Boston, October, 1832.

[10] Online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgo0ONxWiWk

[11] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ineluctable

Copyright©2024 by Phillip R. Beaver. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the publication of all or portions of this paper as long as this complete copyright notice is included. Updated 6/15/2024