Sunday Meditation: Storing Up Treasure

In the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time in Year C, while on the way to Jerusalem, Jesus is confronted with a man who wants Him to get the man’s brother to share his inheritance with him.  Jesus reacts by oddly saying he is not the man’s judge.  Why is this odd?  Well Jesus is everyone’s judge.  Jesus goes on to tell those on pilgrimage a parable about a foolish rich man.  The homilists below will explain the parable, but what I can’t come to a conclusion to is whether the moral of the parable is directed at the man in the crowd wanting his share of his inheritance, at his brother who has hoarded the inheritance, or at both. 

 

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus,

“Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.”

He replied to him,

“Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?”

Then he said to the crowd,

“Take care to guard against all greed,

for though one may be rich,

one’s life does not consist of possessions.”

 

Then he told them a parable.

“There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.

He asked himself, ‘What shall I do,

for I do not have space to store my harvest?’

And he said, ‘This is what I shall do:

I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.

There I shall store all my grain and other goods

and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you,

you have so many good things stored up for many years,

rest, eat, drink, be merry!”’

But God said to him,

‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you;

and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’

Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves

but are not rich in what matters to God.”

   ~Lk 12:13-21

 

Fr. Tim Peters provides goes into the Gospel passage in great detail.

 

 

So do you own your car or does your car own you?  Do you go out and rent storage space?  Storage space seems to be the perfect analogy to increasing barn space.  Are you filling your space with earthly goods or with God’s treasures?  Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I thought this was an excellent pastoral homily by a new homilist to my blog, Archbishop Edward Weisenburger, newly installed in the Archdiocese of Detroit.

 

His Excellency, the Archbishop has quite a presence at the ambo.  So much is packed into that six minute homily.  Still no one offers a thought on who Jesus is directing His parable.  The easy answer is both.

 

 

Sunday Meditation: “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.”

 

 

John Michael Talbot offers us a hymn performed live, “Only in God.”

 

My stronghold my Savior

I shall not be afraid at all

My stronghold my Savior

I shall not be moved

Only in God is my soul at rest

In Him comes my salvation

 

Short Story Analysis: “The Displaced Person,” by Flannery O’Connor, Post #3

This is third post on the short story analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s, “The Displaced Person.”  You can read Post #1 here. 

And Post #2 here.  

 

After Mrs. McIntyre has decided to let Mr. Guizac go, O’Connor then turns the screw on the tension.  Mr. Shortley, the longtime worker who had left the farm with his wife and children at the end of Part I, returns.  He was the head farm hand that felt displaced when Mr. Guizac was outperforming him.  As it turned out, his wife, Mrs. Shortley, had a stroke and died that very day they took off, and her husband blames her death on the stress she felt from the immigrant superseding her husband on the farm pecking order.  Mr. Shortley represents the aggrieved American worker displaced by the immigrant.  He is native, he understands the cultural norms of the home region, he has long worked the farm, his wife’s death reveals his suffering because of the stranger, and he served in the army during the war defending the country.  In his character, O’Connor builds a moral standing to contrast the moral standing of the immigrant.

 

It took Mrs. McIntyre three days to get over Mrs. Shortley’s death. She told herself that anyone would have thought they were kin. She rehired Mr. Shortley to do farm work though actually she didn’t want him without his wife. She told him she was going to give thirty days’ notice to the Displaced Person at the end of the month and that then he could have his job back in the dairy. Mr. Shortley preferred the dairy job but he was willing to wait. He said it would give him some satisfaction to see the Pole leave the place, and Mrs. McIntyre said it would give her a great deal of satisfaction. She confessed that she should have been content

with the help she had in the first place and not have been reaching into other parts of the world for it. Mr. Shortley said he never had cared for foreigners since he had been in the first world’s war and seen what they were like. He said he had seen all kinds then but that none of them were like us. He said he recalled the face of one man who had thrown a hand-grenade at him and that the man had had little round eye-glasses exactly like Mr. Guizac’s.

 

“But Mr. Guizac is a Pole, he’s not a German,” Mrs. McIntyre said. 

 

“It ain’t a great deal of difference in them two kinds,” Mr. Shortley had explained.  (p. 227)

O’Connor here shows us the tribal bonds between Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre; she recalls the friendship bonds with Mrs. Shortley, and, though she can’t hire Mr. Shortley immediately to his old job until she has let Mr. Guizac go, retains him until that job is available.  The gist of the situation is that Mrs. McIntyre is now obligated to carry through on the thirty-day notice for Mr. Guizac.

###

Part III then begins with a tightening of the conflict between the moral obligation to care for the displaced (“He has nowhere to go”) and the native born struggling to live out his own life.  We see the frictions of culturally different people irritating each other, and the tribal bonds forming in reaction to the outsider.  The moral center of the story appears to be in tension.  Does the weight of justice lie with Mrs. McIntyre, Mr. Shortley, and the other native farm hands or does the weight lie with Mr. Guizac who outworks everyone else and would be let go only because he is an outsider?  Here is where Catholic social doctrine might clarify the matter.

Most Catholic contemporary social thinking starts with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum of 1891, but most of the specific thinking on immigrants and migrants was subsequently developed.  Of particular note is Pope Pius XII’s Exsul Familia of 1952.  That’s within the immediate cognizance of Flanary O’Connor’s story.  Pope Francis called the Apostolic Constitution (the highest legislative of papal document forms) the “Magna Carta of the Church’s thinking on migration.”   Exsul Familia was certainly in the Catholic news for O’Connor at the time and could very well have been the inspiration for this story. 

The opening paragraph of Exsul Familia cites the Holy Family’s fleeing to Egypt as the model of how to view immigration:

 

The émigré Holy Family of Nazareth, fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien and refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil.

Exsul Familia uses the word “archetype” to describe this model, which not only elevates the model to a particular transcendence but also would be particularly significant for a fiction writer such as O’Connor.  It would be impossible to consider that O’Connor would not have taken note and integrated it into her story.  Mr. Guizac and his family on Mrs. McIntyre’s farm certainly reflects this Holy Family archetype.

The bulk of Exsul Familia delineates the Church’s history on how it has helped migrants through history.  Subsequent popes have distilled the countless historical events on immigrant support into three principles which are articulated in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) website page under “Catholic Social Teaching on Immigration andthe Movement of Peoples.”  The three principles are the following:

(1)   People have the right to migrate to sustain their lives and the lives of their families.

(2)   A country has the right to regulate its borders and to control immigration.

(3)   A country must regulate its borders with justice and mercy.

The third principle on justice and mercy can be further decomposed to three corollaries:

 

(3a) Refugees and asylum seekers should be afforded protection.

(3b) The human dignity and human rights of undocumented migrants should be respected.

(3c) Even in the case of less urgent migrations, a developed nation's right to limit immigration must be based on justice, mercy, and the common good, not on self-interest.

Notice that it would be inappropriate to limit immigration on “self-interest.”  This implies that wealthy countries have a duty to help migrants.  Also justice in the Catholic Church’s social doctrine sense does not just mean the mere fair application of laws.  It refers to every human being receiving the basic sustenance of shelter and food.  The Biblical justification of these principles rest on the archetypical model of the Holy Family, Exodus 22:21 ("You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God."), Leviticus 19:34 ("You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God."), Matthew 25:35 ("For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me."), and Hebrews 13:2 ("Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.").  My emphasis on “stranger” throughout.

One might contrast this open spirit of charity for the stranger with what St. Augustine calls the Ordo amoris, the ordering of the principles of love.  What that says is that there are circles of primacy that require more charity than the expanding circles.  Your family would have the greatest primacy, then friends and neighbors, then your city, then your country, and finally the farthest reaches of the world.  This is a logical application of limited resources, but some use this argument to squash any immigration.  Surely the richest country in the world can invite some strangers in need.  Self-interest cannot overwhelm justice and mercy.

However applied, Ordo amoris only addresses charity in an abstract way.  It might be useful to establishing a criteria for how to spend resources and where, but it does not address the needs of the Holy Family archetype within the borders.  That Holy Family archetype is within your neighborhood, so it’s within a close circle of charity.  Ordo amoris does not reject the principles that are derived from Exsul Familia but in some ways support it.  Pope Francis, building on Exsul Familia, derives in his theology of encounter the principle that the migrant is Christ:  

 

The encounter with the migrant, as with every brother and sister in need, “is also an encounter with Christ. He himself said so. It is he who knocks on our door, hungry, thirsty, an outsider, naked, sick and imprisoned, asking to be met and assisted” …Every encounter along the way represents an opportunity to meet the Lord; it is an occasion charged with salvation, because Jesus is present in the sister or brother in need of our help. In this sense, the poor save us, because they enable us to encounter the face of the Lord (cf. Message for the 110th World Day of Migrants and Refugees, September 2024).

Although O’Connor wrote this story well before Pope Francis’s statement, she certainly knew intuitively that the migrant conflates into Christ.  Pope Francis is not really saying anything new.  Now given that the Church couches its principles on immigration in natural law, these principles then are innate in the hearts of all unless, that is, they harden their hearts against it.  O’Connor relies on this in the story.

###

Although Mrs. McIntyre has resolved to fire him, she does not.  Her deadline comes and goes without letting him go.  Shortley observes that

 

She looked as if something was wearing her down from the inside. She was thinner and more fidgety, and not as sharp as she used to be. She would look at a milk can now and not see how dirty it was and he had seen her lips move when she was not talking. (p. 230)

Mrs. McIntyre knows what she wants to do but she is in a state of existential tension.  The innate Christian principles are bubbling within her heart.  She can harden her heart, but her conscience is pricking her.  She even has a Biblical type of dream.

 

 There was no reason Mrs. McIntyre should not fire Mr. Guizac at once but she put it off from day to day. She was worried about her bills and about her health.  She didn’t sleep at night or when she did she dreamed about the Displaced Person. She had never discharged anyone before; they had all left her. One night she dreamed that Mr. Guizac and his family were moving into her house and that she was moving in with Mr. Shortley. This was too much for her and she woke up and didn’t sleep again for several nights; and one night she dreamed that the priest came to call and droned on and on saying, “Dear lady, I know your tender heart won’t suffer you to turn the porrrrr man out. Think of the thousands of them, think of the ovens and the boxcars and the camps and the sick children and Christ Our Lord.”

 

“He’s extra and he’s upset the balance around here,” she said, “and I’m a logical practical woman and there are no ovens here and no camps and no Christ Our Lord and when he leaves, he’ll make more money. He’ll work at the mill and buy a car and don’t talk to me—all they want is a car.”

 

“The ovens and the boxcars and the sick children,” droned the priest, “and our dear Lord.”

 

“Just one too many,” she said.  (p. 231)

The tension is there in her heart.  “Dear lady, I know your tender heart won’t suffer you to turn the porrrrr man out.”  And she with her utilitarian view insisting Guizac is not Christ and the priest saying he is. 

She wakes up even more determined to let him go.  She confronts Guizac in the barn, and she speaks of her bills and he speaks of his.  When she suddenly catches a glimpse of a snake in the doorway—is the snake real or a product of her imagination?—she impulsively gets angry and jumps to the disjointed subject that the farm is hers and she can let go anyone she wants.  She practically froths at the mouth.  “She wiped her mouth with the napkin she had in her hand and walked off, as if she had accomplished what she came for” (p. 232).

But she did not accomplish what she came for.  Though she got angry, she could not bring herself to fire him.  The snake, both a symbol of temptation (Genesis) and of Christ (Num 21:8-9 and Jn 3:14-15) had pressed on her heart.  Her heart is hardening, but it has not hardened completely yet.  What finally hardens her heart is the talk about town.  Mr. Shortley has been gossiping about her capitulation to a foreigner, and this has embarrassed her.  Once again she gets herself motivated to let him go.

 

Mrs. McIntyre found that everybody in town knew Mr. Shortley’s version of her business and that everyone was critical of her conduct. She began to understand that she had a moral obligation to fire the Pole and that she was shirking it because she found it hard to do. She could not stand the increasing guilt any longer and on a cold Saturday morning, she started off after breakfast to fire him. She walked down to the machine shed where she heard him cranking up the tractor.

Interestingly O’Connor has Mrs. McIntyre see it as a moral obligation to let Guizac go.  Does she have such a moral obligation?  One can see moral obligations to support her long time farm hands.  Could her finances support them all?  They did at the beginning when Guizac first arrived.  What turned Mrs. McIntyre against Guizac were tribal bonds and pricks to her cultural norms.  Are these moral reasons for letting a man who works harder and better than the others go?  Would it have been moral for the Egyptians to force the Holy Family out based on cultural differences?  Would it be moral to turn away Christ if you had hired Him and He had no place to turn?  The Catholic social principles on immigration and migrants would say no.

In couching her argument of letting Guizac go as a “moral obligation,” we see the final hardening of Mrs. McIntyre’s heart.  If Mrs. McIntyre had never taken on Mr. Guizac as an employee, it would have been understandable.  It would have been a prudential decision of pluses and minuses of taking on a foreign worker.  But she took him on because he was cheap labor that would supplement her farm.  When he worked beyond her imagination, she integrated his life into her establishment.  He wasn’t an abstract entity but an embodied person requiring dignity.  At this point, she has an additional obligation of willing the good of people she has encountered, of serving those who fall under one’s responsibility.  She has encountered a human being in need, and like the Good Samaritan encountering the injured person she must treat him as her neighbor.

###

The final scene confirms O’Connor’s commitment to Catholic understanding of the migrant.  The displaced person has been already referred to as a Christ figure.  On her way to finally give him his thirty days’ notice, she finds him working under the tractor. 

 

Mr. Guizac shouted over the noise of the tractor for the Negro to hand him a screwdriver and when he got it, he turned over on his back on the icy ground and reached up under the machine. She could not see his face, only his feet and legs and trunk sticking impudently out from the side of the tractor. He had on rubber boots that were cracked and splashed with mud. He raised one knee and then lowered it and turned himself slightly.

The tractor perpendicular to the supine body forms a cross.  The raising and lowering of the knee suggests the adjustment a crucified does as he tries to support himself.  Then Mr. Shortley brings another tractor, a larger tractor, close by and brakes it.  Then the climatic incident.

 

Mrs. McIntyre was looking fixedly at Mr. Guizac’s legs lying flat on the ground now. She heard the brake on the large tractor slip and, looking up, she saw it move forward, calculating its own path. Later she remembered that she had seen the Negro jump silently out of the way as if a spring in the earth had released him and that she had seen Mr. Shortley turn his head with incredible slowness and stare silently over his shoulder and that she had started to shout to the Displaced Person but that she had not. She had felt her eyes and Mr. Shortley’s eyes and then Negro’s eyes come together in one look that froze them in collusion forever, and she had heard the little noise the Pole made as the tractor wheel broke his backbone. The two men ran forward to help and she fainted.

The Displaced Person is crucified.  She awakes to find the ambulance and Fr. Flynn, who gives Guizac a viaticum.  Mr. Guizac’s family huddles around him as at the foot of a cross.  The ambulance eventually takes the body away.

Though the climax of story involves a crucifixion of sorts, in what way has the Displaced Person actually become a Christ figure?  He was given a job; he didn’t work out to the landlord’s satisfaction.  Even the “crucifixion” seems to be an accident. 

First, Guizac is the stranger as identified in the Biblical passages.  And does Mrs. McIntyre treat the stranger per Leviticus, “as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself”?  At first she treats him as a commodity.  She is surprised at how profitable her farm now is, and all she can think about is how rich she thinks she can get.  She never offers him a raise or have any warmth for him or his family.  And once she imagines how rich she can get, she joyfully considers letting all her long time farm help go and replace them with a bunch of Guizacs.  She’s ready to displace even the ones who have long worked for her and are tied to the farm.  Everyone is just a commodity to her.  Guizac is the stranger before her.

Second, the one thing that is even more powerful than greed to Mrs. McIntyre is her racism.  Her shift in attitude toward Guizac happens on the discovery of his trying to marry off his white cousin to the black farmhand.  Is it even her business as to who her farmhand and Guizac’s cousin marry?  No, but because it’s a shock to her white, southern culture Mr. Guizac becomes unacceptable as a farmhand, despite he being an excellent worker.  The “Palm Sunday” adulation of Guizac being a profitable worker, turns into the passion narrative of “Good Friday.”  When he is a messiah he is wanted; when he violates some custom, justice is forgotten.   In fact, I think you can think of the story as a condemnation of Southern, racist and nativist culture not accepting the stranger.  We see it with Mrs. Shortley at the beginning of the story, we see it in Mrs. McIntyre with her shift in attitude, and we see a particularly nativist and xenophobic attitude in Mr. Shortley.  It’s Shortley’s actions that lead to the crucifixion.  Let’s take a look at that crucifixion scene but now with the events leading to it added.

 

Mr. Shortley had got on the large tractor and was backing it out from under the shed. He seemed to be warmed by it as if its heat and strength sent impulses up through him that he obeyed instantly. He had headed it toward the small tractor but he braked it on a slight incline and jumped off and turned back toward the shed.  Mrs. McIntyre was looking fixedly at Mr. Guizac’s legs lying flat on the ground now. She heard the brake on the large tractor slip and, looking up, she saw it move forward, calculating its own path. Later she remembered that she had seen the Negro jump silently out of the way as if a spring in the earth had released him and that she had seen Mr. Shortley turn his head with incredible slowness and stare silently over his shoulder and that she had started to shout to the Displaced Person but that she had not. She had felt her eyes and Mr. Shortley’s eyes and the Negro’s eyes come together in one look that froze them in collusion forever, and she had heard the little noise the Pole made as the tractor wheel broke his backbone. The two men ran forward to help and she fainted.

One small criticism of the story is that there is no willful intent between the characters and the crucifixion.  It happens as an accident.  But I think O’Connor is aiming to indict more than just a person or two.  What impulses is Shortely receiving from tractor that he “obeyed”?  What made him park it on the incline beside the tractor Guizac was working under?  What made the brake release?  What is the “collusion” in the eyes of the characters?  It’s all as if some malevolent force was choreographing the events beyond the consciousness of the characters.  O’Connor is indicting the racism and xenophobia of her Southern, white culture, and Mr. Guizac, the stranger, the displaced person, the Christ-figure becomes the victim of the culture’s malevolent spirit.  He is crucified by the culture not accepting him.

For the denouement we see Mrs. McIntyre have a nervous breakdown and hospitalized.  Her farm collapses.  The hired hands leave and she has to sell off her cows.  She is left with numbness in her legs, loss of her voice, and near loss of her sight.  It seems there is a sort of divine judgment given to Mrs. McIntyre.  She is left solitary except for one regular visitor.

 

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.

 

Fr. Flynn apparently goes back to her farm to feed the peacocks and try to save her soul.  It’s as if he must teach her how to be a Christian.

This story has presented us with many aspects of Catholic doctrine on migrants and immigrants.  It is a complex story.  We have seen the tension that immigrants bring to native people, and the justice required to both the immigrant and the native.  This may be a didactic story, but complexity minimizes the preachiness that didactic stories have.  In fact, we don’t get a didactic message on whether it’s better to have immigrants or not.  That is left to the prudential judgement of the reader.  What we see is that once an immigrant is before us, it is required to treat him with justice and mercy, for that immigrant is the stranger that Christ summons in Matthew 25:36, and indeed is Christ Himself.  I didn’t think this was such a great story on first read, but as I systematically analyzed it I found it to be of the highest quality.

Matthew Monday: Iron Man Bobble Head Doll

On June 28^th Matthew and I drove down to Baltimore (about a three hour drive) to watch an Orioles game.  I hope most of you remember that I am a Baltimore Orioles fan.  Matthew, unfortunately, is not, but he enthusiastically comes to all the games I go to.  I try to go one game a year down in Baltimore, and I specifically picked that 28^th day in June.  The reason was the give-a-way that game.  They were giving away a Cal RipkenJr.  bobble head doll but dressed up as Iron Man, the Marvell Comics superhero.

Cal Ripken is a famous, hall of fame Orioles, and one of the most popular.  But he has long retired (2001), but he is now part of the Orioles ownership and keeps in touch with the fans.  His popularity has not faded.  Cal was known as “the Iron Man” because he played in 2632 consecutive games over seventeen years.  Can you imagine, seventeen years without missing a game.  It is more than remarkable.  It is superhuman.

So the Orioles organization came up with a bobble head doll of Cal dressed as the super hero.  Now, truth be told, Iron Man was my favorite comic book hero as a kid.  The identity of Iron Man was a man named Tony Stark, who was an engineer and designed and invented the Iron Man get up.  You may know this from the Iron Man movies.  I can’t help but think that part of me went into engineering because I identified with Tony Stark. 

So when the Iron Man bobble head came out I just had to get it.

Here are some pictures of the bobble head. 

 

The detail in the Iron Man uniform is amazing.  This is one of the better bobble head dolls.

Oh about the game.  It was another of the 2025 games of a disastrous season.  Orioles lost 11-3 to the Tampa Bay Rays.  Not only that, it was a day game, and the sun and humidity were brutal.  I think it was in the 90s with high humidity.  It was a real penance to sit there. 

Here is a nice picture of me and Matthew though.

 

 

Sunday Meditation: Teach Us To Pray

For the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time in Year C, Jesus and the Apostles resume their journey to Jerusalem.  As Fr. Geoffrey Plant points out in his homily below, the journey to Jerusalem, which makes up a good deal of the three synoptic Gospels, is signaled in Luke’s Gospel by the verse, “When the days for his being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem” (Lk 9:51).  What we see along the journey is Jesus’ instruction on discipleship.  In today’s passage, one of the disciples—unfortunately he is unnamed—asked Jesus on how to pray.

 

 

Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished,

one of his disciples said to him,

"Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples."

He said to them, "When you pray, say:

Father, hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread

and forgive us our sins

for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us,

and do not subject us to the final test."

 

And he said to them, "Suppose one of you has a friend

to whom he goes at midnight and says,

'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread,

for a friend of mine has arrived at my house from a journey

and I have nothing to offer him,'

and he says in reply from within,

'Do not bother me; the door has already been locked

and my children and I are already in bed.

I cannot get up to give you anything.'

I tell you,

if he does not get up to give the visitor the loaves

because of their friendship,

he will get up to give him whatever he needs

because of his persistence.

 

"And I tell you, ask and you will receive;

seek and you will find;

knock and the door will be opened to you.

For everyone who asks, receives;

and the one who seeks, finds;

and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

What father among you would hand his son a snake

when he asks for a fish?

Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg?

If you then, who are wicked,

know how to give good gifts to your children,

how much more will the Father in heaven

give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?"   

~Lk 11:1-11

 

Fr. Geoffrey provides the context for the Lord’s Prayer in his homily and then goes into a detailed comparison of Luke’s version with the more familiar Matthew’s version.

I did not realize that the Matthew’s version of The Lord’s Prayer is not in the Sunday Lectionary, only in a weekday Mass.  I think that is a mistake.  We should all be reminded that we are all one family under our Abba on a Sunday Mass.

For the pastoral sermon, Fr. Patrick Briscoe O/P. who has been doing a series of homilies on the life of Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati who will be canonized in early September, combines the theme of today’s Gospel with Blessed Pier Giorgio.

 

It is still persistence in prayer if you have to go through a holy intercessor.  Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati pray for us.

 

Sunday Meditation: “He will get up to give him whatever he needs

because of his persistence.”

 

For today’s hymn, what could be more appropriate than The Lord’s Prayer?

 

You cannot get any closer to beauty and heaven than Andrea Bocelli singing the Our Father with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Short Story Analysis: “The Displaced Person,” by Flannery O’Connor, Post #2

This is second post on the short story analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s, “The Displaced Person.”  You can read Post #1 here.  

 

The trajectory of the story would seemingly be headed for the displacing of the southern farm help with the European immigrants except that toward the middle of Section II, O’Connor introduces a twist that changes the direction of the story.  The disparity between the immigrant’s culture and the native culture gets introduced and shocks Mrs. McIntyre.  While watching over the happenings on the farm, she noticed from a distance Mr. Guizac give a photograph to Sulk, one of the young African-American men.  She walked over to him.

 

He didn’t see her and he paused and dipped his knees and leaned over his hand, his tongue describing little circles. He had a photograph. He lifted one finger and traced it lightly over the surface of the picture. Then he looked up and saw her and seemed to freeze, his mouth in a halfgrin, his finger lifted.

 

“Why haven’t you gone to the field?” she asked.

 

He raised one foot and opened his mouth wider while the hand with the photograph edged toward his back pocket.

 

“What’s that?” she said.

 

“It ain’t nothing,” he muttered and handed it to her automatically.

 

It was a photograph of a girl of about twelve in a white dress. She had blond hair with a wreath in it and she looked forward out of light eyes that were bland and composed. “Who is this child?” Mrs. McIntyre asked.

 

“She his cousin,” the boy said in a high voice.

 

“Well what are you doing with it?” she asked.

 

“She going to mah me,” he said in an even higher voice.

 

“Marry you!” she shrieked.

 

“I pays half to get her over here,” he said. “I pays him three dollar a week. She bigger now. She his cousin. She don’t care who she mah she so glad to get away from there.” The high voice seemed to shoot up like a nervous jet of sound and then fall flat as he watched her face. Her eyes were the color of blue granite when the glare falls on it, but she was not looking at him. She was looking down the road where the distant sound of the tractor could be heard.

 

“I don’t reckon she goin to come nohow,” the boy murmured.

 

“I’ll see that you get every cent of your money back,” she said in a toneless voice and turned and walked off, holding the photograph bent in two. There was nothing about her small stiff figure to indicate that she was shaken.

 

Mr. Guziac has made a deal with Sulk that for some money he can marry Mr. Guziac’s cousin, and so get his cousin over to the United States.  What shocks Mrs. McIntyre is not the deceit of the immigration laws nor the borderline prostituting of the young girl, but the fact that a young white girl is being married to an uneducated, black farm hand.  This is a culture shock, the meeting of two different worldviews.  She confronts Mr. Guziac. 

 

“I want to talk to you,” she said and beckoned him to the edge of the thicket where it was shady. He took off the cap and followed her, smiling, but his smile faded when she turned and faced him. Her eyebrows, thin and fierce as a spider’s leg, had drawn together ominously and the deep vertical pit had plunged down from under the red bangs into the bridge of her nose. She removed the bent picture from her pocket and handed it to him silently. Then she stepped back and said,

 

“Mr. Guizac! You would bring this poor innocent child over here and try to marry her to a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger! What kind of a monster are you!”

 

I’m going to go through this dialogue in detail, since so many of the immigration themes arise from it.  Yes, there is racism here, but the racism is part of the cultural divide.  This is the pre-Civil Rights South, after all, and Sulk is not even an educated, cultured, and suave Sidney Poitier type.  He is an uneducated farm hand.  Mrs. McIntyre is reacting to the cultural divide between the immigrant’s worldview and hers.  Mr. Guziac tries to explain.

 

He took the photograph with a slowly returning smile. “My cousin,” he said. “She twelve here. First Communion. Six-ten now.”

 

He means sixteen in his broken English, but that is still awfully young girl to be brought to a foreign country and married into an outside the mainstream relationship.  And it only confirms Mrs. McIntyre’s presumptions. 

 

Monster! she said to herself and looked at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. His forehead and skull were white where they had been protected by his cap but the rest of his face was red and bristled with short yellow hairs. His eyes were like two bright nails behind his gold-rimmed spectacles that had been mended over the nose with haywire. His whole face looked as if it might have been patched together out of several others. “Mr. Guizac,” she said, beginning slowly and then speaking faster until she ended breathless in the middle of a word, “that nigger cannot have a white wife from Europe. You can’t talk to a nigger that way. You’ll excite him and besides it can’t be done. Maybe it can be done in Poland but it can’t be done here and you’ll have to stop. It’s all foolishness. That nigger don’t have a grain of sense and you’ll excite…”

 

That she now looks “at him as if she were seeing him for the first time” is an important transition in the story.  Until now she had reaped the benefits of an immigrant but once there is a cultural divide between the two the perception of the immigrant changes.  Her emotional bond has changed.  Mr. Guziac tries to explain to no avail.

 

“She in camp three year,” he said.

 

“Your cousin,” she said in a positive voice, “cannot come over here and marry one of my Negroes.”

 

“She six-ten year,” he said. “From Poland. Mamma die, pappa die. She wait in camp. Three camp.” He pulled a wallet from his pocket and fingered through it and took out another picture of the same girl, a few years older, dressed in something dark and shapeless. She was standing against a wall with a short woman who apparently had no teeth. “She mamma,” he said, pointing to the woman. “She die in two camp.”

 

“Mr. Guizac,” Mrs. McIntyre said, pushing the picture back at him, “I will not have my niggers upset. I cannot run this place without my niggers. I can run it without you but not without them and if you mention this girl to Sulk again, you won’t have a job with me. Do you understand?”

 

His face showed no comprehension. He seemed to be piecing all these words together in his mind to make a thought.

 

Mrs. McIntyre remembered Mrs. Shortley’s words: “He understands everything, he only pretends he don’t so as to do exactly as he pleases,” and her face regained the look of shocked wrath she had begun with. “I cannot understand how a man who calls himself a Christian,” she said, “could bring a poor innocent girl over here and marry her to something like that. I cannot understand it. I cannot!” and she shook her head and looked into the distance with a pained blue gaze.

 

Notice the disparity between the narrator’s telling of Mr. Guziac’s lack of comprehension and Mrs. McIntyre now believing the anecdotal stereotype of discrimination that comes from innuendo: “He understands everything, he only pretends he don’t so as to do exactly as he pleases.”  Once the cultural gulf manifests, the taking on of prejudices come easier.

 

After a second he shrugged and let his arms drop as if he were tired. “She no care black,” he said. “She in camp three year.”

 

I think this shows the extreme condition of Mr. Guziac and his family.  I don’t think most immigrants would go as far as Mr. Guziac, but in the case of refuges there is a desperation that makes them suppress cultural barriers.  My Italian immigrant parents would not have done this, but they weren’t in a desperate situation.  Mrs. McIntyre becomes hardened.

 

Mrs. McIntyre felt a peculiar weakness behind her knees. “Mr. Guizac,” she said, “I don’t want to have to speak to you about this again. If I do, you’ll have to find another place yourself. Do you understand?”

 

The patched face did not say. She had the impression that he didn’t see her there. “This is my place,” she said. “I say who will come here and who won’t.”

 

“Ya,” he said and put back on his cap.

 

“I am not responsible for the world’s misery,” she said as an afterthought.

 

“Ya,” he said.

 

Her afterthought—perhaps the central question of the story—rejects the obligation to solve issues that go beyond her sphere of responsibility.  To what responsibility is she accountable?  Is there a limit to her responsibility or is she obligated to go beyond local purview? 

 

On these questions we will come to a conclusion as we walk through the third and final section of the story. 

###

Now that we’ve seen O’Connor set the story up of the Displaced Person arriving at a Southern farm, the conflicts his success creates with the long established farm hands, the tension within Mrs. McIntyre to have a prospering enterprise, and the cultural shock created by the foreigner’s different values, we could wonder where O’Connor could take the story.  She could let the long held farm hands go and replace them with even more hard working immigrants.  That would cause the farm to prosper.  Or, she could let the Guizacs go and return to the struggle of making the farm prosperous.  Both present a moral dilemma.  Letting the long held farm hands go breaks a trust that southern plantation owners had for their dependent help.  Letting the Guizacs go pushes them into a dire uncertain, condition.  The cultural shock of Guizac offering a black farm hand his niece for marriage tips the scale.  O’Connor has Mrs. McIntyre decide to let Mr. Guizac go.  Section III of the story starts with Mrs. McIntyre inviting the priest over for a talk where she’ll tell him Mr. Guizac has not worked out. 

The priest, with his long bland face supported on one finger, had been talking for ten minutes about Purgatory while Mrs. McIntyre squinted furiously at him from an opposite chair. They were drinking ginger ale on her front porch and she kept rattling the ice in her glass, rattling her beads, rattling her bracelet like an impatient pony jingling its harness. There is no moral obligation to keep him, she was saying under her breath, there is absolutely no moral obligation. Suddenly she lurched up and her voice fell across his brogue like a drill into a mechanical saw. “Listen,” she said, “I’m not theological. I’m practical! I want to talk to you about something practical!”

 

“Arrrrrrr,” he groaned, grating to a halt.

 

She had put at least a finger of whiskey in her own ginger ale so that she would be able to endure his full-length visit and she sat down awkwardly, finding the chair closer to her than she had expected. “Mr. Guizac is not satisfactory,” she said.

 

The old man raised his eyebrows in mock wonder.

 

“He’s extra,” she said. “He doesn’t fit in. I have to have somebody who fits in.” The priest carefully turned his hat on his knees. He had a little trick of waiting a second silently and then swinging the conversation back into his own paths. He was about eighty. She had never known a priest until she had gone to see this one on the business of getting her the Displaced Person. After he had got her the Pole, he had used the business introduction to try to convert her—just as she had supposed he would.

 

“Give him time,” the old man said. “He’ll learn to fit in. Where is that beautiful birrrrd of yours?” he asked and then said, “Arrrrr, I see him!” and stood up and looked out over the lawn where the peacock and the two hens were stepping at a strained attention, their long necks ruffled, the cock’s violent blue and the hens’ silver-green, glinting in the late afternoon sun.

The priest, Fr. Flynn, had been to the farm before and had been captivated by Mrs. McIntyre’s pet peafowl, especially the dramatically beautiful male peacock.  Here he looks for the bird, sees it, and is astonished to its beauty once again. 

I think it’s time to introduce two motifs which blossom in the story in this scene.  There is the motif of Catholicism as manifested by the Polish Catholicism of the Guizacs and by the priest who sponsored their immigration.  And there is the motif of the peacock, which is right in the opening scene following Mrs. Shortley when Fr. Flynn first brings the Guizacs to Mrs. McIntyre’s farm. Now in Part III we see Mrs. McIntyre trying to explain to Fr. Flynn why Mr. Guizac is not working out.

 

“Mr. Guizac,” Mrs. McIntyre continued, bearing down with a flat steady voice, “is very efficient. I’ll admit that. But he doesn’t understand how to get on with my niggers and they don’t like him. I can’t have my niggers run off. And I don’t like his attitude. He’s not the least grateful for being here.”

 

The priest had his hand on the screen door and he opened it, ready to make his escape. “Arrrr, I must be off,” he murmured.

 

“I tell you if I had a white man who understood the Negroes, I’d have to let Mr. Guizac go,” she said and stood up again.

 

He turned then and looked her in the face. “He has nowhere to go,” he said. Then he said, “Dear lady, I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t turn him out for a trifle!” and without waiting for an answer, he raised his hand and gave her his blessing in a rumbling voice.

 

She smiled angrily and said, “I didn’t create this situation, of course.”

On the one hand, Catholicism adds to the culture shock against the predominant Protestantism of the Southern culture.  O’Connor has the priest explaining Purgatory to an oblivious Protestant though unreligious woman.  In addition, and more importantly, Catholicism acts as the moral core of the story.  Fr. Flynn will lay down something very heavy on Mrs. McIntyre’s conscience.  “He has nowhere to go,” the priest says.  What is implied here is Catholic social doctrine concerning the plight of immigrants and migrants.  “I didn’t create this situation,” Mrs. McIntyre retorts, defending her position with utilitarian logic.  The priest presses the moral obligation while Mrs. McIntyre pushes for an out, perhaps a legitimate out but one that pricks at conscience.  What is Mrs. McIntyre’s duty here? 

And then the peacock displays his plumage.

 

The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. “Christ will come like that!” he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there, gaping.

What does Fr. Flynn mean when he says “Christ will come like that”? For Mrs. McIntyre the mention of Christ in the conversation seemed out of place.  She continues with her utilitarian logic. 

 

Mrs. McIntyre’s face assumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother. “It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go,” she said. “I don’t find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world.”

 

The old man didn’t seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on the cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail. “The Transfiguration,” he murmured.

 

She had no idea what he was talking about. “Mr. Guizac didn’t have to come here in the first place,” she said, giving him a hard look.

 

The cock lowered his tail and began to pick grass.

What Fr. Flynn was talking about was the peacock displaying his plumage in all his glory.  He identifies it with the Transfiguration where Christ revealed His glorified state.  At the very moment when Mrs. McIntyre’s moral obligation was about to be discussed, O’Connor brings in the Christ symbol of the story, the peacock.  And then Fr. Flynn and Mrs. McIntyre talk past each other:

 

“He didn’t have to come in the first place,” she repeated, emphasizing each word. The old man smiled absently.

 

“He came to redeem us,” he said and blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go.

Mrs. McIntyre, of course, is referring to Mr. Guizac as not having to come to the United States or at least to her farm while Fr. Flynn explains why Christ came to earth.  The “he” in the conversation refers to both Mr. Guizac and Christ and thereby conflates the two.  Rejection of Mr. Guizac becomes rejection of Christ.