This past Sunday, I gave a presentation on Flannery O’Connor to an adult education group in my parish.
(This article, which I wrote a decade ago (!) is my framework when I do something like this.)
(A few weeks ago, I began this intermittant series on Catholic writers that I’m doing by presenting on Walker Percy – I thought it was appropriate because he was born at St. Vincent’s Hospital here in Birmingham, and lived here until his father’s suicide – at which point his mother moved them to Athens, GA, where they lived until her death, at which point the boys were moved to Greeneville. )
After I ran through the basics of her life, theological and literary vision, I took the rest of the time to read through chunks of “The Displaced Person,” simply calling attention to various images, phrases, sentences and allusions that helped illuminate that vision.
Why “The Displaced Person?” I’m not sure. I didn’t have a real plan for it. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is probably the story most of them had already read, since it is so widely anthologized (along with “Revelation,” I’d guess), but I’d already talked to them about that one in some point in the past. I used to read “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” to my high school students – it’s hilarious and strange and explicitly and obviously “Catholic.”
There are many other choices, too, but for some reason, in re-reading “The Displaced Person” Saturday night, I was drawn to it. I wanted to talk about it more, to see what other people thought.
I’m not going to bore you with a plot summary, because that’s not the point of the post today. Essentially, it’s about the impact of a Polish refugee family brought to work on a farm some time after World War II somewhere in the rural south. It’s about pride, fear, original sin (if you’ve read it, recall the farm’s owner Mrs. McIntyre’s repeated defense that she’s not responsible for the ills of the world), the Cross, and our place in this world, our place as displaced persons.
There is a priest in the story, the priest who brings the family (the Guizacs) to the farm, and then continues to visit Mrs. McIntyre. He is old and Irish, listens to Mrs. McIntyre’s complaints about her workers and the difficulties of her life with a nod and a raised eyebrow and then continues to talk to her about the teachings of the Church.
He is seen by the others as a doddering fool, talking about abstractions, not clued into the pressing issues of the moment, telling Mrs. McIntyre, for example, about what the Son of God has done, redeeming us, “as if he spoke of something that had happened yesterday in town….”
And at the end, as Mrs. McIntyre watches the black figure of the priest bend over a dead man ” slipping something into the crushed man’s mouth…” we see why he spoke of it that way.
It did happen yesterday in town. It happens today.
He’s here.
The priest, too, is the only character who recognizes transcendence. Every time he comes to the farm, he is transfixed by the peacocks (see the header on the blog today), a fascination the others think is just one more symptom of foolishness and “second childhood.”
You must be born again….
And here is the “irony.” Although steeped in Catholic faith and sensibilities, we know it is not ironic – but to the world’s eyes, it is. That the priest who expresses the mysteries in such matter-of-fact, “formulaic” ways, ways which even theologians today fret are not nuanced or postmodern enough, which they would like to dispense with in favor of…what, I am not sure, unless it is one more set of windy journal articles…this priest is, as I said, the only character who can recognize beauty and the transcendent reflected there. And the one who embodies Mercy.
Flannery O’Connor always said that she found the doctrines of the Church freeing – and this is what she means.
And the story ends:
Not many people remembered to come out to the country to see her except the old priest. He came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs and, after he had fed these to the peacock, he would come in and sit by the side of her bed and explain the doctrines of the Church.
Charlotte was Both 