Flannery O'Connor and the Splendor of Forgiveness

In honor of Flannery O'Connor’s 100th birthday, here is a piece I wrote a little bit ago, on how one of her famous short stories strikingly shows the importance of forgiveness in the Christian life.

“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

That violent declaration, written by Flannery O’Connor in her most famous short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” has a depth to it hidden beneath the Southern dialect of the Misfit.

This tale, along with the rest of O’Connor’s short stories and novels, is striking in both image and depth.

O’Connor, a young Irish Catholic, found herself living in the Protestant South, having to return home because of her Lupus, which would eventually take her life. She wrote these stories, she said, because she considered America asleep to the moral tales that surrounded her every day. Americans, then and now, seemed more concerned with business, with making a buck or seeking out pleasure at the expense of others, than with the state of their soul.

Like her predecessor, Pascal, she considered a life disinterested in its soul not worth living. Which is why she wrote such Southern Gothic tales. “For the hard of hearing you shout,” she wrote, “and for the nearly blind you draw in large, striking images.”

And so she did.

In her most famous story, whose ending line I quoted above, she told the story of an older grandmother whose job in retirement seems to have been a busybody who judges everyone’s actions but her own. She is the judgmental woman, the woman who sees flaws in every person, hidden, dark motives underneath every action. She gossips and judges underneath the veneer of Christian concern. She is the person Paul warned Timothy about in his first letter to him, the idle person who goes about speaking what she ought not.

It wasn’t until she accidentally leads her family, while on vacation, down a wrong road where they get into a bad wreck, that she begins to realize what her life had become. Not until the Misfit, a character akin to death, comes across the wreck, does she see what her unforgiving attitude had brought to her family.

It took facing death at the barrel of a revolver for her to see the sin in herself, beg forgiveness, and ask forgiveness in return.

I hesitate to say she represents us, but in many ways, looking about at society and in my own heart, it seems so.

We are not a forgiving society. Every day forgotten sins are dredged up and shown for people to gape and be appalled at, old wounds continue to fester and deteriorate into gangrene. With hard, dead hearts we walk about, never forgetting or forgiving any wrong done. I hear the gossip. I see it in the papers and online, men and women unwilling to forgive, incessantly arguing about the same things, never able to reach any conclusion other than how wicked the other side of any argument is.

Without realizing it, many of us can live that way. Life is busy. We don’t have time to stop and talk with others, only enough time to toss rhetorical grenades as we bustle on by, hitting our wounds again and again to remind ourselves of the pain other people caused.

It isn’t until death approaches in its untimely way do we stop to consider what our actions have brought about, why we chose to harden our hearts instead of forgiving or asking forgiveness from our brother or sister, mother or father, wife or husband, or someone we once called friend.

That’s what O’Connor meant when she put those words into the Misfit’s mouth, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” If we lived, knowing how close death was at every minute, we would forgive. We would forgive because we would know how important it is to have our life in order before we leave this world.

And our lives would not be so trivial, so concerned with drink and sex and ambition, using people as instruments to get ahead, becoming so offended every time we feel slighted, if we knew how fragile, how precious all life is.

O'Connor's stories are jarring, uncomfortable, and utterly fascinating reads. She understood the human condition: our virtues and vices, our humility and our pride. That’s why I return to her stories often in my mind, and will find myself reaching for a collection of her short stories, one of her two novels, or her wonderful collection of essays both hilarious and profound. I return because she not only understood the human condition, but, like other great writers, was concerned with protecting and preserving the soul in man.

The busyness in life, and the unforgiveness running rampant today, is causing our souls to shrivel like raisins in the sun. We need the nourishment that forgiveness provides. And forgiveness is the only way to restore the fellowship and community modernity so desperately needs. There is a splendor to forgiveness. A restoration occurs when we offer forgiveness, a recovering of what is good, a lifting up of what was cast down. Forgiveness restores the relationship broken by sin, and lifts us up in love to our Lord.

As for the moral example of this tale, I hope it won’t take standing before death’s door for us to realize how important it is to forgive and be forgiven.