2020 Reads, Update #1

Completed First Quarter:

“Leaf by Niggle,” a short story by J.R.R. Tolkien. 

“The Turkey,” a short story by Flannery O’Connor.

“The Trouble,” a short story by J. F. Powers.

“Theft,” a short story by Katherine Ann Porter. 

Book of Baruch, a book of the Old Testament, RSV Translation.

Completed Second Quarter:

Gospel of John, a book of the New Testament, RSV Translation.

Introduction to the Devout Life, a non-fiction work by St. Frances de Sales.

“The Blue Hotel,” a short story by Stephan Crane.

“A Good Man is Hard to Find, a short story by Flannery O’Connor.

Oronooko or The Royal Slave, a novel by Aphra Behn.

Lord of the World, a novel by Robert Hugh Benson.

The Book Of Ezekiel, a book of the Old Testament, KJV and RSV translations.

Currently Reading:

Last Post, the 4th novel of the Parade’s End Tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford.

Dominican Life: A Commentary on the Rule of St. Augustine, a non-fiction work by Walter Wagner, O.P.

Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith, a non-fiction work by Robert Barron.

The City of God Books 1-10, by Augustine of Hippo, translated by William Babcock.

I Am Going: Reflections on the Last Words of Saints, a non-fiction devotional work by Mary Kathleen Glavich, SND.

Prince Caspian, a novel from the Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis.

Upcoming Plans:

“God Rest You Merry Gentleman,” a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

“The Sea Change,” a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

“A Matter of Chance,” a short story by Vladimir Nabokov.

 “The Manager of ‘The Kremlin,’” a short story by Evelyn Waugh.

“The Magic Paint,” a short story by Primo Levi

Brideshead Revisted, a novel by Evelyn Waugh. 

Utopia, a short novel by St. Thomas More.

Book of Daniel, a book of the Old Testament, 

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While this is my first update for the year, this is actually my mid-year review.  I missed the first quarter update, mainly because I was really late in getting my initial plans for the year out.  Perhaps the output for the year doesn’t seem like much for half a year’s reading.  Three books—two of them novels—three books from the Bible, and six short stories. 

However, there are six books that are in progress, and might all be completed by the next quarter.  Several of them are more than half way.  I think the output for the third quarter will be much more substantial.

Upcoming will be the Book of Daniel from the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation from the New Testament.  Both these books are apocalyptic visions of the end of times.  Having just completed Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World, which is a dystopian Catholic novel envisioning an end of times scenario, I will be steeped in apocalyptic literature this year.  I will be posting quite a bit on my reading of Lord of the World.  It’s definitely a prophetic novel relevant to our times.

In addition, the Catholic Thought book club at Goodreads will be reading Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited next, and it will add even more to the read list in the third quarter.  Perhaps you may want to join us in this read.  It’s a great novel.

Short Story Analysis: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, Part 3

This is the final post on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

You can find Part 1 here.  

And you can find Part 2 here.  

I started the conversation with a question of what is similar and what is different between the Misfit and the grandmother.  I think there is a value in exploring this contrast, especially since I see it as leading to another theological theme.

As to how they are different, perhaps that is the easy side of the equation and we can dispense with it quickly.  First, the grandmother is not a killer.  Second, the grandmother uses her verbal dexterity and her wits to get her way and not a gun.  "She was a talker," Bobby Lee says.  Meanwhile the Misfit seems to be rather reticent.  He's the opposite of his father who seems to have a "knack of handling" the authorities.  The Misfit is the opposite; he seems to succumb to the authorities.  Interestingly the authorities claim the Misfit killed his father, the talker, just as he will kill the grandmother, the talker.  I think the suggestion is that the Misfit really did kill his father.  The grandmother's entire interaction with the Misfit is her attempt to handle the authority of the guy with the gun.  She fails.  The guy with the gun gets his way.

As to how they are similar, that takes some close reading to reveal, but I think it's more probing.  They are both sinful people, though I think the Misfit realizes his sins while the grandmother is oblivious to them.  But I think at the heart of it, their sins stem from the same impulse.  Committing crimes and especially murdering people is imposing your will over God's will.  What are the grandmother's chief sins?  As I listed above, she's vindictive, childish, conniving, manipulative, and devious.  I said she was "passive-aggressive" which at its core is not that different from the Misfit's aggressive behavior, the difference being how they weaponized the aggression.  Notice the grandmother aggressive behavior toward Bailey when she tries to change his mind about going to Florida standing "with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head."  Now the newspaper is not a gun, but the posturing is aggressive.  Vindictive, conniving, manipulative, these are sins where she is imposing her will onto people.  Ultimately for both the Misfit and for Grandma, it's not "thy will be done" but "my will be done."

And the childishness is also a commonality between the two.  We've seen the grandmother reduce herself to the children's level.  She banters on their level and they feel free to continue the bantering because they see her as a mental equal.  The Misfit too is an adult who appears to not have matured.  He doesn't kill for gain; he kills for the heck of it.  His problems seem to stem from when he was a child.

"I never was a bad boy that I remember of," The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice, "but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive," and he looked up and held her attention to himby a steady stare.

"That's when you should have started to pray," she said. "What did you do to get sent to the penitentiary that first time?"

"Turn to the right, it was a wall," The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. "Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain't recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come."

Not remembering one's crime is actually what a child says and does.  At the end when the grandmother hits a nerve on whether Jesus existed that brings the Misfit into a childish emotion.

"I wasn't there so I can't say He didn't," The Misfit said. "I wisht I had of been there," he said, hitting the ground with his fist. "It ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady," he said in a high voice, "if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn't be like I am now."  His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for an instant.

He reverts back to his childhood here, and places blame at some outside circumstance for his criminal behavior, making an excuse like a child.  Even he seems to think at the heart of his problem is some inability to piece the adult world together.

"I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."

No child thinks his punishment is warranted.  He is saying that about himself.  And what criminal calls himself the "Misfit?"  Al Capone called himself "Scarface."  The famous pirate called himself "Blackbeard."  Another criminal was called "Jack the Ripper."  John Wesley and June Star in the story are misfits.  As is the grandmother.  The name "The Misfit" is childish, and suggests his problems are rooted in an arrested development.

Another commonality between the two is a veneer of respectability.  Yes, the Misfit is a psychopathic killer, but he is respectful and kind.  When the grandmother recognizes the Misfit and Bailey shouts some unmentionable words to his mother, the Misfit finds an excuse for Bailey: “Lady,” he said, “don’t you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don’t mean. I don’t reckon he meant to talk to you thataway.”  When the misfit wants to send Bailey and John Wesley into the woods, he asks kindly.  He is even kinder when he asks the children’s mother and the little girl, making sure one of his henchmen helps the mother up.  He even excuses himself when he’s embarrassed to be shirtless in front of ladies.

” He put on his black hat and looked up suddenly and then away deep into the woods as if he were embarrassed again. “I’m sorry I don’t have on a shirt before you ladies,” he said, hunching his shoulders slightly.  “We buried our clothes that we had on when we escaped and we’re just making do until we can get better. We borrowed these from some folks we met,” he explained.

He’s trying to make do “until we can get better,”   That’s the language of one concerned with respectability. 

The grandmother’s veneer of respectability is on display throughout the story.  She dresses fancy for a vacation ride because “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”  She tells June Star she should be “ashamed” for insulting the waitress but meanwhile moments before in private she used the most horrid racist terms.  And she is obsessed with the notion of a “good man.”  She tells Red Butts he’s a good man.  Red Butts is essentially a lying slob who keeps a monkey chained to a tree and bosses his wife around.  And what does she tell the Misfit?

“I just know you’re a good man,” she said desperately. “You’re not a bit common!”

Not being “common” seems to be her definition of what is a good man.  I’m sure she considers herself a good lady, after all she does think of herself as a lady and not common.  But is this the Christian definition of a good man?  Isn’t the definition of a good man one who acts like Jesus Christ, who has the heart of Jesus Christ, or at least tries to?  Neither Red Butts nor the Misfit nor the grandmother even come close to acting like Christ.  That is why a good man is hard to find.

###

Let me just add that there is nothing wrong with being respectable.  We all should be respectable.  Respectability is a way of being neighborly.  The issue is that that for the grandmother (and the Misfit) it is only a veneer.  Just as the Misfit on the surface is respectable while inside he's a cold hearted murderer, the grandmother is only respectable on the outside while on the inside she's a selfish racist.

So why are all these similarities between the Misfit and the grandmother important?  Ultimately the story is about the grandmother.  The similarities between the two provide a projection into each one.  So what is at the core of the Misfit, can be, with some reasonable consideration, attributed to the grandmother.  This I think is important to grasp the theological implications of the story.  We are allowed into the Misfit's theological understanding of life, and so with reasonable deliberation, we can project that theological world view to the grandmother.  Let's look at some of the theological points.  Let’s look at the easiest one first, not needing help.

"If you would pray," the old lady said, "Jesus would help you."

"That's right," The Misfit said.

"Well then, why don't you pray?" she asked trembling with delight suddenly.

"I don't want no hep," he said. "I'm doing all right by myself."

Is he really doing alright by himself?  He’s been locked up in jail.  He’s not doing alright.  He could use a lot of help.  Now project this into the grandmother, and let’s consider the state of her soul.  Is her soul doing alright by herself?  She doesn’t seem to want help and she is extraordinarily willful.  It’s been her will, not “thy will.”  From what we have seen of her sinfulness, I would say right now she’s heading for hell, the metaphysical equivalent of the Misfit’s jail. 

Second, let’s look at how the Misfit can’t seem to recall sins.

"Turn to the right, it was a wall," The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. "Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and  ain't recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come."

Consider that as a metaphor for sitting at judgment day in front of Christ the judge.  None of us will be able to recall all the sins of a lifetime.  Most of the time we aren’t even aware of the sins we commit that moment.  Look at all the sins the grandmother has committed on that morning’s journey.  She’s oblivious to them. 

Third, let’s look at what the Misfit says about matching the punishment to the crime.

"Jesus thown everything off balance.  It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course," he said, "they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now.  I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you'll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you'll have something to prove you ain't been treated right.

Again, take that as a metaphor for facing the Judge and He going down a list of your sins to decide what your eternal fate will be.  This is how the Misfit conceptualizes eternal judgement.  But that’s not theologically correct, at least from a Catholic perspective.  It’s not a list but the state of your soul at death.  We all commit sins, but is your soul clean and absolved and in a state of grace?  I think we get further insight when the Misfit talks about his name.

I call myself The Misfit," he said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."

The implication I think is that he can’t fit the theology together.  It doesn’t make sense to him.  I think O’Connor is contrasting a Protestant world view against a Catholic.  We the reader know the Catholic view, and we’re watching the Protestants live out their dislocations that result from their world view.  It’s O’Connor who solicits Protestant and Catholic distinctions by naming the boy “John Wesley,” the same as a famous Protestant theologian.

For O’Connor, it seems to me that what drives her Protestant characters to this sort of tension and anxiety is the lack of graces we Catholics receive from the sacraments and from a church that provides authority.  We don’t have to make it fit.  The Church and the Magisterium has made it fit for us.  For the Misfit, and the grandmother presumably, it’s him and his bible.  They have to make it fit on their own.  Second, the sacrament of penance on a regular basis would have done both the Misfit and the grandmother a world of good.  Neither would be experiencing the anxiety of a final judgement if their sins had been taken care of sacramentally.

So when the grandmother implores the Misfit to “pray, pray” and call on Jesus for help, she is symbolically telling herself to pray and to call on Jesus.  Notice how many times she calls on Jesus in that encounter.  Notice, when she reaches her moment of crises, she falls “down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.”  Are her legs twisted supposed to suggest the crossed legs of Christ on the cross?  Is O’Connor giving her a spiritual communion with Christ as the grandmother seems to emotionally breakdown?  I think so.  It comes just before her moment of compassion.  A spiritual communion is as close as one can come to actually receiving the sacrament.  We have been living with spiritual communions watching Mass on TV during this virus. 

I would also venture to say that the three bullets the Mistfit fires into her is a spiritual sacrament too.  One could name the bullets Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I’m not one hundred percent sure on the theology.  If anyone has other thoughts, please feel free to correct me.  I don’t claim to be a theologian.

###

Madeleine Commented:

I like your analysis, Manny, although I think it may be a bit of a reach to imagine the Misfit administering sacraments.

My Reply:

LOL, I didn't quite phrase it that way, but that is a startling thought.

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I found this nice three and a half minute video biography of O’Connor.  It gives you the basic facts and displays some nice photographs. 

Music Tuesday: Charlie Daniels, RIP

I was sadden to hear that Charlie Daniels passed away the other day from a stroke.  He was 83.  I mostly knew Charlie Daniels from one song, but in reading about him at this Rolling Stone magazine obituary he had a very long career.  He wrote songs for Elvis, played with Bob Dylan, and was a sort of hippie southerner before he became a right wing southerner.  He played for the Jimmy Carter presidential campaign in the 1970s and for the NRA afterward.  Some highlights from the obituary.

Singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Daniels, who played bass and guitar on Bob Dylan’s 1969 Nashville Skyline LP and would go on to pioneer the burgeoning Southern rock movement with his namesake Charlie Daniels Band, died Monday at 83. His publicist confirmed Daniels’ death from a hemorrhagic stroke to Rolling Stone.

With his fiery fiddle at the forefront of much of his recorded output, the leader of the Charlie Daniels Band paved the way for the mainstream country-rock success of that group and others, including Alabama and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and crossed over into the pop charts with his best-known song, 1979’s Grammy-winning “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” A country chart-topper about a fiddle contest between a boy named Johnny and Satan, the song also spent a pair of weeks at Number Three on Billboard‘s Hot 100.

Charles Edward Daniels was born October 28th, 1936, in the seacoast town of Wilmington, North Carolina, the only child of teenagers William and LaRue Daniel — the “s” at the end of his name was the result of a mistake on his birth certificate. Two weeks after Daniels started elementary school, his family moved to Valdosta, Georgia, bouncing between there and Elizabethtown, North Carolina, until finally moving back to Wilmington. A feverish bout with childhood measles forced Daniels to wear eyeglasses for most of his life, making him a target of school bullies, but the youngster, who grew up on Saturday matinees of Western films and Saturday nights spent listening to the Grand Ole Opry, would soon find his niche performing and writing songs.

You should read the entire obituary.  I bet there’s a lot you didn’t know about him.  For instance, that he played quite a number of instruments: bass guitar, mandolin, violin.

Here is first hit, “Uneasy Rider,” a hippie tour de force. 

Perhaps my second favorite Charlie Daniels song is “Simple Man.”  I don’t endorse the vigilantism message of the song, but I do love that guitar riff and the passion against our contemporary evils.

And then there is the great, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”  This from the obituary is what Daniels says on how the song came about.

“I don’t know where the phrase ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’ came from or why it entered my mind that day in the rehearsal studio,” Daniels wrote in his 2017 memoir Never Look at the Empty Seats. “I don’t even know where the song idea came from… But when it started coming, it came in a gush. The band grabbed ahold, and when Taz [DiGregorio] came up with the signature keyboard lick behind the devil’s fiddle part, we knew we were on to something.”

Finally let’s end this retrospective with a rollicking patriotic song that is so relevant today and perhaps fits the campaign of one of the presidential candidates.  I’ll let you guess who.  ;)

Eternal rest, Lord, grant onto Charlie Daniels, and your eternal light shine upon him, a man who by appearances loved God, family, and country.

Trivia: Top Five World Cities with the Most Bridges

This may be a new category for the blog.  Call this “interesting trivia.”  I subscribe to a trivia site, which floods me with advertisements and emails.  But I enjoy trying to answer the trivia questions.

This question listed the top five cities in the world with the most bridges.  The introduction actually started off with Portland Oregon’s claim they are the “City of Bridges” having a grand total of twelve.  Ha!  I laughed.  Here in New York City we probably have twelve in one borough.  After all we are on a harbor with two rivers coming together and a host of islands.  Still I wondered if NYC would make the top five.  There are a lot of cities with harbors and rivers.

So here are the top five in reverse order with a count of the bridges.

5. Venice, Italy, 391 bridges.

That doesn’t surprise me.  After all, everybody has at least one bridge on their block.  If anything the number seems low.  But Venice is not a very big city.  It is a very beautiful city though.  I’ve been there.  It may be the most beautiful city in the world.

4. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, 446 bridges.

Now that surprised me.  I would not have guessed.  I have been to Pittsburg and it does have a confluence of three rivers.  It’s not that big a city, but I guess they love to build bridges there.  It used to be one of the world’s steel making capital.  The certainly had lots of I-Beams to build with.

3. New York City, New York, USA, 789 bridges.

There we are!  We made the list.  Now that’s a lot of bridges.  I didn’t think we had that many, but they are around.  I’ve posted plenty of pictures of my walks over the Brooklyn Bridge.  Here’s one.  And I’ve also posted pictures of the Verrazano Bridge, here.  

2. Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1281 bridges.

That would make sense.  Amsterdam is built on water.  I wonder if they are floating bridges.  Could they have modular bridges?  Nonetheless I bet they are not very big bridges. 

1. Hamburg, Germany, 2300 bridges.

Hey, I’ve been there too!  I posted on my business trip to Hamburg, here.  Oh wow, it’s been almost seven years now.  I didn’t think it was that long ago.  That’s a city with at least one river and a big harbor.  I am surprised it has that many bridges, but I did notice quite a few.

  

Now that is a weird-looking bridge.  Only German engineering.  ;) 

So I have been in four of the five cities with the most bridges.  I would never have guessed.

Short Story Analysis: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, Part 2

This is the second part of a series on Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." You can find Part 1 here.  

Let me push the discussion a little further, into a reading that perhaps no one has considered.  Let’s look at the encounter between the grandmother and the Misfit not from realism, but from a metaphorical, even symbolic, perspective.  You might even call this reading a metaphysical perspective.  Keep in mind, this reading doesn’t undermine the realism, but amplifies it.  It creates another level to action than the immediate.

By all rights, when a car flips 360 degrees into a ten foot deep ditch and passengers are not even wearing seatbelts as they wouldn’t in the 1950s, it is very likely people in the car would have died.  You don’t walk away from accidents like that.  Let’s say, metaphysically, they have died and unbeknownst to them they are dead and waiting for what comes next.  The family is sitting in a ditch, ten feet deep, which is not exactly the six feet of a burial, but O’Connor may not want to make it obvious.  But they are below ground.  Behind the ditch are woods.  O’Connor describes them as “tall and dark and deep.”  That language is an allusion to a famous poem by Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  That poem is ultimately about death (silence of isolation, snow as symbol for death, frozen lake recalls the lake in Dante’s Inferno).  Read the last stanza:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

O’Connor’s echo of “dark and deep” is not accidental.  The grandmother has gone on a journey of many miles, her vacation as we have seen; you can even stretch that to her life time, and now she has come to a stop.  Along comes a “big black battered hearse-like automobile” which contains beings (angels?) who are going to bring her and the family to their final end.  “There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun.”  We hear that several times.  How could there be no cloud in the sky and no sun?  We are in a state of another world.  They look up and it’s the heavens.  They are in another plane, somewhere in between earth and heaven.  They are going before the final judge.

So that would make the Misfit, the executer of that judgement, and that would be Jesus Christ.  The Misfit even compares himself to Jesus at one point.  “Jesus thown everything off balance,” the Misfit says.  “It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime…”  Well, the Misfit has thrown everything off balance too, and he clearly links himself to Jesus.  Just before that connection to Jesus Bobby Lee throws him the shirt with the parrots on it.  Parrots have been used as representative for the Holy Spirit at least since Gustave Flaubert’s story “A Simple Heart,”  about a hundred years prior to O’Connor writing hers.  We saw parrots as suggestive of the Holy Spirit in Willa Cather’s novel Death of the Archbishop.  O’Connor was very conscious of great writers, and I’m sure she read Flaubert’s story since it had a Catholic dimension to it.  So the tossed shirt with the parrots flying onto the Misfit is certainly suggestive of the Holy Spirit coming onto him.  And then the Misfit puts on the shirt.  This is all very symbolic action.

But it goes even beyond that.  Notice that the Misfit is squatting down the whole time he is speaking to the grandmother.  “The Misfit squatted down to the ground,” we are told early in the encounter.  The whole time the Misfit is speaking to her he is doodling on the ground with the butt of his gun.  “The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking about it.”  Even just before the end he hits the ground with his fist. The Misfit squatting and writing on the ground parallels Jesus in John chapters seven and eight with the woman taken in adultery to be stoned.  There too a woman’s fate hangs in the balance while Jesus writes in the sand.  If Jesus agrees with the men who intend to stone her, she is doomed.

What we see in this symbolic reading is the grandmother coming before judgement, and the fate of her soul hanging in the balance.

No, the Misfit is not Jesus, but O’Connor is using the Misfit to expand the meaning of the story.  Remember in this reading, she is already dead from the car accident. The bullets are not what causes the death, but what decides her judgement.  The question then that beckons us is, what is her judgement: Saved or damned?

###

My Reply to Susan Margret to why the other characters don’t receive a judgemtn like the grandmother;

Susan, as a short story, the focus is usually on one or two characters. There just isn't space enough to develop and bring to a conclusion secondary characters. The rest of the family are there to move the plot. Each successive execution in the woods is a means for the author to "turn the screw," as Henry James would say, tighter on the grandmother's moment of truth. We should talk about her moment of truth. Something changes in the grandmother. Notice what happened at the story’s climax:

“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.

At the cracking of the Misfit’s voice and then seeing him almost cry, the grandmother has a transcendent vision. With each shot, she has called out “Bailey boy,” as if recalling her son as a child. This has been on her mind, but has had to focus on the tension-filled situation and the preservation of her life. When the Misfit pounds the ground with his fist—something I can see John Wesley doing—and nearly coming to a cry, the grandmother's social pretense of proper decorum falls away, her selfish sense of preservation falls away, and she has what O’Connor is always aiming for in her stories, a moment of grace. “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” she says. All of a sudden she no longer sees a murderer but a child, a child perhaps who has gone wrong, but nonetheless a child of God and as a mother herself sees in him her own child. This is in complete opposition to everything we have seen of her. That litany of sins I enumerated above dissolve, fade into a memory. The willful striving to be socially respectable also dissolves, and the compassion of her heart is laid bare, honest and forthright.

This is why the Misfit at the end says, “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Samuel Johnson, the 18th century writer and intellectual has a famous quote: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” The grandmother needed that moment of impending death to concentrate her mind and accept God’s grace. This was her moment of truth.

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Irene Comment:

"When the grandmother reaches out to the Misfit in recognition that he could be one of her babies, is she having her first moment in the story of moving away from her narcisistic inward obsession?

My Reply:

Irene, we posted nearly the same time. Yes, it is a moment of repressing her natural narcissism. I don't know if she's recognizing her sins. If somehow she would have survived and lived on, I could see her return to her previous way of life. But then it could be life altering. On that we'll never know. However, for the state of her soul at death, I would say this was enough of a repentance to be saved. With a heck of a lot of time in Purgatory!

Personal Essay: Welcome Back Home

Today after fifteen weeks, I returned to Mass since the Coronavirus caused the lockdown.   It was the first Sunday Mass allowed in New York City, the first Mass had been allowed this past Monday.  I had not the opportunity to go the entire week.

Yes, we had to wear masks.  Yes every other row was cordoned off from sitting, and there were tape marks on the pews locating a six foot distance.  My church has two center aisle sets of rows of pews and one set on each side.  The two outer set could be used for families where one was not required to sit six feet apart. 

People were, however, required to fill out from the front of the church towards the back.  As it is my habit to get there a half hour early, I sat in the first row on the family side with my son.  There would be no collection at offertory, but everyone should drop their envelope or offering in the basket at the rear of the church.  That is how I know we missed fifteen weeks of Mass.  I had fifteen envelopes at home before I got to the one with today’s date.

Everyone wore masks, even our music director, Ms. Williams.  There was no choir and she sang alone with the mask on.  We were actually surprised to see her.  We thought it would be a bare-bones, no music Mass.  There were no altar servers or readers.  The priest had to do all the readings.  But there was precious music.

Father Eugene was alone in procession on the opening hymn, wearing a mask, but thankfully took it off once he got behind the altar.  Before Mass, when he came out to ensure the altar was set proper, I was able to speak to him.  If you remember I mentioned he lost hismother to the virus early on.  I passed my sympathies to him, and then he told me between family and friends he had lost six to the virus.  Oh my, I was stunned.  What a cross he has had to bear through this.  My son said he had a tear in his eye when he was retelling it.  I was so stunned I had looked away and not noticed. 

There were no missals to avoid sanitizing them, but I knew this would be, so I took with me my monthly Magnificat which has all the readings. 

And then we stood for the opening hymn, “Table of Plenty.”

Come to the feast of heaven and earth!

Come to the table of plenty!

God will provide for all that we need,

Here at the table of plenty.

As the organ played and Ms. Williams, opera voiced trained, sang, Father Eugene in green vestments walked down the nave, genuflected as he faced the tabernacle, held that genuflection on his knee for a good moment, walked up the altar steps, got behind the altar, took off his black mask, bent over and kissed the top of the altar as is custom, and stood facing the congregation.  “Welcome back home,” were his first words.

And for the next hour, all the troubles of the last fifteen weeks, the virus, the lockdown, the ventilators, the deaths, the protests, the riots, the statues, the cops, the cancel culture, the controversies all disintegrated into particles one by one before one’s eyes and fell from the air like dust mites.  Time suddenly transformed into the timeless time of heaven, and peace settled into the sacred space.

I love Collin Raye’s version of that classic!