Ralph Wood on Flannery O'Connor and the Church

Ralph Wood brilliantly taught many students at Wake Forest University and then at Baylor. I had several visits with Ralph over the years. On one occasion we were walking into a restaurant in Waco when a car full of undergraduate women yelled out to greet Professor Wood. I experienced the same affection towards Ralph while walking around campus with him. 

I have had the good fortune of interviewing over 200 scholars, leaders, and writers. These include Pulitzer Prize winners and other notables. Ralph is one of my favorites. Along with being a top-notch scholar, he is great company. Anyone who has spent time with Ralph knows of his well-honed skills as a raconteur.

The following interview revolves around Ralph’s most recent book, Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible (Baylor University Press).

This book is not long at 173 pages, but jam-packed with insights that make you want to pause and ponder. My own copy’s marginalia reflect this kind of engagement with its 160 plus notes.

Baylor is offering a 20% discount to readers of Mere Orthodoxy. Head over to www.baylorpress.com and use the code 17PROMO.

Moore: I interviewed you on another terrific book you wrote about Flannery O’Connor titled, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.

How does this present work relate to/augment the earlier book?

Wood: In that book of 2004, I was concerned primarily to interpret Flannery O’Connor’s life and work as embodying the most radically Christian vision to be found in the whole of American literature. 

I dealt not in general terms, however, but attended to the particularities of her fiction. I sought to show that its grotesque violence is never gratuitous but always gracious—though in her particular sense: “Grace must wound before it heals.” Only in dying do most of her characters come to see themselves in the blinding light of truth and thus to receive the redemption they have been resisting. Her readers are meant to undergo a similar awakening. “To the deaf you shout,” she said, “and to the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” 

The literary establishment finally caught up with her. In 1979, The Habit of Being, her collected letters, won the National Book award. In 1985, Flannery O’Connor: The Collected Works made her only the second 20^th century writer (William Faulkner being the first) to be included in the Library of America. In a 1990 issue of the New York Review of Books, Frederick Crews, a leading literary scholar, surveyed the most important recent books by and about O’Connor. He offered a mainly positive assessment of my 1988 book, The Comedy of Redemption (which includes two full chapters on O'Connor).

Moore: When did Flannery O’Connor writings initially cross your radar? What or who convinced you that it was time well spent to study and write so much about O’Connor?

Wood: When I finished high school in 1959, I very much wanted to attend Baylor in order to become a Baptist preacher. Yet I could see that I would be putting my parents in financial straits. And so, I lowered my ambitions. I attended little East Texas State College in Commerce. The finest professor in my English major was Paul Wells Barrus. He was by far the most eloquent and learned man on the campus—fluent in both French and German, able to read Latin without a dictionary, master of the great texts of the West, etc. 

Yet there was a fly in the ointment: Barrus was a Roman Catholic, the only one on the faculty amidst a horde of Baptists. Though I wasn’t brought up to think ill of Catholics, I suspected that they never had been “saved” and thus weren’t real Christians. Barrus exploded such nonsense. I took every course he offered. (Only much later did I discover the providential irony of my not attending Baylor: In 1959, such “unsaved” Catholics were not allowed to teach there.)

In November 1962, my senior year, Barrus brought Flannery O’Connor to our campus, her only Texas visit. Upon reading her stories, I knew I had struck gold. I could see that the central concerns of my revivalist Baptist boyhood—sin, judgment, grace, redemption—were also her concerns, yet stretched and deepened beyond anything I had ever imagined. Sixty-two years later, I’m still seeking to fathom the inexhaustible depths of her life and work.

Moore: Like Flannery O’Connor, Emily Dickinson struggled with doubt about the claims of Christianity. Unlike O’Connor, Dickinson did not remain attached to a church. 

The poetry of Dickinson has made a large impact on me. I sympathize with Dickinson’s struggles, but it saddens me that her doubts seemed to immobilize her in a way that did not occur for O’Connor. It’s a big question, but would you share a bit about why this is the case?

Wood: Emily Dickinson was the product of a feeling-centered Congregationalism. It was centered on a singular emotional conversion as the final proof of her Christian faith. When she saw that almost all her friends were converting, she felt lonely and left out, even as she admitted that she would never be happy unless she loved Christ.

Dickinson was too smart and too honest to trust the inconstancy of her feelings as the vehicles of such love: “I felt that I was so easily excited that again I might be deceived and I dared not trust myself.” Note well: She doesn’t say that she dared not trust Christ, but that she dared not trust herself. Yet while remaining unconverted, unable to call herself a Christian, she nonetheless became one of our most important poets of the spiritual life.

Flannery O’Connor also had doubts. She was drawn to the confession of the father whose son Jesus had healed, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” Like Dickinson, she also distrusted her emotions. When asked what she felt at the Mass, she curtly replied: “Nothing”—adding that, if she received the Eucharist in order to have warm feelings, it would be ruined. It would be given an extrinsic purpose other and alien to itself.

Moore: O’Connor was candid about her own struggles with the church, in her case, the Roman Catholic tradition. What does her devotion to the church, warts and all, teach us about the central place the gathered body is supposed to have for all of us Christians?

Wood: For Flannery O’Connor, there is no Christianity apart from the Church: To be a Christian is to live and move and have one’s being in the Body of Christ. Yet she complained that Catholics are often required to suffer not only for the Church for also from the Church—so terribly compromised is its witness. In a shocking statement she confessed that “Nihilism is the gas we breathe. Whether in or out of the Church, it’s the gas we all breathe.” She meant that, even within the Church, the Faith is often made into a warm blanket of God-denying comfort and convenience—terribly replicating the world’s unbelief—when it’s nothing less than the rough cross of the Crucified. We are called to bear it all the way to the end, whether in small daily acts of self-surrender or, if required, in martyrdom.

O’Connor gladly confessed her gratitude for being baptized and confirmed into the Church without her permission. If she had been required to choose it for herself, she would never become a Catholic. She was also grateful for being able to think with the Church rather than for herself. “Dogma is the only thing that guards mystery,” she confessed. The deeper one plumbs its truth, the greater grows one’s ignorance. Thus, does it become the inexhaustible source of Life.

Moore: O’Connor knew suffering up close and personal. She lived a full, but brief life of 39 years. Martin Luther said that many Christians have a theology of glory instead of a theology of suffering. How does Flannery O’Connor help us develop a more accurate theology of suffering?

Wood: In 1952, Flannery O’Connor was diagnosed with disseminated lupus erythematosus, the disease that had killed her father. Knowing that she would never write about anything other than her native region, she nonetheless wanted to live at a critical distance from the South. Instead, she was forced to return to Milledgeville, Georgia, to spend her final twelve years on a dairy farm. She thought it would be the end of her creative work, fearing that she would be suffocated by the small-mindedness of her domineering mother. Instead, Flannery and Regina became a magnificent team. “The best of my writing has been done here.”

Despite massive doses of cortisone, O’Connor surely suffered excruciating pain. Yet she never mentioned it, never complained, regarding her illness as a nuisance rather than a disability. “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.” 

Toward the end, her letters became both terse and poignant. “I don’t make no plans.” “I’m sick of being sick.” “Pray that the lupus don’t finish me off too quick.” Most telling of all is this indispensable combination of faith and doubt: “I can take it all as a blessing, with one eye squinted.”

Moore: Several times you mention Flannery’s abhorrence for “abstractions.” Why did she voice so much ire about abstractions?

Wood: For Flannery O’Connor, abstractions are a means of avoiding the grit and gravel of real life. Most of the world’s evils are committed in the name of grandiose abstractions, as Orwell says in “Politics and the English Language.” The worst cover-ups are also self-justifying abstractions such as “collateral damage.”

O’Connor never began a story with an abstract idea, asking how she might illustrate it. She always started with a concrete scene of conflict, asking how her characters had got into it and how she could help them get out. “Show rather than tell” was her motto. “Sink the theme,” she said, so that it emerges within the story and remains inseparable from it. She did not set her readers on a quest to discover the meaning of her stories as if finding X in an algebraic equation. For once you’ve found X, she said, you can forget it. O’Connor’s best stories are unforgettable because they deal in memorable scenes and phrases: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” a Wellesley student tells Ruby Turpin in “Revelation.” “Jesus thrown everything off balance and he shouldn’t have done it,” the Misfit complains in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” “She would have been a good woman,” he says of the repentant Grandmother whom he has just killed, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Moore: Where would you recommend a person begin to read Flannery O’Connor?

Wood: With “Revelation.” It is her most accessible story. It deals with all of her central concerns: about race and class, about religious hypocrisy and self-congratulation, about a woman who tries to out-shout God, even asking him, “Who do you think you are?” But it ends in Ruby Turpin’s gracious discovery—while beholding a sow suckling her piglets—of who she is. Rather than giving herself away as the sow does, she sees that she has grasped after any and everything that would serve her self-interest. In a grand purgatorial vision, she discovers that the last are indeed first, that she and her husband Claud are bringing up the rear, though they too will pass through the cleansing fire, once their small-minded virtues of decency and good order have been burned away.

From there, readers may be ready to understand her signature story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” then perhaps to take up my favorites, “Good Country People” (especially the hayloft scene where Manley Pointer steals Hulga Hopewell’s wooden leg), “The Artificial Nigger” (where a miserable broken Black Sambo statue becomes a Crucifix that reconciles two terribly alienated kinsmen), “The River” (where a four-year old boy baptizes himself unto Eternal Life via a drowning), and “The Enduring Chill” (where O’Connor accomplishes the unthinkable feat of having the Holy Ghost actually descend on a heretofore arrogant youth).

I also urge O’Connor newcomers to read her splendid letters. Only one per day will suffice to save their souls!

Moore: What are a few things you would desire your readers to gain from reading Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible?

Wood: I have always sought to write about Flannery O’Connor at full stretch. I have never condescended by trying to make things easy. She is a tough-minded writer and I have sought to be tough-minded in my treatment of her work.

This is pre-eminently true of my new book. Though it will not become as popular as Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (which is still available after two decades), I probe greater depths and make more radically Christian claims than I have done in any of my other seven books. I am especially pleased with the chapter on O’Connor’s self-portrait. There I demonstrate what has never been previously detected—that she models her own picture on the most famous of all icons, the 6^th century Christ Pantocrator of Mt. Sinai.

Above all else, I hope my readers will become ever more faithful participants in Christ’s visible Church.