Thursday, March 31, 2022                                         (today’s lectionary)
Living out of the back of my truck
Go down to your people, and go at once! They have become depraved. They quickly turned aside from the way I pointed out to them, and they have made a molten calf. They are worshipping it and sacrificing to it.
When I read passages like this, I sometimes wish I had a sandwich board in the back of my truck and spent my days traveling alone from campus to campus, from city to city, spending a night or two and moving on.
I’d put on my sandwich board in the morning and walk the streets, walk the quads on campus, shouting “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand!”
In her first novel Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor introduced us to Hazel Motes, who preached on street corners. As a boy, Mr. Motes was uncertain about Jesus.
He saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.
Then as an adult, Hazel was uncertain about everything. He put that into words and stood up on the top of his car and preached it.
I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there is no truth … No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place … In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
O’Connor herself spent her days writing rather than carrying around a sandwich board. Her commitment to God, the Catholic church and her faith was complicated but unwavering. She wrote reviews of theological and religious books for church publications. She read, she prayed, wrote. She cared for her peacocks in Milledgeville, Georgia.
I recently returned to Austin from New Mexico, where books are written about the Penitentes of the Sangre de Cristos. I wonder what Flannery would have written about the Penitentes, who spend hours in self flagellation. Hazel Motes would surely have been one of those flagellants, had he lived out west. Perhaps Miss O’Connor exorcised some of her own demons as she got to know Mr. Motes. She said about herself, and her readers:
Wise Blood was written by an author congenitally innocent of theory, but one with certain preoccupations. That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes’ integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author, Hazel’s integrity lies in his not being able to.
Those eyes! Jesus looks into my soul, and I can’t stand it any more. Leave me alone, Lord Jesus. Don’t love me, don’t love me, don’t love me, I don’t deserve your love. But I can’t look away, and you won’t look away. You take up your cross. I take up my whip. You cry out, “It is finished!” I think for me it has only just begun.
Here we are, locked in an embryonic embrace, and I’m about to be born again. Stop that!
You search the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life through them. But even they testify on my behalf, and you do not want to come to me to have life. I do not accept human praise; moreover, I know that you do not have the love of God in you.
Ten years after her novel was published, Miss O’Connor wrote in the new edition:
Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery.
Our Father freed us to choose Jesus, to listen to him, to follow him, to believe in Jesus the Messiah, the Christ. Who will rescue me from this body of death? Jesus will, Jesus is the answer and the salve inside my soul.
But how can you believe, when you accept praise from one another and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father: no, the one who will accuse you is Moses, in whom you have placed your hope.
In Sunday School, where did I learn that Jesus lives? Jesus lives inside my heart. Day after day I spend more time outside my heart than inside it. Time flies by in a whirl of sparrows, squeaking. And still I sit alone, forgetting to listen to what lies beneath, to Jesus, forgetting to drink his living water. Here’s what Hazel said:
Nothing outside you can give you any place. You needn’t to look at the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.
You’ll have to excuse me now. I need to go and get my sandwich board.
(Exodus 32, Psalm 106, John 3, John 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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