KIM LAWTON, anchor: The Obama Administration launched a new initiative this week encouraging Americans to help fight hunger in their communities. The campaign is called  “United We Serve: Feed a Neighbor.” It urges people to donate money to local soup kitchens and food banks and also to volunteer their time and talents. The effort comes amid new government reports that hunger is on the rise in the US. Forty-nine million Americans struggled to put food on the table this past year—that’s an increase of 13 million—and a record number of Americans, 36 million, now receive food stamp assistance.

Joining me with more on all of this is Candy Hill, a senior vice president at Catholic Charities USA. Candy, it seems like this time of year, every year, we hear appeals from groups saying “Oh people are hungry, you need to give.” What makes this year different?

CANDY HILL, Catholic Charities: Well, we certainly are seeing such an increase, and new people that have never come to Catholic Charities for services before. Some of them are even our donors, and some of them are our former board members, so we see a real crisis in the number of people coming and who need assistance this year over the other years that we’ve been in business.

LAWTON: And there’s been some talk of food insecurity, I mean we’re not talking about starving in the streets, but we’re talking about people who are just having a harder time feeding their families?

Candy Hill, Catholic Charities USA

HILL: Yes, and I think when we talk about food insecurity we’re really talking about people not having food for three meals a day, so we find parents who are scrimping or not having a meal themselves in order to feed their children, and seniors who are making choices between whether they buy medicine or feed themselves, and in a country as great as this country we shouldn’t have people doing that.

LAWTON: And this is a function of the economy and all of the repercussions of that?

HILL: I think this is a perfect storm. We see the economy, and the people that we serve certainly were struggling before the collapse of Wall Street, but they were struggling first and will be the last to recover in this recovery.

LAWTON: And to what extent is it difficult in these tough economic times to make appeals for groups like yours, to say to people, give money to hungry people when individuals might be thinking, you know, I don’t know how I’m going to feed my own family?

HILL: Exactly. Well, what I would say as Americans we’ve always risen to the occasion, and this is one of these occasions. Our neighbors are suffering and we need to dig deep into our own pockets. The government has a role to play, all of us have a role to play, and we need to reach out and help each other during this really tough time.

LAWTON: Well, speaking of the government’s role, the U.S. government is urging people to give more in this new initiative, but is that enough? I mean, is it enough for individuals to give $20, a $100 or whatever, or do we need systematic changes in policy?

HILL: Well, I think long term we need systematic changes, but you know that’s a long term strategy and right now we have a short term problem, and so we need people to give and we also need the government to step up and do its part as well.

LAWTON: Are you pleased that the administration is having this initiative?

HILL: Absolutely, because I think it brings, it highlights always when the administration speaks on something and gives information, it helps connect to the things that we’re doing on the ground, and so this initiative, certainly, I think will highlight the need, but also the really creative things that are happening across America to try and meet the needs of individual people.

LAWTON: Yours is a faith-based organization. A lot of groups are trying to help the hungry. What is the specific role for religious groups and those from the faith community?

HILL: Well certainly we have a 2,000-year tradition that we’re supposed to feed the hungry and we take that very seriously and so we’ve been doing this for decades across the country and we see it as a moral issue, that people shouldn’t have to go hungry in a country as rich as ours, and we’re going to continue to try and meet the needs of people in local communities across this nation.

LAWTON: Again, we hear all the time people are hungry, people are hungry, the poor are always with us. Are there solutions? Is it possible to end hunger?

HILL: I absolutely believe it, and certainly the government is calling on that and Congress is as well. We have to think creatively. We have to think about 21st century solutions to 21st century problems, and the safety net in this country is badly torn and weakened, and we need to not just fix it. A repair is not sufficient. We really need to think about how do we eliminate the need for programs like food stamps, and like donations to feed the hungry through a food bank or a soup kitchen, and if we have the political will to do it in this country we can change this. You know, Bobby Kennedy forty years ago called attention in the Mississippi Delta to children being hungry, and yet today you and I are sitting here having the same conversation four decades later. We just need to rise to the occasion and have the political will to change it.

LAWTON: All right, Candy Hill, thank you very much.

HILL: Thank you as well.

Click here to view the original April 10, 2009 story and additional Wintley Phipps videos.

Pastor WINTLEY PHIPPS (singing at National Prayer Service, Washington National Cathedral):  “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound . . .”

KIM LAWTON:  Grammy-nominated Gospel singer Wintley Phipps is a familiar voice at big national events. At President Barack Obama’s National Prayer Service following his Inauguration, Phipps’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” brought the entire National Cathedral audience, including the new president and first lady, to their feet. But he says it’s just as meaningful to him when he sings in places like prisons.

Pastor  PHIPPS: There is a sense that you’re giving hope to people who really need it.

LAWTON:  For Phipps, who is also a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, music is a ministry and, he says, one of the deepest expressions of his Christian faith.

Pastor PHIPPS: Music is almost to me an echo of the sounds of the divine world, and when you hear these sounds, it stirs something deeply spiritual within you.  Music also is the most powerful way of impressing the human mind with hope.

LAWTON: Hope has been a hallmark not only of Phipps’s musical career, but in his charitable efforts as well.  In 1998, Phipps founded the Dream Academy, a national nonprofit for at-risk kids. Born in Trinidad, he says hope was crucial in overcoming his own at-risk childhood.

Pastor PHIPPS: I was born to a troubled home, and I used to get away from my parents’ troubles — I had a little red tricycle, and I’d go in the back yard of my house, and I would turn the tricycle on its side and use one of the backside wheels as a steering wheel, and I would sit there for hours, and I would dream that I was flying to faraway places in the world and meeting important people when I was six, seven years old, and then I wanted to be like Tom Jones.  I’d go around the house singing, “It’s not unusual to be loved.”  I just wanted to be Tom. But something was missing to me.

LAWTON: Despite a difficult family life, Phipps says his mother always prayed for him and told him that God had a special plan for his life.  As a teenager, Phipps embraced her faith as his own.

Pastor PHIPPS:  t the age of 16, God walked into my life and said, “I’ve seen your dreams. Give me your dreams, and I’ll let you see what I’ve been dreaming for you.”

Singing at National Prayer Service

LAWTON:  He attended an historically black Seventh-day Adventist college in Alabama, where he met Linda, now his wife of 32 years.  Then, Phipps says, God began providing opportunities for him to sing in national venues such as a 1984 appearance on “Saturday Night Live” with Jesse Jackson.  He came to the attention of Billy Graham’s team and became a frequent performer at the evangelist’s crusades.

Pastor PHIPPS (singing in Washington): “Talk about a child that do love Jesus.”

LAWTON: Phipps also became a favorite in Washington. He’s sung for every president since Ronald Reagan.

Pastor PHIPPS: I’ve never had a manager or never had an agent, and yet some of the most wonderful moments that a singer could ever dream of have happened to me, and I believe it’s providential.

LAWTON: The idea for the Dream Academy came after he got involved with a prison ministry.

Pastor PHIPPS: I did not know that so many young men in prison looked like my sons. , and when I saw it I was shaken. One of every three young black men in America between the ages of 18 and 30 are in prison today or supervised by the court system either on probation or parole.

LAWTON: Phipps then learned that 60 percent of the young people who end up in prison are the children of prisoners. He wanted to break the cycle of intergenerational incarceration. The Dream Academy offers after-school mentoring and interactive academic tutoring to children of prisoners and kids falling behind at school.

Pastor PHIPPS: One of the most exciting things that can ever happen in a child’s life is to know that , “You mean God thinks about me?  Or God dreams about me?”  And he’s got a dream for my life?”  And when you catch a little glimpse of what that dream is, wow, it changes everything.

LAWTON:  Phipps has enlisted the support of some of his famous connections for the project.  One of his biggest benefactors is his longtime friend Oprah Winfrey.  The lesson of faith, he says, is that things aren’t always as they seem and that hardship can be overcome.  In these uncertain economic times, he’s released a new music DVD called “No Need to Fear.”

LAWTON:  It’s a theme he finds throughout the old spirituals that he often performs.

Pastor PHIPPS (singing): “Swing low sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home . . .”

The Negro spiritual teaches us that you’re going come up rough sides of mountains, and you’re going to have difficulties.  But faith gives you that ability to weather any storm.

(singing): “I looked over Jordan and what did I see?”

LAWTON:  It’s the core theme as well for the song that has become his signature, “Amazing Grace.”  He finds great spiritual lessons in the history of the song.

Pastor PHIPPS:  A lot of people don’t realize that just about all Negro spirituals are written on the black notes of the piano, and they just keep recurring.  Probably the most famous white spiritual that’s built on this slave scale was written by a man by the name of John Newton who, before he became a Christian, used to be the captain of a slave ship and many believe heard this melody that sounds very much like a West African sorrow chant (hums “Amazing Grace”).  And it has a haunting, haunting, plaintive quality to it that reaches past your arrogance, past your pride, and it speaks to that part of you that’s in bondage, and we feel it. We feel it. It’s just one of the most amazing melodies in all of human history.

(performing “Amazing Grace” on stage): “To sing God’s praise than when we’ve  first begun. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Amen.”

LAWTON: Another lesson, he says, on how hope always triumphs. I’m Kim Lawton in Vero Beach, Florida.

RAFAEL PI ROMAN, correspondent: Even at the end of her short life, when it became harder and harder for her to walk, Flannery O’Connor went to Mass nearly every day at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Milledgeville, in central Georgia. She lived with her mother in an old plantation house surrounded by 1500 acres of pasture and woods. In her room after church she would write all morning, facing the back of a tall chest so that she would see no distractions. Her output was not massive—two short novels, two collections of short stories, a number of essays, and a lot of letters. But today many consider her one of America’s greatest writers. Since O’Connor’s death, more than 50 books have been written about her, one of them by Ralph Wood of Baylor University.

PROFESSOR RALPH WOOD (Author of Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South): Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced.  That is an astonishing fact. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickenson, Frost, Stevens: not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. She is a Southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer.

Prof. Ralph Wood

ROMAN: What makes her increasing popularity even more surprising in these secular times is the fact that O’Connor was a self-proclaimed orthodox Catholic whose subject, in her words, was “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”

O’Connor was the only child in a respected and well-off family. She was fascinated by birds of all kinds, and when she was a little girl a newsreel cameraman came down to film a chicken Flannery claimed could walk backwards. Later on, her hobby centered on peacocks, a bird she saw as her personal symbol, according to her biographer, Brad Gooch.

BRAD GOOCH (Author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor): I think she liked it because it was a comic and gawky bird, like herself. It ate her mother’s flowers and kept everyone awake all night, and then at a certain transfigurative moment tails would open, and here was all this beauty which she saw as a symbol of the way her fiction worked, and also in the Middle Ages the peacock was the symbol of Christ and the church so, you know, it all lined up for her and the peacocks.

ROMAN: As a young woman, O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, to the exclusive Yaddo artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, and then to New York City and Connecticut, writing all the way. Then, at the age of 25, she was forced to return home because, like her father before her, she was dying of lupus. It was back in Georgia in the 1950s that she discovered the characters for her stories.

WOOD: Not the cotton belt, not the tobacco belt, but the ugly word the Bible belt, and for O’Connor that was the glory of her region. These were the emarginated people on the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places.

ROMAN: She wrote that her Christ-haunted characters are so cut off from orthodox Catholicism that they don’t have a guide and that they are actually involved in a do-it-yourself religion that is kind of comical, sadly comical.

WOOD: She said, look, these are my brothers and sisters. They are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated gospel, a gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them.  I cannot dismiss them, saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically.

ROMAN: Father Thomas Joseph White is a Dominican priest whose conversion to Catholicism was influenced by O’Conner’s fiction.

FATHER THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, OP (Theology Instructor, Dominican House of Studies): You don’t have baptism, confession, and the Mass, which she says are, you know, the center of her life. You have instead odd and grotesque, historically surprising events where people encounter the grace of God.

ROMAN: From these people her stories emerged. In “Wise Blood” and “The Violent Bear It Away,” and in twenty short stories, she told dark tales of murder and bigotry and madness, of a preacher of the Church without Christ who puts out his own eyes. Some have asked, is this Christian?

WOOD: She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess, but she says there is one and only one quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that is the love of God, and she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

ROMAN: Talk about the importance of grace and mystery in her work.

WOOD: Mystery does not mean for her a kind of a fuzzy, foggy, gooey something or other. It’s a very specific term for her. For her the word mystery means that which is inexhaustible in our knowledge of God, that the deeper we go in understanding who the self-declared, self-revealed God is, the more there is yet to understand, so that the greater our knowledge of God also the greater our ignorance of God, so that we know only a thumbnail of what and who God is.

Brad Gooch

ROMAN: As the civil rights movement changed attitudes and language, O’Connor was sharply criticized for using the N word in her writing.

GOOCH: She couldn’t change that word because that’s the way those people speak.

WOOD: For Flannery O’Connor, race was indeed the curse of the south in the sense that it was the single-most important test which we as white Christians failed. For O’Connor, the mistreatment of black people is a violation of their being creatures made in the image of God.

ROMAN: In recent years, O’Connor has become a favorite not only of writers and scholars but of artists and entertainers of all stripes, including Bruce Springsteen, Bono, the Coen brothers, and even Conan O’Brien and the creators of the hit TV series “Lost.”

Professor Bruce Gentry teaches at O’Conner’s alma mater, Georgia College and State University, and edits the Flannery O’Conner Review.

PROFESSOR BRUCE GENTRY (Editor, Flannery O’Connor Review): She always talks about waking people up to the mystery of the world, and I think that puts her in a position that is similar to a lot of people in popular culture. You know, they want to create something substantial, but they also want to do it for a popular audience.

ROMAN: In the process of writing his biography of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch says he came to admire her discipline and determination, particularly during the final months of her life.

GOOCH: She was staying alive through writing, and you see it at the end of her life, where it becomes a real race with death. She’s working on stories which she keeps under her pillow in the hospital so the doctor won’t take them away from her. She’s editing one story after she’s had last rites. So all of this seems to me a very clear kind of sense that this is what’s keeping her alive, or why she’s alive.

ROMAN: O’Connor’s admirers wonder what her legacy will be in years to come. Some say that will depend on whether future readers will understand a writer who saw “the action of grace in territory held by the devil.”

I’m Rafael Pi Roman for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Readers coming upon the work of Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) for the first time in this first decade of the 21st century can be forgiven for not immediately recognizing her as a “Catholic novelist.” Many of her original readers in the 1950s and early 1960s did not, on first reading, or even second and third readings, know of O’Connor’s personal Catholic commitment nor read her novels and stories of so-called “backwoods prophets”’ and grotesque Southern Protestant and Pentecostal fundamentalists as exemplifying a particular Catholic sensibility.

Still, readers found O’Connor brutal, broadly brushed stories compelling, and she is well embedded in the canon of both Southern fiction and most “religion and literature’’ reading lists.

But how has she fared over the past half-century?

Revisiting O’Connor after five decades, it still remains difficult to find that Catholic sensibility she and many of her admiring critics insist permeates her work, and other shortcomings—in particular the almost complete absence of attention to race and the civil rights movement that was convulsing her beloved South as she wrote some of her most powerful works—become increasingly apparent with distance. It can even be argued that the signature elements of her style—character as grotesque, gratuitous violence as the bearer of meaning—no longer shock, no longer convince.

O’Connor made her mark as one of the most original and boldest story-tellers of the mid-century South, writing two novels, two major collections of short stories, and a number of other miscellaneous stories and occasional prose. She was also a prolific letter writer and wrote numerous books reviews, principally for Roman Catholic diocesan newspapers. While mining some of the same social milieu as Faulkner—the poverty-stricken, illiterate backwoods and the small town lower-middle-class gentility—O’Connor imbued her stories and novels with religious imagery and themes drawn primarily from a corner of Protestant and Pentecostal fundamentalism, as well as pre-Vatican II Catholicism.

She had a certain contempt for both her time and her audience, believing her present was not only secular but also mired in nihilism, and considering her principal audience to be unbelievers who needed the shock of her paradigmatic and emblematic violence in order to be brought to belief. “My audience is the people who think God is dead,’’ O’Connor wrote in one letter. In her influential essay “The Fiction Writer and His Country,’’ she argued: “The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

O’Connor defended her approach in a 1955 letter complaining about readers who found her powerful and jarring story “A Good Man is Hard to Find’’ brutal and sarcastic for its depiction of the killing of an entire family, including a sleeping baby, by escaped convicts: “The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.’’

But what she calls “Christian realism” seems more like the judgment of a wrathful God. It is a notion of the human situation so distorted by sin that all understanding of the orthodox Christian conception of humanity created in and retaining the image of God is absent. It was hard then and is equally difficult now for some readers to see grace announced with the point of a gun and a mass murderer as a prophet of God in waiting, or to “be on the lookout,” as O’Connor once told students before reading “A Good Man,” “for such things as the action of grace in the grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies.’’

In any version of Christian realism, dead bodies count; they are not soulless plot appendages. As Joanne Halleran McMullen, in her book “Writing against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O’Connor,’’ has noted, both the central characters in this story are nameless. Neither the grandmother nor the pathological murderer is given a name. The latter, McMullen notes, is called by what he is—The Misfit—not who he is. “He has no Christian name; it is his depravity that has become specifically ‘incarnate’ in O’Connor’s world.” Grace may somehow be operating in the final gestures between the grandmother and The Misfit when she reaches out to touch him but he recoils as if bitten by a snake—a biblical symbol that is the antithesis of grace. But this seems more apparent in O’Connor’s intention than the story’s realization. In her lecture on the story, O’Connor describes The Misfit as a “prophet gone wrong” who, because of the grandmother’s touch, would become “the prophet he was meant to be.’’ But, again, the story as written provides the reader with no clue for understanding The Misfit as a prophet either gone wrong or yet-to-be. Throughout her fiction, O’Connor’s characters seem only faintly realized as human, as people with individualized souls and personalities meriting the author’s or the reader’s sympathy, compassion, or even revulsion.

O’Connor wrote before Vatican II threw open the windows of reform in Catholicism, and it would be understandable if Catholics, or other readers familiar with some of the new, more pastoral accents created by the Second Vatican Council, had difficulty recognizing O’Connor’s Catholicism. But even in the pre-conciliar church, some critics within the faith were quick to denounce O’Connor’s work. Essayist Robert O. Bowen, reviewing “The Violent Bear It Away” in 1961, was fierce: “Neither its content nor its significance is Catholic,’’ he wrote. “Beyond not being Catholic, the novel is distinctly anti-Catholic in being a thorough, point-by-point dramatic argument against Free Will, Redemption, and Divine Justice, among other aspects of Catholic thought.’’ Yet O’Connor read widely in contemporaneous Catholic thought, and much of her book reviewing, albeit mostly brief notices, concerned Catholic theology and doctrine.

To the contemporary reader, O’Connor’s fiction does, indeed, seem to eschew the notion of free will for her characters; they seem to be playing out preordained roles in a cosmic drama of divine anger and judgment. And while there are sacramental elements in her work—at least one story centers on baptism—they appear mostly as ornament, like the comparison of the sun to an elevated host during the Eucharist in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” In part that may be because O’Connor was concerned that her message and meaning not be transparent. While her Catholicism can be veiled, it can also leave her readers confused. In her nonfiction, O’Connor stressed the role of mystery in Catholic doctrine. “The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula,’’ she wrote in “The Church and the Fiction Writer.’’ Too often, however, the Mystery became mystification for the reader.

Perhaps O’Connor greatest lapse, and the element that makes her fiction more of a footnote in the history of American literature than work of enduring value, is her total exclusion of the civil rights movement and the religious elements—black Protestants especially, but also white mainline Protestants and Catholics—that fueled it and that were so much a part of the texture of everyday Southern life in the period in which she was writing. It seems a curious omission for a writer of O’Connor’s sensibility, who sought to be attuned to the action of “grace through nature’’ and who boasted of being a Southern writer, a regional writer, to ignore that drama of biblical proportions being played out in her own front yard. It was a drama with many of the same elements—violence, lynching, castration, rape—that she rooted her fiction in. The critic Ralph Wood is most probably correct when he says O’Connor was no racist, but he fails to explain away her ambiguous attitudes toward African Americans and her contemptuous dismissal of efforts, especially by Northern sympathizers and others, to heed the call of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to join in the struggle to dismantle segregation, in some instances by giving up their lives.

“The South is traditionally hostile to outsiders, except on her own terms,’’ O’Connor wrote in “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.’’ “She is traditionally against intruders, foreigners from Chicago or New Jersey, all those who come from afar with moral energy that increases in direct proportion to the distance from home.’’ Apparently O’Connor feared that “moral energy’’ might dilute or undo the racial status quo on which Southern identity depended, believing that only time and history would resolve the race issue. In Wood’s view, racism and segregation were, for O’Connor, “a species belonging to a much deeper and more pernicious genus of evil.’’ If so, it is nowhere evident in her work.

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on John Updike, Walt Whitman, and American religious poems.

I had the great good fortune of going to a small Texas university called East Texas State College, and there I had the extraordinarily great gift of having had a Roman Catholic major professor in English, and he taught us all the great literary texts of both the American and English traditions. But during my senior year of 1962-1963, he brought Flannery O’Connor to our campus, her only Texas visit—1962. She would die two years later in 1964 of lupus at the age of 39. And in those days every single undergraduate at this little college was required to read A Good Man is Hard to Find, that collection of her first short stories from 1955, and I was just overwhelmed. I was struck by something really strange, something really odd, something also very hilariously funny, and something that took my own world of rural east Texas, small-town east Texas, not sophisticated, not cultured, but turned it into art of the greatest, highest kind. But it was also very deeply Christian, comic-Christian and southern in ways that in some sense defined me, and I said to myself, if I can spend the rest of my life trying to fathom a writer like Flannery O’Connor and other writers like her, I’d have my calling, and that’s how it’s turned out to be, thanks to this one professor at this one small state school.

[Her work] can be appreciated, it can be read as a kind of document of its times, it can be read as an illustration of what a southern kind of literature of the 1950s would have looked like, but it can’t be really comprehended in the sense of grasped in all of its fullness apart from her Catholic Christianity. She said if I did not see through the lenses of my faith I’d have nothing to see. I’d have nothing to say. So quite literally there would be no Flannery O’Connor without her profound, life-centering faith in the Catholic Church and the Catholic tradition and the Gospel. You don’t have to have Christianity to understand Shakespeare, although it would help you understand a great deal of Shakespeare, but if you don’t understand O’Connor in the light of her faith, you really don’t understand her. You misunderstand her.

There can be a kind of reductionism and too quick reading of her in Christian terms. She, by the way, did not want to be known as a Catholic writer; she wanted to be known as a writer, that is to say as a woman whose work had its own excellence, that could stand on its own legs, that did not have to be propped up with the crutches of her faith as if it would crumble without it, so in that sense she is not a Catholic writer, and those that say there’s more to her than simply finding Christ figures—there really are almost none, or of tracing down Christian themes—is to misread her, I think they have a point, and she would agree to that point insofar as she said this: remember that reading literature is not like algebra, it is not a matter of finding x, that is to say the kind of extractable meaning that you can lift out of the text—that’s an Enlightenment notion by the way. Instead, she said once you find x you can forget it. A literary text is the embodiment of a whole way of experiencing the world, and therefore it’s going to have depth after depth, layer after layer, but for O’Connor there is nothing larger than the Gospel, nothing larger than the faith, so that those who say you must not reduce her to her faith are engaged in a fundamental category mistake. When you’ve got, as the Book of Colossians says, Christ present in the presence of the cosmos, then in a real sense the Gospel is larger than the universe, so there’s nothing outside it, grander than it, larger than it, and therefore she could encompass all that counts against it. There’s nihilism running rife through her stories. If you don’t pick up that nihilism, you’ve missed it. If you make a kind of sweet, easy Christian reading of her, you’ve missed it. But you can’t get to the core of her apart from her Christianity.

She wrote two novels, two collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and of course her very important collected letters called The Habit of Being, but out of that small body of work grew a kind of presence that simply cannot be exorcised. You cannot get rid of her, because when you read her you know that no one else could have written that work. In fact, Evelyn Waugh, not knowing that Flannery was a woman, said of her what he thought was something very complimentary but was in a certain way an insult, he said no woman could have written this work. Now Waugh of course got it really wrong, but his point was there’s something strange, spare, odd, alarming, troubling, but above all unforgettable about her. You cannot walk away from these stories saying, well, I’ve got O’Connor down, I’ll move on to something else, and so people keep returning to her. There are more than 50 books written on O’Connor now. She was the second writer in the Library of America series from the 20th century to be included. Faulkner was the first. That’s remarkable, that the second writer in that whole important series from the 20th century was Flannery O’Connor. So there’s something that’s perduring, lasting about her that’s just not going to go away.

The assumption made by most of her readers in the early ’50s when she came into print was that here we have another H.L. Mencken, here we have another Sinclair Lewis, here we have a sophisticate, and above all a Catholic sophisticate, making fun of these dumb, backwoods, benighted, backward fundamentalists who are screaming “Jesus saves,” who are doing wild and hairy things like handling snakes and so forth, so she must be mocking, she must be having fun with them, she must be satirizing them in the fashion of Mencken or Sinclair Lewis. Of course, Mencken called the Bible the nastiest name he could think of, you know—not the Cotton Belt, not the Tobacco Belt, but the ugly word, the Bible Belt. And for O’Connor that was the glory of her region, these people, backwoods—not our contemporary fundamentalists, not those that have moved into political power. These were the emarginated people in the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places, never making it into the news, never wanting to get into the news, never trying to push political candidates forward, never using the Gospel for some so-called larger political end. They were, instead, obsessed with God’s own self-identification in the Jews and in Jesus and in the book that is that story of self-identification, and so she saw—look, these are my brothers and sisters, they are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated Gospel, a Gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them, I cannot dismiss them, and so she winds up saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically, and of course that just stunned her secular audience, as they couldn’t understand at all what she was trying to do, when she was saying I think, in fact, what St. Thomas says. She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess. There’s one and one only quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that’s the love of God.  And in fact Thomas says you cannot love God moderately, you cannot love God in a kind of lukewarm fashion. We love God either absolutely or not at all. And she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

Now she sometimes criticizes them. Criticism and mockery, of course, are two different things. Mockery is to stand outside of and above and look down upon in a kind of scorn and disdain for that which you think is less than you are. Criticism is from the inside, trying to say, look, here’s something really important but that needs qualification, modification, and so there are stories in which she comes down on the anti-sacramental character of southern folk Christianity, the most powerful of which is called “Parker’s Back,” that story about a man who has—long before tattoos were de rigueur and fashionable—who has the figure of Jesus Christ tattooed on his back, and it is for that reason his wife rejects him. She cannot stand the idea of Jesus being figured image in any kind of incarnational way, certainly not in her church, and least of all on her husband’s back. So [O’Connor’s] critical of the anti-sacramental quality of that kind of southern folk Christianity, but she is not dismissive, never dismissive.

Prof. Ralph Wood

When these people have profound encounters with a living God into whose hands it is a fearful thing to fall, since the Book of Hebrews, they don’t know what to do with it. They say there are no structures, there are no forms, there are no disciplines, there are no sufficient habits in which to place these radical encounters with God, and so they go off and do nutty things. For example, when I was teaching in the south, a fellow up in Boone, North Carolina, decided that since we hear our Lord say if your hand offends you, cut it off, went to the shop at Appalachian State University, got a saw out, and cut his hand off. Well, again, O’Connor would not make fun of that. She would criticize that and say, again, his Christian world did not give him the forms in which to put a radical kind of Christianity, and so she’s critical of that lack of form, but not the lack of substance. Those are two very different things. She admires him for having very great substance. She said those who were such drastic Christians, if they had been in the Catholic world would have wound up in a monastery where they could have had their lives given a certain kind of shape, as they couldn’t in do-it-yourself religion.

Thomas Merton, in a famous phrase, says that the command “love God” has now the force, roughly, of “eat Wheaties.” It’s just another empty phrase. But for O’Connor, “grace” and “mystery” are not empty phrases. They are something than which there is no greater. The grace of God, for O’Connor, she said, must wound before it could heal. What we would want is the kind of grace that comforts, cheers, that always lifts up but never casts down. She says we want a Christianity that’s like a warm blanket, when in fact the Gospel is a cross. Of course, she’s absolutely right about that, so for her grace means the cross entering the world in such a fashion as to bring radical judgment, that is to say wounding, but of course far greater and deeper healing, that is to say, gracious redemption. Likewise with the word mystery: mystery does not mean for her a kind of a fuzzy, foggy, gooey something or other. It’s a very specific term for her.  For her the word mystery means that which is inexhaustible in our knowledge of God, that the deeper we go in understanding who the self-declared, self-revealed God is, the more there is yet to understand, so that the greater our knowledge of God, also the greater our ignorance of God, so that we know only a thumbnail of who God is. So mystery for her is, therefore, an inviting term. It is not a kind of term that stops conversation. It’s not that which is just a puzzle, an enigma to which you throw up your hands and say, well, that’s a mystery. On the contrary. Another translation of the word mysterion in Greek is not only mystery but sacrament, so for her the sacraments invite ever deeper, inexhaustible exploration, knowledge, truth, wisdom, and of course humility, because the more you understand the less you know you really understand.

The violence puts off many readers. A lot of folks encounter it and say I want no more of that. There’s enough violence in the world around us, why go read a writer where in her most famous story five people get killed? Where the protagonists of both of her novels turn out to be murderers, where almost every story ends in death. In fact, she said, I can’t imagine many good stories that don’t end in death, because she says death has always been like a brother to my imagination, and what she meant by that, of course, was that in the moment or the fact of death we bring our lives to the point of culmination, either of course in fullness, giving back to God, like in the parable of the talents, or squandered with nothing to return. So death is for her a moment of immense focus, clarity, and sharpened culmination, and therefore for her death was a thing that Christians are meant to live toward. I point out to my students, we celebrate the saints on their death days, not usually on their birthdays, so that violent death, as it were, is a way of speeding up that process, of making what would often be a long and slow and unprepared-for moment supremely well prepared for, either by suffering a violent death, or alas by committing a violent act of crime, murder, that makes you refocus. But those deaths are never gratuitous in O’Connor. In fact, she had a witticism I often repeat to help students. She said now remember, a lot of people get killed in my stories, but nobody gets hurt. And what she meant by that was that nobody’s tortured. Almost everyone goes to their deaths graciously. Think of that story where even the mother whose child is about to be murdered goes off to her death in a kind of accepting way, so that deaths are never there for their own sakes so that she can make our skin crawl. No one’s fingernails are plucked out, as they are in Dostoevsky, for example, no one made to squirm before being killed, but instead brought to moments of immense clarity about who they are in final, ultimate, metaphysical, theological terms. Now, that also happens to echo the fact that ours is the most violent world in the history of the human species. O’Connor knew well, though she did not live to witness the pronouncement of Pope John Paul II when he called ours the culture of death. She knew ours was the culture of death, that more people were killed by violent means in the 20th century than in all the preceding centuries combined. One of my students calls it the age of ashes, the century of blood, and that there is built into our existence a fundamental violence, an antagonism that causes people to kill each other in mass numbers, usually nation-states and their omnicompetent governments killing their own citizens, but also simply a widespread kind of seething fury that underlies everything, because of course that’s the real mark of God’s absence from our world. That’s the nihilism she thought characterizes our world. So she wanted to confront that nihilism, but not with stories that are nice, that are sweet, that are saccharine, that say don’t be violent, be good.  No, she meets violence with violence, but the violence she meets it with is redemptive violence, it’s the violence where people come to see themselves before God, and always when they see themselves in that form, maybe one exception, they come to the moment of repentance, to a moment of grace, so that a kind of horrifically destructive violence is answered by a wondrously redemptive, constructive violence. After all, the cross is the ultimately violent act, where we killed God himself, so you can’t have a Christianity that isn’t in some sense spiritually violent, in that if we were doing real warfare with all that counts against God, there’s going to be something internally violent, so most of her characters undergo an internal warfare more than an external kind of violence.

Mayhem, murder, a woman being gored by a bull that gets loose, a grandmother being shot 3 times in the chest by a mass murderer, a little boy drowning himself to be really baptized, on and on and on—those stories are also hilariously comic for two reasons. The most obvious reason, that O’Connor simply understands what is really comic about ordinary southern, country, untutored life. Southerners tell stories, southerners make jokes, southerners are just funny, and a lot of her funniest lines are from these characters. For example, at the end of The Violent Bear It Away, where the protagonist is, to his great surprise, confessing that he has in fact drowned a boy, tells this to a truck driver he’s hitched a ride with: “Hey man I just drowned a boy,” And the truck driver says, “Only one?” Well, you see, that’s not a sophisticated humor. O’Connor really liked Mark Twain, a kind of slapdash bang ’em up humor, and it’s usually out of anecdotes like that that things are funny. For example, in her story with the famously ugly title, “The Artificial Nigger,” a grandfather decides to take his son into the city to show him what a wonderfully common and safe world they live in out there in the rural countryside, whereas the city’s going to be really forbidding, and the boy will never want to go there again. He says I’m going to teach you how you never will get lost out here, and the boy says, “Out here there ain’t nowhere to get lost.” So it’s one-liners like that that are very funny. But of course O’Connor, as a deeply Christian writer, knows that comedy is the ultimately Christian category. When Dante writes his great book, he calls it the Commedia, the Comedy, because comedy is a literary form that always issues in life. It usually ends with a marriage. Of course, the New Testament ends with the great marriage feast of the lamb, with life coming into the world, with new birth, with resurrection. Tragedy, though a very great, noble art form, ends in death, and in some sense in defeat, usually in ennobling death, but still in a sense that finally things are to be despaired over. So it’s comic in that ultimate sense, that you can laugh not at O’Connor’s characters so much as with them, because you see—that we’re like them and that we need to undergo the same radical renovation they undergo.

“The Artificial Nigger” has caused a great deal of consternation among her readers. It means that her work is often not taught in high places in American academe, because that word is so offensive, and I confess it is offensive, it should be offensive, but it’s absolutely appropriate to the story and to the characters who use it, just as in Huckleberry Finn the word appears in an absolutely appropriate way by Mark Twain. For Flannery O’Connor, race was indeed the curse of the South in the sense that it was the single most important test which we as white Christians failed. Walker Percy of course says the same thing. She approaches the race question, however, not in the fashion that most people would expect, that is to say I can’t remember many, if any, places in her letters, which were voluminous, her using the phrase “civil rights,” because as Alasdair MacIntyre points out, rights are an invention of the 17th and 18th centuries.  For O’Connor, the mistreatment of black people is a violation of their being creatures made in the image of God. Therefore racial injustice is a horror to God, first of all, and of course to blacks, and therefore to be corrected. She supported, and I think especially in a late letter she supports Martin Luther King, because King is dealing with that question from within the church. King is appealing fundamentally to the Gospel saying, look, this is not how Christians treat their fellow Christians, and I think that was more or less O’Connor’s own approach. She did not like topical art. She says that “topical” is poison, and she meant by that if you set out to make a point in a story, it’s no longer a story. She says I always begin a story with some complex situation, and I ask, how in the world do people get into that jam, and how in the world might they get out? So she deals with the race question, the race problem in her stories in two ways. One, this is what is surprising, by showing the way in which racial injustice is a symptom of a larger disease. That’s a crucial distinction for her. The larger disease is a pandemic sinfulness of the human race in our fallenness, and that means for her everybody is sick. That means that black people who are sinned against are still sinful. That means that civil rights workers who are there seeking to overcome racial injustice are still sinners, no less than their white persecutors, and so she writes about the sinfulness, not so much in blacks, although she has some as they’d say “sorry blacks” in her stories, but she writes about self-righteous racial reformers who can go off and “do good,” so called, away from home, but who cannot attend to the people who are right at their feet. That is to say they cannot deal with their own mothers or fathers or brothers or sisters in such a way as to be redemptive and reconciled. So she’s concerned about the way in which, unless we’re very careful, we divide the world up into what someone said is the easiest moral question of the world, you know. Percy said if blacks are being mistreated, stop mistreating them. That’s pretty simple. But the complex matter is this matter of sinfulness that infects all of us, including, as I’ve said, those who are victimized and those who are trying to liberate them, the blacks, from their injustice. But the other way she treats the racial question, and far more deeply in my view, is to show the way in which black people have often been the means of redemption to white people because of the way in which blacks have born their suffering. In the South, almost all blacks are Christians, and therefore they have acquired something from the Gospel that has enabled them not to strike back, not return evil with evil, not to say “the fire next time.” O’Connor knows that justice delayed is in a real sense justice denied. But she also knows that justice too quickly corrected can mean new injustice created. You can drive out one devil by welcoming in seven devils through the back door. So in these other kinds of stories what she does is show moments of a strange kind of racial redemption, and she was moving into new territory at the very end of her life. The story that was left on her desk unfinished was called “Judgment Day,” in which a black man and a white man are living together, something really radical and strange in O’Connor. But far more importantly to me than that story is the one with the offensive title, “The Artificial Nigger,” where in very subtle ways most of my students don’t get, because it is so subtle, we confront a black Madonna by way of a large black woman standing in a door in the ghetto, and this young boy named Nelson, who’s never been in a church where there’s a figure of Mary, never seen a Madonna, has an instinctive sense that this must be what the mother of God would be like. He doesn’t use any kind of language in this story, but he has an instinctive sense that there’s some kind of accepting, embracing love of God that has this maternal quality that he’s never known. But more importantly, the story ends with a terrific sense in which this grandfather named Mr. Head and this grandson named Nelson have sinned against each other in that most diseased sort of way, the most fundamental way, violating each other, but they’re brought to their reconciliation before a broken Sambo. Now, for a northern audience that will have to be explained, that in the South, less and less now, thank goodness, many whites had black Sambos on their lawn, usually at the gate. They took two forms. Usually one would be a black jockey, holding a lantern, and was thus serving as the light post for entering the driveway. The other and far more degrading is the kind they encounter, and that’s of a black eating watermelon, which of course was a very demeaning way of ridiculing blacks as unworthy to do anything but eat watermelon and spit the seeds. But in this case, the black Sambo has not been attended to well. The watermelon has turned brown, so it’s barely discernable as watermelon. One eye has been chipped out so that you can’t really see that this is an ordinary face, and the back of the statue has come loose from its attachment, and so it’s leaning over, its mouth turned down, its eye chipped out. It becomes a crucifix before which these two terrible sinners against each other are reconciled, and there can be no other crucifix for this white man and this white boy than that figure by a black Sambo. I think that’s why it was her favorite story. It’s her largest embodiment of the Gospel in fiction, in ways that are not at all preachy or sermonic or point-making.

For O’Connor the term sacramental is not a loose and baggy term that applies to any sense of something slightly holy anywhere. It means instead something in the world that has discernable analogies with what lies beyond the world, so you can see visible signs of God’s invisible grace if you have the lenses for seeing them. Those occur in a lot of places in O’Connor’s fiction, for example, very often in a tree line, which in southern Georgia and Florida you often have, that stretches on and on to infinity. That becomes for her a moment of discerning what lies beyond us. The trilling of a bird in a lonely woods makes you pause: Why four notes rather than three? Why that noise and that alone? Again, it calls into mind a world beyond this one. But above all just silence.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Silence was, for her—as St. Thomas said, silence honors God, and so many times her protagonists and characters come to their moment of awareness of who they are in silence, all of those things having the sacramental quality. Now, on the other hand, the word sacrament means something very different. It’s not an adjective but a noun, and of course as a Catholic, for her there are seven sacraments, and that means therefore that sacrament is an act in which something happens, in which what was not present is made present, and the most famous incident about that business is a famous New York dinner party hosted by Robert Lowell and his wife, and a lot of the literati of New York were present, one of whom was Mary McCarthy, the kind of literary doyenne of New York society in the ’50s, and McCarthy had just written a book called Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, the basic thesis of which is how I outgrew the Catholic Church, how it became too small for me, how I transcended my narrow Irish Catholicism. Flannery O’Connor rarely spoke unless spoken to. She was shy. She was not a hail woman well met. She never said a word until Mary McCarthy said, well, you know, I’m not a Catholic, don’t believe any of that hocus pocus. I nonetheless find Eucharistic symbolism useful in my art. There is after all a kind of cultural resonance to bread and wine that people will kind of pick up on it and know that something significant is going on because you’re putting it to symbolic use. Well, Flannery O’Connor, who had not said a word the whole evening, rose to the edge of her chair and said in her best Georgia drawl, which I can’t imitate, “If the Eucharist is only a symbol then I say to hell with it.” In other words, for her this is the real presence of our Lord, and not just for her as a Catholic, but surely for us who are Protestant.  In the 14th chapter of John we read, if you eat of my meat and if you drink of my blood, you have life in you, and if you don’t, you don’t have life in you, and Paul says if you drink of this cup unworthily you risk your own damnation. Well, something is happening, and that’s not just something. It is God’s own real presence, where Christians are meant to feed and find their very sustenance without which we cannot do. So Flannery O’Connor’s life was sacramental to the core. She went to Mass every day when possible, trudging through the deep snows of Iowa when she was a graduate student there, getting out of the YWCA in New York, trudging down to the local Catholic church, because the Eucharist, the Supper, the Communion is the place where we receive into us that which we cannot possibly give ourselves, and whereby the church of course is made into the mystical body of Christ, where we’re transubstantiated no less than of course the bread and the wine. And so that works itself out in her fiction over and over again, though not overtly; usually covertly, because again she doesn’t want the kind of trundle in Catholic sacraments that let the reader know, okay, here’s a Catholic, she’s going to show you something. It’s always sly, indirect, at a kind of acute angle, as in for example the story called “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” where this little girl who’s been eaten up with her own Catholic pride, she’s so proud of being a Catholic as over against these dumb Church of God boys. To one of them she says “you dumb ox, you dumb Church of God boy,” and of course that’s exactly the name for Thomas Aquinas, the dumb ox. He was big, he was slow to speak, and he was often taken advantage of with jokes and the like. But at the end she sees that consecrated host at the service of benediction, not the Eucharist but there on the altar, like a huge sun, and sees there’s life, and in so seeing undergoes her own radical humiliation that becomes her humility.

One can read her as a nihilist. I’ve had students tell me that they read her in high school, they read her as a nihilist because a lot of people get killed. In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” you’ve got the serial killer who finally decides there’s nothing to do but plug her, kills her, walks off. Nihilism. And O’Connor said nihilism is the gas we all breath, and then she added what is a very frightening footnote. She said whether inside or outside the church it’s the gas we breathe. So there’s nihilism in the church.  The church can become the place where we enact the nothingness of our world, where in a horrifically not just anti-sacramental but sacrilegious way we deny God. So nihilism is never anything she dismisses. She admired Nietzsche for that reason. He named our illness. He had no cure, but he named our illness. In fact, she said, “I read recently about a new technique where we can breed the wings off chickens so they will have these big, fat, luscious chicken breasts that we can eat.” She said, “We are an age of wingless chickens, which is what I think Nietzsche must have meant when he says God is dead.” She never dismisses nihilism. It’s there. However, she read St. Thomas every night 20 minutes before bed. Well, that’s not bedtime reading, if you’ve read Thomas. Thomas is tough. He’s a knotty, dense, complex, rich, meaty thinker who was the great, formative influence on her thinking, but again in a background sort of way, not in a foregrounded sort of way. And she made jokes about this. She said I can envision the day when my momma walks into my room and says turn off the lights, and I say sed contra, on the contrary, light being eternal cannot be shut off, and she added “or some such nonsense like that.” So she made fun of her own Thomism, but she got her Thomism largely through Jacques Maritain, who taught her in his book Art and Scholasticism that art is a virtue of the practical intellect, by which he meant that art achieves its purpose and in that sense gives glory to God by being what it is and not another thing, by being really good art. Not by preaching, not by being nice, not by being cheerful, but by being whole. People kept saying why don’t you write a fiction that’s wholesome? She said I do. I write fiction that’s whole, because there’s nothing extraneous, there’s nothing disingenuous, it all has to be there, and so she felt that her first calling was to practice the habit of good art making, as St. Thomas had taught her, without any necessary regard for how good a person she may have been. She knew she was not a good person, as none of us truly is. Jacques Maritain in fact quotes Oscar Wilde, who says that a man is a poisoner is nothing against his prose, and Chesterton says a man may be able to hit his grandmother at 100 yards. That means he’s a good shot but not necessarily a good person.  So O’Connor wanted to be a good shot. She wanted to create really good art, in the deepest sense, that’s whole, that grasps the fullness of any scene or situation in all of its dimensions, from the depths of the demonic to the heights of the transcendent, and thereby she would glorify God, and she got that from Thomas, especially through Maritain.

She welcomed the Second Vatican Council. It ends in 1965, she dies a year before. She especially welcomed the council’s new emphasis upon scripture. It wasn’t entirely new, it had begun with the institutes in Jerusalem and the Medieval Institute in Toronto. She felt that the church was really digging into its deepest resources, which are scripture and tradition, and that could be only for the good. She was scandalized, to be honest, by a number of Catholics who did not know the Bible. The old Protestant canard that Catholics don’t know scripture was to her all too true. She made it, by the way, her point, not for that ever to be said of her. She knew scripture inside and out. So this new refreshment of the church, this opening of the church’s windows to the world of scripture and tradition was really refreshing. She also wanted the church to really engage modern thought. She did not want the church to be medievalizing in the bad sense of trying to be nostalgic, recovering a lost age. For example, for a while she was an enthusiast for the work of Teilhard de Chardin because she thought Teilhard was offering a new synthesis of classic, Catholic, orthodox theology with Darwinian evolutionary science, that he had brought those together into a new configuration of wholeness. She had lived to see that that was wrong. She lived to be critical to him. In fact, I think she’s making fun of his famous phrase, “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” in her story with that title because what happens there is you’ve got these two rising forces they don’t converge, they clash. So she welcomed the new stress on scripture, she welcomed the new opening to the world of modern thought. However, I don’t think she would have welcomed the radical alterations of the liturgy. She was no classicist, she did not read Latin, she read Thomas in translation, but she felt that even uneducated Catholics could follow the Mass in Latin and that therefore I expect she would have seen no great need to have said it in the vernacular. That’s my suspicion, and I am quite sure she would have protested against the denudation of the churches of its sacred images, at least the radical stripping of so many Catholic churches. Now she didn’t like frivolous decorations. For example, when her Irish Catholic priest in Milledgeville festooned the church in green for St Patrick’s Day she was horrified, because she wanted to make sure being Catholic did not mean being Irish, although she had an Irish name. Being Catholic meant being a member of the church universal and complete. But I don’t think, therefore, she would have liked the way in which so many Catholic churches ceased looking like Catholic churches. Not that you have to have fancy decor  She said for me mass involved the same act if it’s said out of a suitcase in a boiler room as it is said at St. Peter’s in Rome. So it’s not it all has to be in a perfectly aesthetically pleasing context or setting. But I think at the same time she would not have wanted to be folksy and so devoid of reverence. Remember those balloon Masses of the late 1960s? I’m horrified to think what O’Connor might have said about those. One of my friends at Notre Dame, John O’Callaghan, said there are some of those Masses that made you want to go say confession after you had attended them, not before. I think she might have had that same regard.

Thomas Merton compared her to Sophocles. That’s a stunning statement, to say the least, by Merton, because Sophocles certainly is the greatest of the Greek tragedians and a figure that kind of gives us the main texts in some ways of the Western world, the Oedipus trilogy, but I think that’s a bit extravagant, frankly. I think O’Connor would be not too well pleased to be put on that kind of not just pedestal but pinnacle. I would call her a major minor writer. By that I mean someone very important, but not a person of the very—I wouldn’t put her with Dante or Shakespeare or with Sophocles. I’d put her with people like, for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet of the 19th century, Evelyn Waugh, the great Catholic novelist of the 20th, Claudel, Bernanos, the great French writers. But I would add to that something that can’t be said of any English Catholic or any French Catholic, and that is Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced. That’s an astonishing fact, when as Chesterton said this is the nation that has the soul of a church, the nation that has more churchgoing people than any other industrialized advancement, and yet name our major writers, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickinson, Frost, Stevens—not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. There are points in which their work certainly has Christian quality, especially in Emily Dickinson, but you would not call any of them a Christian writer. So you have this one figure, and again on the edges of American culture. She’s a southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer. That’s a claim large enough, it seems to me.

I think the sacramental barrenness of so much American Christianity has failed to enliven the imagination of its products. I mean, for example, the Hispanic maid in my building at Baylor is a woman who is not literate, yet she knows the whole Christian story because she has seen it figured in images in her Catholic church. She’s greatly impressed that I’m named after the archangel Raphael, so she’s picked up by osmosis, just by breathing in the sacramental, imagistic world of her Catholicism, a kind of richly imaginative way of construing the world. But the church in America has been too often a reflection of America. It has not been sufficiently countercultural. It was not at the places where it should have stood over against the culture with a kind of prophetic witness that would make writers of the caliber of the ones I mentioned pay attention. I mean, Mark Twain was horrified by slavery and Mark Twain’s a southerner. What were southern churches saying about slavery? Not much. Emerson, you know, winds up with a kind of Unitarianism that is so devoid of thick Gospel content that he can’t produce any kind of art that would be, again, profoundly Christian. So at both the political and the intellectual level I think the church has failed to provide an alternative that would really, again, arrest the attention of our brightest, ablest, most imaginative thinkers. That’s why Hawthorne is drawn to the Puritans. The Puritans at least tried; they may have gotten it wrong, but he takes them way more seriously than he does the experiment at Brook Farm, where everybody went around saying “how’s your Over-Soul?” and things like that.

Thomas Merton’s influence is more directly political. He was a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War. He, together with Dorothy Day, who also exercised an equally important influence on American culture, it seems to me, if not more important, because her work survived through the Catholic Worker Movement. In fact, the joke was that after Merton’s death a lot of Cistercian monasteries said hurray, at last we don’t have all these people thinking they are called to be Cistercians because they’ve read Thomas Merton, so in some ways it’s as if his work had a kind of counterproductive effect. Merton’s influence, it seems to me, is scattered. It has political effect. He’s very good about retrieving Cistercian mystical thought, hugely. His book New Seeds of Contemplation is, to me, one of the great books of mystical literature in our time. He writes very good poetry, but not poetry of the highest order. His essays, I think, are the essence of his work. In that regard he’d be more like Wendell Berry. I’d compare Merton to Berry. Berry is our best Protestant and Baptist essayist. I think Merton was probably our best Catholic essayist, but O’Connor moves in a different realm. She moves in a different realm, and that is a realm that’s not simply prose fiction on the one hand, nor kind of elevated insight on the other hand through essays, but the reconfiguration of everything through the lenses of the Christian faith. She liked to quote Conrad. Conrad said the function of a writer is to make the audience see. To make the audience see, and by “see” O’Connor interpreted that to mean not simply figure out that’s an oak and that’s not a hickory, not simply some kind of realism, but to have vision. Sight is one thing. Sight is simply to use the eye as a kind of ocular organ for perceiving furniture, lamps, and the like. But the eye when seeing through, seeing something behind it informed by the Christian faith, and it becomes a lens for beholding what she calls “distances” that are far off close up. Then you’ve accomplished something. That’s what she does. She’s prophetic in that sense. She says I’m a realist of distances, not a realist of surfaces or a realist of appearances, but a realist of distances—trying to bring that which is far off close up. It was far off, of course, as the transcendence of God, the otherness of God, the sinfulness of human nature that goes unrecognized and so forth. I don’t think Merton ever accomplishes anything that great, and that’s why I think she will last in a way he won’t.

Already we’ve seen downturns and upturns in O’Connor’s reputation. There was a while where her work was held in a good deal not just of suspicion but disdain, because of the way in which her characters do, when appropriate, and only when appropriate, use the N word, in the way in which she was dismissed, I’m afraid, about people in high places, as a Catholic, and therefore in her own way a fundamentalist. I know people who call O’Connor a fundamentalist, which means she believes in the basic doctrines of the church, so that there have already been ups and downs, but what we’re in now in the midst of is a new kind of resurgence that I think will continue. It will have its low points, I don’t doubt that it will, but she said even if it takes 200 years for my work to be appreciated that’s okay. My Catholic friends said remember for us a thousand years isn’t a very long time. And so if there is a thousand years, I think O’Connor will be appreciated a millennium from now.

I myself am from Georgia and had never discovered Flannery O’Connor while living in the South, but while I was in a boarding school in Massachusetts at age 16 had works of Flannery O’Connor assigned to me in English class and read her for the first time, and shortly thereafter a friend of mine gave me her letters as a Christmas gift, and I read those somewhat assiduously and became very interested in her person, in her stories.

Reading Flannery O’Connor for the first time did change my life a little bit. I mean it was the first time I had read a Christian thinker, or a Christian writer who I thought was impressive intellectually and challenging. I was a secular person, and her worldview was so different, so abrasive in some ways, very jarring.

I found it offensive and fascinating and problematic and attractive, and so I acquired a sort of new sensitivity to Catholic thought. It was the first time I read a Catholic intellectual, and then I started reading some of the people she wrote about in her letters, the works she was reading of philosophy or theology, and discovered from that something about the Catholic intellectual tradition, and that led me to actually become a Christian. My mother’s from a Protestant background, so I initially sought baptism as a Protestant and then remained interested in Catholicism partly through [O’Connor’s] influence and then kept reading authors in that tradition, and eventually, within about three years, became a Roman Catholic.

Father Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

I can’t say that Flannery O’Connor’s writings directly influenced my decision to become a Catholic priest. I think that came from a higher source and intervention. But I think she was the first person I ever read who gave me the impression that Thomas Aquinas’s thought would be maybe quite important, and I joined the Dominican order eventually, which is an order that Thomas Aquinas was a member of, and where his thinking is very prevalent, so she gave me a first initial sympathy to his thought.

Many of her characters are people struggling with the question of whether there’s any meaning in the world at all or any meaning in life, and she has a great capacity to at the same time in a certain way project what that personality is—the searcher, or the person who questions meaning, and she also satirizes that person, sometimes brutally, and it’s both showing the pain of the person in disbelief or with lack of religious orientation and at the same time making fun of them. That is so provocative and almost painful, and I think it gave me the impression that someone could both understand me or understand something about me and also challenge me very deeply in my conception of the world religiously. I think that understanding of modern unbelief, and at the same time that kind of almost robust satire of modern unbelief was very provocative to me. It gave me the impression she had some perspective that would be interesting to chase down.

Flannery O’Connor’s said “people who read my works tend to think I’m a hillbilly nihilist, but I would like to be seen rather as a hillbilly Thomist,” and one of the things I think she’s clearly taken from St. Thomas is this understanding of what a sacrament is. In the Catholic tradition there are seven sacraments, and a sacrament is both a sign and an instrument of grace, so that it symbolizes what it also confides, that is to say the grace of God. She says very clearly in a number of places her stories are about how God’s grace works invisibly in the world for people who don’t have sacraments. So she’s trying to write as a kind of hillbilly Thomist about how God works in a non-Catholic terrain of southern Protestantism, of skeptical southern progressivists etc., and in that context looking at how kind of grace manifests itself in signs that are instruments, but you don’t have baptism, confession, and the Mass, which she says are the center of her life. You have instead odd and grotesque, historically surprising events where people encounter the grace of God. Someone throws the book across the room at someone they’re angry at, and the book is called “Human Development,” and when it smacks the person on the head you have the confiding of grace. The book is a sign and instrument of human development, and the absolute becomes manifest in this very concrete, sacramental way. In her story “Greenleaf” you have Miss May who’s gored to death by a bull, who represents Christ, and as the horn of the bull pierces her heart she looks up to heaven, and the bull is a sort of sacramental presence of grace. That’s very odd, it’s very provocative. It’s Catholic but with a very strange twist. The second thing I’d say about sacraments for Aquinas is they’re only suggestive of a glory to come. They’re not a full realization of what we will see in heaven, and so there’s a lot in Flannery O’Connor about a partial, almost secret unveiling of God in the world, leaving the reader with questions and leading the reader toward more questioning about God. So there’s a sort of mysterious ambivalence. If God’s at work in the world, we don’t find him very easily. His grace can explode onto the world, but it also leads us to a higher aspiration to see God, to know God beyond this world. That’s very Catholic. She talks about how she wants to stimulate an understanding of God’s grace hidden in the American South.

I think she’s trying to both teach and shock. Teach and shock are not opposed for her. She says that in a very secular world that we have trouble recognizing the sacred except under the signs of violence. But it’s not a violence that is from the outside. I mean she’s clear about that. The violence of the external, physical events that are shocking is meant to reflect an inner violence of the conversion of love, and she says this when she talks about the title of her book The Violent Bear it Away. She says St. Thomas says the violence that bears us away to Christ is the violence of love that allows us to overcome the defects of our own nature that’s fallen and that’s fragile and can be selfish and egoist. So it’s about the violence of love converting itself to God. The shocking violence of the exterior world is supposed to mirror the internal conversion of love. It’s not something that’s opposed to the will or destroying our freedom. It’s something opening our freedom. She’s very clear about that. Her stories are humorous because her stories are about liberation, but it’s often a liberation that comes despite our selves. We don’t want to be free. We actually want to be free from the love of God, and the love of God comes in kind of comic ways, almost violently frees us to be our better selves.

Flannery O’Connor was a very intuitive, I would almost say shoot-from-the-hip kind of Catholic. She had a deep intuitive sense of the truth in Catholic faith.

She says in one of her letters I am a Catholic not in the way some people are Baptists or Methodists, but in the way some people are atheists. It has a kind of evidential force for me that I find difficult to question’, not in the sense that she was an anti-intellectual. If anything she read avidly, lots of secular as well as religious authors and theologians. But there’s a sense in which she’s grounded in something prior to speculations or deductions or arguments. She’s got a deep intuitive sense of Christ present in the Mass. She says Mass is the stable pillar of her life, that it’s what makes life in the modern world tolerable for her. So she’s a fairly traditional Catholic, I think.

Flannery O’Connor says repeatedly in her letters to Betty Hester that dogma is not a force that’s anti-intellectual for a believing Catholic, nor does it cramp one’s freedom, but rather dogma preserves and safeguards mysteries that open the mind to contemplation and preserve the freedom of the person to approach God more intimately. So she sees dogma not as something anti-intellectual or hampering the development of the human person, but opening the human person up to the mystery of God. She was very concerned about the Catholic Church’s moral teachings in the sense that she was very committed to them. She knew in her own day about the controversy about the question of regulation of birth and birth control, and she was pretty clear that she was on the side of the church’s traditional teaching. She said we should be prepared to move over and get used to being crowded rather than anybody commit the least sin with regard to the Church’s teachings in this domain, so I don’t know how she would have reacted to the liturgical changes of Vatican II, but I think in terms of the teaching of the Catholic Church concerning doctrine and morals, she had a very deep reverence for the church’s tradition.

She says a southern writer is challenged to write as a Catholic because you’re writing in a Protestant culture. It’s not a Catholic culture, and so you’re showing how certain truths that Catholics may have even become numb to about their own faith can be discovered under grotesque or ironic forms by Protestants. She tells a story about this where she mentions a real event in the ’50s of a Tennessee revivalist minister who for his Lenten revival tied a living lamb by a chain to a cross for his congregation and then sacrificed it there in front of the congregation. She said, well, he may have been doing that for show, but I think that’s just as close to the Mass as he can get, and she says what he is doing there represents, in a certain ironic way, under forms that Catholics might not even recognize easily, a truth they’re living day to day in Mass. But she says if I wrote things that I think are truly grotesque, like if I wrote about people with totally meaningless lives, it might be considered normal in the north—she says that—but when I write about anything southern it would be considered grotesque in the north. She says in the south, because it’s Christ-haunted, you find, at least in her day and age she could say that, because it’s Christ haunted it’s not Christ-centered, you find she says a disfigured image of Christ in people’s suffering and in their brokenness, even if it’s disfigured and broken it’s better than no Christ at all. In the end of the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” when The Misfit kills the grandmother, and the blood of the grandmother is on his eyes, on his glasses, and he cleanses them, her death—he kills her because she’s compassionate to him. She’s compassionate to him because she sees he agonizes over the person of Christ, and there’s a moment in which grace touches her and saves her but also invites him to salvation, and his eyes are open for a moment by her blood, and he says she would have been a good woman if there had just been someone there to kill her every day of her life. And I think what Flannery O’Connor is saying in part is the Catholic life of expiation and suffering for others is what also makes us good people. We don’t have, as Catholics, someone there to shoot us every day of our life. What we have every day is the Catholic Mass. We die with Christ in the Mass, we live with him, and she says the suffering of human beings everywhere is in some way an initial participation of that mystery, an anticipation of redemption in Christ. So she’s looking at Southerners in the imperfections of their faith, their deep human imperfections, and she’s seeing how Christ is sort of hidden in them in ways that foreshadow or speak of Catholic realities, of God uniting us in our suffering to the mystery of the cross, so I think that there’s something like that going on.

Thomas Merton is a person whose whole life is characterized by movement, and even up until the end of his life he’s really trying to figure out what he believes in a certain way, and there’s a dynamic there that fascinated his generation, because it’s somebody really trying to find the truth whose a nonbeliever, who becomes open to Catholicism, who converts, who writes eloquently about his conversion, but he was restless, whereas with Flannery O’Connor you get the impression of somebody who accepted herself as a Catholic and as a person who’s Southern and as a person from the rural South, as a person who is sick and had to go home physically ill and live with her mother and be cared for until death. There’s a certain solidity to her, a bemusing certitude. But also, I think, more than Merton she’s fascinated by speaking with unbelievers. I think Merton is trying to articulate his experience of faith for his generation, how to believe in the world today. I think she’s much more interested in communicating traditional Catholic truths to people who are radically separated from the Christian tradition.

Sophocles points out the tragedies in life and the monstrous dimensions of human existence, and Flannery O’Connor doesn’t have a tragic worldview, but there’s a tragic moment in her stories. She’s very Augustinian. She says the truth of the doctrine of original sin is at the base of all my stories, and also the truth of redemption. So where she’s very different from a lot of our contemporary sensibilities is she thinks it’s both necessary, but also somewhat humorous, to see our fragilities and our weaknesses and our brokenness. She’s very interested in showing human brokenness and even our ugliness, not as an end in itself, I mean that’s where it is the tragic dimension, and almost the grotesque dimension, but it’s ultimately comic for her, because once you admit your brokenness, or you can admit your brokenness if you see the flip side of it, which is the mystery of redemption and grace, and the fact that God in the end is compassionate. So the way grace breaks in and makes use of our disillusionment with ourselves, the tragic conundrums we’re in, is almost playful. It’s almost a violent playfulness, but there’s a sort of gravity of love that comes into characters’ lives, disillusions them, shows them the tragic component of their life, shows them their brokenness, but also only ever does that to introduce them into something higher, which is God’s love and mercy, and there’s something comic about it in the way she writes about it.

I think the most important thing for contemporary Catholics about Flannery O’Connor’s work is that she has the mindset of a person who’s expecting to be misunderstood in contemporary culture. She’s writing provocatively, elliptically, suggestively about what she treasures most or believes in most deeply, the mystery of Christ, mystery of grace, but in a world where she expects to be misunderstood, perhaps resented, even despised, and that tension that animates her work is very suggestive for modern Catholics who increasingly understand themselves to be in a very secular surrounding society that doesn’t necessarily understand their viewpoints. So she’s trying to talk to people who are even hostile or very different in mindset. She has a very strong consciousness that she’s speaking to and with people who find Catholicism alien or strange, and she’s attempting to convey truths of the Catholic faith in elliptical or suggestive or inviting ways, provocative ways, but she wants to defy immediate expectations and instead move on to more substantive conversation, and she’s found a way to do that through a literary format, and I think that’s one of the great challenges for Catholics in an increasingly secular world is how do you talk about your faith when it’s likely to be perceived as alienating to people in ways that move beyond the initial constraints of provocation and into a deeper, substantive discussion, and Flannery O’Connor’s figured out a way to do that in a literary motif.

She is an artistic genius, so just on a natural level her work has an incredible originality to it, and she can embody something of the genius of her culture, so to speak, in a very raw, almost primitive way. She has this deep absolutism, this deep, concrete way of writing. She’s mastered the Southern dialect, so there’s something just as a literary art form very original and very inviting, and a lot of the people who originally read it were not particularly interested in the religious ideas, the religious content, and I think as time goes by, as people read more of her letters and see what the whole corpus of her writing is about, it becomes more evident that you have to have a theological level of reading to see her deepest aspirations. She is very explicit about that herself, and I suppose also because she says really, basically in her letters, the two choices in the modern world, she says that it’s—in rural Georgia 1955 the two choices in the modern world are really between nihilism or Roman Catholicism, and that’s a very odd viewpoint in Protestant, if I may say, Biblicist, southeastern culture in America in 1955 but that doesn’t seem like such a strange juxtaposition to us 50 years later. She talks about the advent of an age of nihilism, and I think she means by that an age in which all values seem relative and a matter of subjective preference, and it’s impossible to discern if there’s any transcendent meaning in life. She says that leaves you a humanity like certain chickens where they bred off the wings, made them smaller to get more white meat, so humanity becomes a bunch of wingless chickens. She says, “I think that’s what Nietzsche meant when he said God is dead.” In the absence of a value system in a relativistic world, people become just kind of non-vital. They lose their vitality, and she’s offering up a vision of a deep Catholic vitality based on grace, based on a sacramental view of the world.

Martin Heidegger

I think we’re living in a time when there’s an increased de-Christianization or secularization of contemporary culture, and what happens in that sociologically is that a majority of people who were previously educated in the Protestant or the Catholic tradition tend to gravitate toward a more secularized stance of interpretation of the world, so that to be a Christian in contemporary Europe or America tends to make you more of an anomaly. That being the case, the people who actually persevere or tend to continue to want to be religious tend to have a countercultural identity, and you see that more in evangelical movements and in the Roman Catholic movement in America. So young people today who are devout Roman Catholics tend to expect to be misunderstood, maybe even disagreed with frequently, so at the same time their interest in recovering their tradition, also because they feel like it’s under threat, the identity of the very church and her tradition is perceived as being subject to perhaps ceasing to be.

There’s no question we live in a more secularized America than in the age of Flannery O’Connor. I don’t know what her influence will continue to be, but I think the fact that she understands her writing to be geared towards a very secularized world, or that the real choice in her writing is between a robust Catholic identity or capitulation to a very secularized world, I think that tension or juxtaposition is something she lived very personally in her own decision to be a believer. I think that she continues to speak to people who are confronting that decision. She read Nietzsche, she read Sartre, she read Heidegger. And Hulga or Joy, in the story “Good Country People,” is a person who moves from a cynical, dark view of reality based on her own very superficial understanding of Heidegger, pseudo-intellectual, really. Flannery O’Connor’s making fun of herself and moves to this shocking conversion of realizing her need for grace in the end of the story, at least we can suppose, I think, and she really represents Flannery O’Connor herself who walked on crutches while she was writing the story, who doesn’t have a leg to stand on, so to speak, if you put her in terms of Joy or Hulga, and who discovered her need for grace, that she can’t just live by her own powers, and has moved from a secular worldview to a religious worldview. I think that the juxtaposition in Flannery O’Connor’s life itself between the decision to practice her Catholic faith versus her encounter with secular thinkers like Nietzsche and Joyce and Heidegger, that juxtaposition continues to be one that is very visceral for a lot of Americans, or a lot of modern people, that her writing speaks to—the decision between a radical unbelief, which is in her character Hazel Motes before his conversion versus radical discipleship in a very secular world, which is Hazel Motes after he’s converted and puts his eyes out and converts to God in a really radical way. She, of course, sees him as a saint. He’s a nihilist before, he’s a saint afterwards, and that is an interesting commentary on options that a lot of people would consider still viable options, to pursue a life of God or to pursue a life without God. So she’s really trying to put the choice in front of us.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: The festival of Eid al-Adha begins with sacrifice. Those participating in the hajj, and all other Muslim families with the financial means, slaughter a sheep, lamb, goat, camel, or cow.

DAWUD WALID (Council on American Islamic Relations Michigan): This sacrifice is in remembrance of what the Qu’ran says, as well as the Bible, of when Abraham was inspired or he had a dream that he was to sacrifice one of his sons, and then God told Abraham that he did not have to sacrifice his son, and a ram came, and Abraham then sacrificed the ram.

LAWTON: American Muslims typically buy meat slaughtered according to Islamic requirements from a market or grocery store. The immediate family eats one-third of the meat. Another third is shared with the larger community of friends and relatives, and the rest is donated to the poor.

WALID: It’s a religious obligation for us to give to other people. We would not be good Muslims or following our religion, because the third pillar of Islam is charity, so we’re obligated to give charity.

LAWTON: In the United States, recipients include places such as Gleaner’s Community Food Bank of southeastern Michigan. They partner with over 400 outlets in their network of feeding programs to distribute thousands of pounds of frozen lamb meat donated by the Muslim community annually.

JOHN KASTLER (Gleaner’s Community Food Bank): It’s a high-protein item, and it’s certainly the type of food product that we really like to provide during the winter months where you get a nice, hearty meal out of the donation. Groups like the Salvation Army, the Cabbage & Soup Kitchen, the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, and different feeding programs around town will be able to enjoy this blessing.

LAWTON: Through the soup kitchens they operate, mosques and Islamic centers also serve as distribution sites. Those who come in to pray are offered bags of lamb to take home, as are all non-Muslims seeking food assistance.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Before President Obama left for Asia he visited Fort Hood in Texas, where 13 members of the military were killed allegedly by an Army psychiatrist who is an American-born Muslim:

President Obama at Fort Hood memorial service: “No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice—in this world and the next.”

The Fort Hood killings have raised questions about whether the accused shooter’s zeal about Islam could have played any role in the tragedy and about being Muslim in the US military.  Imam Yahya Hendi is the Muslim chaplain at both the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland and at Georgetown University in Washington. He had met Major Hasan.

Imam, welcome. Is there anything in what you’ve heard or read about Major Hasan that could explain to you what happened?

The Obamas at Fort Hood memorial service

AM YAHYA HENDI: Actually, no. It is a shock for me. I met Major Hasan a few times, and every time I met him I understood him to be a loyal American, loving of his country, and he wanted to join the military in support of America.

ABERNETHY: Is there anything about his being a very devout Muslim that could explain to you his shooting?

HENDI: For me it was….

ABERNETHY: …his alleged shooting.

HENDI: For me, what happened on that Thursday (November 5) has nothing to do with Islam. Islam does not stand in support of such shooting. Actually, according to Islamic law what he did was criminal, immoral, and unethical and against the teachings of Islam in every way, shape, and form.

ABERNETHY: When he apparently—when he began shooting he shouted out “Allahu akbar” in Arabic—God is great.

HENDI: Yeah. You know Muslims use that phrase, “Allahu akbar,” like “Oh, gosh” in English, “Oh, my Lord, Oh, my God.” It does not really have a religious motivation always and all the time.

ABERNETHY: You have counseled a lot of Muslim soldiers and sailors and marines. Is there any conflict for some of them, at least sometimes, between being Muslim and then having to go some place where they are fighting Muslims?

HENDI: You know, overall most of the soldiers we have, Muslim soldiers in the US military, are loyal Americans and have joined the military, again, to defeat terrorism, to defeat extremism. After all, on September 11 we were attacked, and Islam gives Muslims and America the right to defend itself against terrorism and, therefore, Muslims should be proud and are proud of their service in the US military.

ABERNETHY: There’s a concept, if I understand it correctly, within Islam called the ummah, which is a sense of intense brotherhood with all other Muslims. Now does that conflict with having to go into Afghanistan?

HENDI: Actually, no. If I love my brother and when my brother does something wrong, Islam requires me to stop him from his wrongdoing. You know, Prophet Muhammad—and in the Koran we are told that we have to enjoin good and forbid evil. What happened on September 11 and the aftermath of that terrorism, extremism, what is happening in Pakistan, suicide bombing, and in Afghanistan is against the teachings of Islam, and Muslims are required to join any military in self-defense and to defeat terrorism.

ABERNETHY: What about in the Muslim community in this country? What’s going on there since the shootings?

HENDI: You know, American Muslims feel proud of being American, but at the same time are suspected on daily basis. Their religion is under siege; the community is under siege because of suspects. What we want America to do is to understand that we are a part of the fabric of America. We love America, our country, and we want to fight with everyone in defense of America.

ABERNETHY: Imam Yahya Hendi, many thanks.

HENDI: Thank you.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In 2002, we aired a profile of the young, bestselling poet Mattie Stepanek and his mother Jeni. They both suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy. The messages of hope and peace in Mattie’s writings inspired millions of people around the world. Mattie died in 2004, but Jeni is working to keep his memory alive. She talked with Kim Lawton about how her faith gives her the strength to move forward.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s standing room only at the Border’s Bookstore in Bethesda, Maryland, where Jeni Stepanek is talking about her new book called Messenger. The book is about her son Mattie, the New York Times bestselling inspirational poet who died five years ago at the age of 13. Mattie had a rare form of muscular dystrophy, the same disease that afflicts Jeni. This is the store where Mattie had launched his books, too, and the fact that he’s not here tonight highlights the loss that’s still raw.

JENI STEPANEK: Since he died, I’ve hit some very, very low points. I have had mornings where I’m not quite sure what the sane reason is to bother getting out of bed. I always find one, and if I can’t find one, what I’ve learned is to allow other people to give me a sane reason to get out of bed.

LAWTON: One of Jeni’s biggest reasons for getting out of bed every day is her quest to keep Mattie’s legacy alive. In his short life Mattie wrote six books of poetry and a collection of essays that he collaborated on with Jimmy Carter. He became a friend to the rich and famous and touched millions of people around the world with his message of hope and peace.

MATTIE STEPANEK: God gives me hope that there is something greater than us, something better and bigger than the here and now that can help us live.

LAWTON: Mattie told us in an interview seven years ago that he believed God had a plan for his life.

MATTIE STEPANEK: I feel that God has given me a very special opportunity that I should not let go to waste. I use the gift he has given me.

LAWTON: Jeni says from the time he was just a little boy, Mattie told her God was putting messages in his heart.

JENI STEPANEK: And I began to get concerned, actually, and ask him questions like, “Are you hearing voices? Is God’s voice a man’s voice or a woman’s voice?” And he looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, “Mommy, God’s voice is not like this. It’s a message in my heart.”

LAWTON: Mattie believed God wanted him to give voice to those messages, and he did that through his poems, which he called his “heartsongs.” Jeni says there were several basic themes.

JENI STEPANEK: Hope is real, peace is possible, and life is worthy. The best I can understand it is that it really is the universal truth. It’s what Jesus Christ taught us, it’s what Gandhi teaches us, it’s what Martin Luther King teaches us, it’s what any good speaker, any peacemaker teaches us: In giving we shall receive, in doing good, good happens.

LAWTON: Since Mattie died, Jeni has gotten thousands of letters and emails from people who say he continues to inspire them. There’s even a grassroots movement of people who want the Roman Catholic Church to open an official investigation into whether Mattie should be recognized as a saint.

JENI STEPANEK: I have had people who have contacted me to say they believe Mattie has interceded in their lives. They believe that Mattie has healed their child, or touched their spirit, or turned them back to God, or prevented them from suicide.

LAWTON: As the mom of a kid who loved practical jokes and didn’t always make his bed, she finds it all humbling and, a bit overwhelming.

JENI STEPANEK: I feel the responsibility to share with people the truth of my son’s life. What I don’t want people doing is thinking, oh Mattie, you know, and putting him up on a pedestal: he’s a little guru, he was perfect, he never got angry, he never got sad, he only spoke bits of wisdom. I mean, he wasn’t. That’s not who Mattie was.

LAWTON: Jeni chairs a foundation named for Mattie that tries to make his message as accessible as possible. There are school curriculum projects based on Mattie’s writings, and parks like this one in Rockville, Maryland, that has a life-sized statue of Mattie and his beloved service dog, Micah, who is now Jeni’s. Jeni herself has also become an inspiration to many. Mattie was her fourth child to die of the disease that she didn’t even know she was carrying.

JENI STEPANEK: When I was having these children, I did not know I was going to give birth to children with this condition. When I was having children I was apparently healthy, active, running two to five miles a day, coaching and playing sports, working on my first doctoral degree.

LAWTON: She was diagnosed when Mattie was nearly two, after her oldest two children had already died and her third child was also dying from the disease. She and her husband divorced, so her focus became being a single mom.

JENI STEPANEK: So even though you grieve the loss of your child, when there’s still another living child, not that the grief isn’t there, but you have to focus on celebrating life with that child, with the one that’s still alive. When Mattie died, that’s when the grief became so overwhelming, because where do you put your mommy role?

LAWTON: Jeni says her Catholic faith helped her cope, and she says despite some times of questioning God, her faith has grown dramatically.

JENI STEPANEK: I’m very good at, through prayer, giving God a to-do list, all right? Dear God, this is where I need you, and this is how you can meet my needs, and I give God the little to-do list, and I think I began to realize towards the end of Mattie’s life prayer is not just giving God your wishes. It’s asking to bring God into whatever the moments are in my day.

LAWTON: She also has a close circle of friends, chief among them her roommate, Sandy Newcomb, and Sandy’s extended family, whom Mattie called their “kin family.” Jeni says they’ve made all the difference in her life.

SANDY NEWCOMB: I’d like to think in some way that my support of Jeni and Mattie has helped them to be able to do what God wants them to do.

LAWTON: Jeni’s own health continues to deteriorate. She says the most difficult thing is giving up independence and control.

JENI STEPANEK: It’s really hard knowing I will always be the passenger in a car. I will never be driving again. That’s a really, really tough thing when I’m a doer, a giver, a be-er, and you have to be the recipient and call someone and ask them to do something for you. That’s a tough lesson for me.

LAWTON: Although people tell her they’ve felt Mattie’s spirit, Jeni never has.

JENI STEPANEK: And what I would give to have my son come and stand and just say “hi” or “yo,” just say anything, just touch me. But I know that that would be wrong, and I think that my son is wiser than that, because if my son came and spoke to me or touched me, and I knew without doubt this is my son, I so miss him that I’m afraid I’d never emotionally or physically be able to move from that spot.

LAWTON: She says near the end of his life Mattie knew he was dying and tried to prepare her. But she couldn’t accept it.

JENI STEPANEK: It was one of my mommy decisions that I regret. You know, I should’ve just put my arm around him and said that must be really difficult. You must feel very alone. I just, I couldn’t tend to it, and I feel very badly. I will forever feel badly about that. But I don’t think he holds that against me. I think he knew that I was being a mommy.

LAWTON: Still, she says Mattie gave her the hope and faith to move forward.

JENI STEPANEK: He said when I’m gone promise me you will choose to inhale, not breathe merely to exist, and that means finding some worthy reason to move into each next moment, and that’s the most difficult choice I face every single day. But it’s the most worthy choice.

LAWTON: She says she’s learned that it’s not how long you live that matters, but the depth with which you live those days. I’m Kim Lawton in Rockville, Maryland.