This sermon was inspired by a challenging sermon topic prompted by Kate Howard. Kate bid and won a sermon topic of her choice, a popular auction item in many Unitarian Universalist congregations. Kate chose "The Spiritual Writings of Flannery O'Connor, a Southern Catholic whose writings goaded Kate to deeper reflection in graduate school. I, too, heard of Flannery O'Connor in a Church History class at Wesley Theological Seminary and Kate and I formed a good team in offering this service in October of 2011. I am grateful to Kate and to Flannery O'Connor for helping me reflect on the presence of sin, grace and the core theologies that shape us.
© Rev. Susan Karlson
November 6, 2011
Flannery O’Connor used characters in her novels and short stories that seem ridiculous, smug; it’s easy to cast them down since we presume ourselves to be more enlightened than they are. Yet she pushes us to recognize a bit of flawed humanity in each of them and within ourselves.
O’Connor wrote, "It is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population like the wings have been bred off of certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said 'God is dead'." I want to contrast that with the reading about peacocks—how they lift their tails and their voice simultaneously. To some, their call seems sad; to others, “hysterical” but for her, it “always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.”
Flannery O’Connor lived most of her life in rural
Most of her stories are violent and volcanic, about people who struggle against temptation and contradictions in their character. As Kate, the woman who suggested this sermon topic, said, Flannery O’Connor felt most at home with evangelists and fundamentalists rather than those who identify with religion experienced as a sociological study or as personality-based phenomenon. She believed that all of us were sinners and at the same time all could be recipients of grace, unmerited redemption and transformation.
Her stories are populated with people who display their racism, arrogance and classism in their revealed private thoughts and in dialogue with other people. Reading her stories, I often feel a kind of revulsion—my immediate reaction is shock— “I can’t believe he or she just did that—how disgusting!”
And yet, listen to the street preacher Onnie Jay Holy, who is looking to make a dollar preaching about the Church of Christ Without Christ that has a whole new Jesus, who claims that every person has “a little bundle of sweetness” inside that gets pushed down as life happens, “when it could be on the outside to win friends and make him loved.”
I recognize some of my own naïve leanings in Onnie Jay’s words. I like to think that humans have the proclivity and free will to act on the side of justice, love and compassion in spite of my wholesale experiences with the side of people more prone to evil action.
In
It was my job to testify in court whether I thought they would re-offend or not. I spent many sleepless nights pondering the impact of my clinical judgment on society. When I began that job, I entered with a philosophy that all of us make mistakes; some of us just make bigger mistakes than others. Many of the men I worked with had serious mental illnesses; a few were sociopaths. I learned an enormous amount then about evil human actions and depravity—what O’Connor would undoubtedly term “sin” or John Newton’s song, “Amazing Grace”, would call “wretchedness.”
Later, I worked with a program for children, adults and families who were survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Here I saw the devastation wreaked on whole families and the results years later in the groups I facilitated for Adults Molested As Children. When I accompanied children to testify in court I listened as defense attorneys belittled the children who had been abused. I knew those attorneys, some with children of their own, were doing their job but I wondered how they slept at night knowing sometimes that their clients were guilty as “sin.”
I tell these stories because my early social work career transformed my understanding of the complicated nature of evil and sin. Survivors, offenders, non-offending parents, I knew them as more than their case files. Like John Newton’s realization of his own wretchedness as part of the slave trade, leading ultimately to him writing “Amazing Grace”, I had to ask myself challenging questions with no easy answers—where did the evil actions come from that claimed the souls of those little abused children? How could someone torture another living person like that? What was my role in this real life reality show?
Decades later, I don’t have concrete answers like John Newton and Flannery O’Connor. I know that the people represented by both characters, Onnie Jay Holy and Hazel Moates, only have partial perspectives. If there is this “little rosebud of sweetness” in each of us, there is also this little thistle of callousness, selfishness and greed there as well. We are a composite—saints with hard crusted kernels of ill will and temptation, sinners laden with the seedlings of possibility and hope.
O’Connor wrote, “At its best, our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily. . . The sense of mystery vanishes”.
When Kate and I talked about this worship service, we spoke about her experience last spring talking to the photographer for the church photo directory. He told her how he had gone to another Unitarian Universalist congregation and placed a cross beside his computer. He was told to take that cross down and so he assumed Unitarian Universalists were against Christianity.
This anecdotal story bears closer scrutiny. As Unitarian Universalists aren’t we about something other than dividing people into labels by their theology? Isn’t this congregation and its purpose in our lives and on Staten Island and as citizens of the world about something far more important than putting people in boxes like conservative or liberal; or Christian, Theist, Humanist, Atheist, Agnostic or Pagan?
O’Connor is clear how being a Catholic informs her writing and her entire life. She has dug deep into her own received beliefs. Can we say the same? Next Sunday, we begin the lay sermon series on Unitarian Universalism from various perspectives. Do those services conflict with what I just said about moving beyond keeping people stuck in neatly labeled boxes?
Not at all. We have a broad net that we cast, as exemplified in the Sources of Wisdom from which Unitarian Universalism draws, its importance manifested in its placement in the front of the hymnal. We don’t define this church by the numbers of members who identify with a certain core belief. We are not here to change each other’s minds but to enlarge our own. Are we like “wingless chickens” bred to throw out every religious thought that does not resonate with that of our own making?
Not by a long shot. Here, we create a place where respect for each vision is held higher than dogma; and an inquisitive mind is more precious than certainty. This may run counter to O’Connor’s certainty about the redemptive saving grace of Jesus but we are all in an “invisible parade.” This parade in which we are marching, marching is the Peacock’s siren call; it is the Mystery itself and it involves deeper and deeper religious exploration over the course of our whole lives. Let us cheer for that!
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