RON HANSEN: A reading of the holy Gospel according to Matthew.

CONGREGATION: Glory be to our Lord.

BOB FAW, correspondent: Nearly every day, as he has for most of his adult life, Ron Hansen attends Mass. For this deacon at Saint Joseph of Cupertino parish in California, the ceremony brings both comfort and renewal.

RON HANSEN: I find nourishment in it. It’s a way of being quiet for a while and to let my mind focus on just communication with God.

FAW: Hansen’s religious sensibility isn’t limited to rituals like this. It also infuses all eight novels written by this highly acclaimed author.

(to Hansen): You really do see writing as a kind of sacrament then, don’t you?

HANSEN: Yes, it’s a witness to what God is doing in the world. We’re supposed to worship and praise, and I can’t think of a better way of worshiping and praising than to write poetry or fiction.

Scott: (from television film “Missing Pieces”): “Why? Why did you have to come?”

Atticus: “Because you are my son.”

FAW: “Missing Pieces,” for example, is the made-for-TV movie of Hansen’s novel Atticus, the story of both mystery and the parable of the prodigal son.

HANSEN: I started with the idea of my grandfather and really of God walking on earth. I thought of Atticus as a God figure, because the prodigal son story is of a God figure and human being figure.

Atticus: My, my, my.

FAW: Hansen’s Assassination of Jesse James explores the relationship between the legendary outlaw played in the film adaptation by Brad Pitt.

Jesse James: (from the film “Assassination of Jesse James”) “Open that safe.”

FAW: And Bob Ford, an outlaw who once worshiped James.

Jesse James: “I can’t figure you out. You want to be like me, or do you want to be me?”

HANSEN: It’s about hero worship and how you kill the things you love. I think Buddha once said you must kill all your teachers, and that’s what I think was going on with Bob Ford and Jesse James.

FAW: And Hansen draws on the biblical story of Cain and Abel when Bob Ford shoots Jesse James in the back. Ford, who expected to be praised for that, was instead reviled.

HANSEN: How do you become for a short time a hero and then become one of the most loathsome personalities in the world?

FAW: Like Cain, a “fugitive and a vagabond on the earth.”

HANSEN: Right, yes. But I wanted to have a sense of how do you, once you’ve done that, how do you redeem yourself?

FAW: Does Bob Ford really find redemption?

HANSEN: He doesn’t. No.

FAW: Ron Hansen grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, along with his twin brother and three sisters in a Catholic household. He graduated from Creighton University and the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he studied with John Irving and John Cheever.

(to Hansen): Do you have a favorite? Can an author have a favorite? Is it like a child?

HANSEN: It’s like a child.

FAW: You can’t.

HANSEN: Yeah. Probably Mariette is my favorite.

FAW: Hansen does extensive research for each novel. One of his best known, Mariette in Ecstasy, was based in part on two saints who lived in Europe in the 1800s. Mariette in Ecstasy is the story of a beautiful nun who bears the wounds of Christ, the stigmata, and who is banished from her order.

HANSEN: I developed this idea of the stigmata as a kind of metaphor for a passionate love affair with Christ, and that was the stumbling block for the other nuns. And I wanted to have at the heart of it a kind of questionableness, so you could read it all the way through and say, “She’s making this up,” or you could say, “She’s the real thing.” I didn’t want to come down one way or the other. My own impression was that she was the real thing.

FAW: But perhaps the clearest sense of Hansen’s own faith is in his novel Exiles. with its gripping portrait of the priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, who found God and was still tormented.

HANSEN: I loved his poetry, I loved his language, and I loved the fact that he was miserable. At the same time he discovered that he could bring in his poetry and make it a reflection of his spirituality.

FAW: Hansen, a talented painter, didn’t just paint a portrait of Hopkins and study his poetry.

(to Hansen): You said at some point that you have actually prayed to him…

HANSEN: Yes.

FAW: …and have been answered.

HANSEN: Yes. I’ve prayed to Thomas Merton. I’ve prayed to a lot of people who have died, just because I knew them better.

FAW: And you invoke their name at the outset of the prayer?

HANSEN: No. I just imagine them sitting there opposite me, talking just as I am to you and try to express what’s going wrong or what I need an answer to, and sometimes they give me the answers.

FAW: Hansen, once the deacon at Santa Clara Mission on the campus of the Jesuit college Santa Clara University, has been teaching English and creative writing there for the last 16 years. He is no fan of so-called “Christian fiction,” which Hansen says “is often in fact pallid allegory, a form of sermonizing.” That’s not for him.

HANSEN: I’m trying to pass on the good news, and it might not necessarily be the good news of Jesus Christ but it might be the good news of this beautiful world we live in and how we can make it better. So that’s the evangelism I’m looking for. I’m trying to change people in subtle ways, but not to convert them.

FAW: He says faith-inspired fiction and religion can go hand in hand because each faces what he calls “the imponderables of life.”

(to Hansen): You say fiction and religion often share the same goals?

HANSEN: Yes.

FAW: In what way?

HANSEN: Essentially fiction shows you how to live a moral life or how to avoid an immoral life, and religion is trying to do that same thing, but fiction provides you models rather than lessons.

(to his wife): I’ve got that Juno Diaz book to read on the plane…

FAW: Now 63, Hansen is happily married to writer Bo Caldwell, whose novel City of Tranquil Light was inspired by her missionary grandparents.

If you think Ron Hansen’s role as a Roman Catholic deacon and as author of racy, sometimes salacious material might conflict, well, think again.

HANSEN: Fiction has to do that story, has to do the story of people making terrible mistakes and seeing how it could have been different or how they came out of it in a positive way. And that’s what the role of religion is, to do exactly the same thing.

FAW: From Jesse James then, to a beautiful nun, from Atticus to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hansen says he has come to believe that religion need not be sack cloth and ashes.

HANSEN: That’s definitely not what God is looking for. God is looking for a connection, one on oneness with people. That feeling of God watching over you and loving you and embracing you and having that connection–that’s very rewarding, and that’s what gives people steel so they can stand all the terrible things that might happen in a person’s life.

FAW: Reflections of a Catholic deacon who entertains as he evangelizes, uniting the worlds of fiction and faith.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Cupertino, California.

Originally broadcast July 16, 2010

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Abraham Verghese has all the credentials and degrees befitting a professor at Stanford Medical School. But he is best known and acclaimed for his writing — two best-selling memoirs and a new work of fiction that evoke a different kind of medical vocation.

ABRAHAM VERGHESE: My desire to be a physician had a lot to do with that sense of medicine as a ministry of healing, not just a science. And not even just a science and an art, but also a calling, also a ministry.

DE SAM LAZARO: His goal is to have today’s medical students aspire similarly to a calling­ as much as a career in medicine, to awaken a more basic curiosity as they sharpen their clinical acumen. These third-year medical students were studying abnormalities on a scan, specifically the prominence of certain blood vessels.

VERGHESE: (Speaking to students) This is what’s called pulmonary redistribution. Have you heard that term? It’s an early sign of heart failure. Who’s got good hand veins that I can borrow?

DE SAM LAZARO: Verghese offered a simple physics explanation of why blood vessels should not normally be visible above the level of the heart.

VERGHESE: (speaking to students) The level of her right atrium is about here. So watch what happens as I raise her hand. You still see the veins, nice three dimension, right? See how they’re flattening out? Now they are gone.

DE SAM LAZARO: The bottom line: Well before an x-ray, a doctor might spot telltale signs of disease.

VERGHESE: (speaking to students) And you see their neck veins and they’re not coughing, speaking, singing, straining, they have increased venous pressure.

DE SAM LAZARO: Increasingly, he says students and practitioners of medicine in the West rely on technology in a system that stresses cognitive knowledge and machines over the skill that comes from touch and feel.

VERGHESE: I’m the first to admit that the resolution of a hand feeling the belly doesn’t compare with the resolution of a CAT scan scanning the belly, but only my hand can say that it hurts at this spot and not at this spot. Only my hand can say that. Only my hand can say that this pulsatile mass, which might be an aneurism, is also painful, which is therefore maybe a leaking aneurism. You know, there are nuances to the exam that no machine is going to give you.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s a theme Verghese has sounded repeatedly over the years, writing in magazines, including the New Yorker and Atlantic, and now in a best-seller called “Cutting for Stone.” It fulfills a long-held desire to write fiction, as he told this book club in Menlo Park, California.

VERGHESE: (Speaking at book club) Dorothy Allison, a wonderful American writer, she says fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.

DE SAM LAZARO: The setting for Verghese’s novel is far from Silicon Valley — a mission hospital in Ethiopia. It is a textured, 650-page narrative, set amid that country’s turmoil in the 60s and 70s. Its stories of medicine, doctors and future doctors at the hospital all illustrate what the author calls the “Samaritan role” of the healer. Verghese went from med school in India to Boston, Tennessee, Texas, then Stanford. He was born and raised in Ethiopia to parents originally from Kerala, India and from its Syriac Orthodox traditions. Faith was a big part of life for this and other expatriate communities in the Addis Ababa of his youth, which may unwittingly have shaped some of the novel’s characters.

Woman at Book Club: You said that what really inspired you to write the book was you wanted to write a book that would get people interested perhaps in medicine. But there was so much in the book about faith and different types of faith, and so how did you come to have so much of this, of another theme in your book?

VERGHESE: Well, you know, the honest answer is I don’t really know. It all just sort of evolved that way. And I think when you’re in medicine, you agonize over matters of faith.

DE SAM LAZARO: The confluence of faith and medicine, and the mission hospital itself, attracted Duke University Divinity School dean Gregory Jones to Verghese’s book. It was a timely find, just before a recent trip to discuss his church’s own mission work.

GREGORY JONES, Duke University: It becomes a shaping institution that plays a really significant role in any developing country and one that we need to pay a lot more attention to. My trip to London was actually to deal with issues around southern Sudan, and so I was struck by the significant role this hospital was playing in the novel about Ethiopia.

DE SAM LAZARO: And even though its setting seems distant, Jones says the novel’s context is very relevant to many students he sees at Duke.

Gregory Jones

JONES: I think a lot of Christians go into nursing or medicine or other health-related vocations out of a deeply formed and felt Christian vocation, but sometimes the practice of health care, in the United States particularly, often pushes those apart. And I think the novel portrays that in a really beautiful way.

VERGHESE: I joke but only half joke that if you show up in an American hospital missing a finger, no one will believe you until they get a CAT scan, MRI and orthopedic consult.

DE SAM LAZAROAll the emphasis on machines, he says, adds cost to the health care system, and comes at the expense of one of our most important rituals — a visit with one’s doctor.

VERGHESE: Rituals are about transformation. You know, we marry with great ceremony to signal a transformation. We are baptized in a ritual to signal a transformation. The ritual of one individual coming to another and confessing to them things they wouldn’t tell their spouse, their preacher, their rabbi, and then even more incredibly, disrobing and allowing touch, which in any other context would be assault. You know, tell me that that’s not a ritual of great significance. If we short-change the ritual by not being attentive, or you are inputting into the computer while the patient’s talking to you, you basically are destroying the opportunity for the transformation. And what is the transformation? It’s the sealing of the patient-physician bond.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ironically, Verghese says, research is emerging that corroborates the importance of this bond, the virtue of the Samaritan healer.

VERGHESE: We’re learning that you can have a powerful effect on patients, or a powerful negative effect on patients based on context, based on your tone of voice. They are actually associated with significant chemical changes in the brain. The Parkinson’s patients’ dopamine levels go up with a placebo. We’re now able to show that the words of comfort trigger biological reactions which are the very things that you want, and you can use drugs to get there, or you can use words of comfort to get there, which would make your drugs so much more effective. It’s an incredible insight, and you know, a couple of decades now of practicing medicine, it’s lovely to come full circle to where I started, but with the science to back it up.

DE SAM LAZARO: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

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Originally published July 16, 2010

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FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Abraham Verghese has all the credentials and degrees befitting a professor at Stanford Medical School. But he is best known and acclaimed for his writing — two best-selling memoirs and a new work of fiction that evoke a different kind of medical vocation.

ABRAHAM VERGHESE: My desire to be a physician had a lot to do with that sense of medicine as a ministry of healing, not just a science. And not even just a science and an art, but also a calling, also a ministry.

DE SAM LAZARO: His goal is to have today’s medical students aspire similarly to a calling­ as much as a career in medicine, to awaken a more basic curiosity as they sharpen their clinical acumen. These third-year medical students were studying abnormalities on a scan, specifically the prominence of certain blood vessels.

VERGHESE: (Speaking to students) This is what’s called pulmonary redistribution. Have you heard that term? It’s an early sign of heart failure. Who’s got good hand veins that I can borrow?

DE SAM LAZARO: Verghese offered a simple physics explanation of why blood vessels should not normally be visible above the level of the heart.

VERGHESE: (speaking to students) The level of her right atrium is about here. So watch what happens as I raise her hand. You still see the veins, nice three dimension, right? See how they’re flattening out? Now they are gone.

DE SAM LAZARO: The bottom line: Well before an x-ray, a doctor might spot telltale signs of disease.

VERGHESE: (speaking to students) And you see their neck veins and they’re not coughing, speaking, singing, straining, they have increased venous pressure.

DE SAM LAZARO: Increasingly, he says students and practitioners of medicine in the West rely on technology in a system that stresses cognitive knowledge and machines over the skill that comes from touch and feel.

VERGHESE: I’m the first to admit that the resolution of a hand feeling the belly doesn’t compare with the resolution of a CAT scan scanning the belly, but only my hand can say that it hurts at this spot and not at this spot. Only my hand can say that. Only my hand can say that this pulsatile mass, which might be an aneurism, is also painful, which is therefore maybe a leaking aneurism. You know, there are nuances to the exam that no machine is going to give you.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s a theme Verghese has sounded repeatedly over the years, writing in magazines, including the New Yorker and Atlantic, and now in a best-seller called “Cutting for Stone.” It fulfills a long-held desire to write fiction, as he told this book club in Menlo Park, California.

VERGHESE: (Speaking at book club) Dorothy Allison, a wonderful American writer, she says fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.

DE SAM LAZARO: The setting for Verghese’s novel is far from Silicon Valley — a mission hospital in Ethiopia. It is a textured, 650-page narrative, set amid that country’s turmoil in the 60s and 70s. Its stories of medicine, doctors and future doctors at the hospital all illustrate what the author calls the “Samaritan role” of the healer. Verghese went from med school in India to Boston, Tennessee, Texas, then Stanford. He was born and raised in Ethiopia to parents originally from Kerala, India and from its Syriac Orthodox traditions. Faith was a big part of life for this and other expatriate communities in the Addis Ababa of his youth, which may unwittingly have shaped some of the novel’s characters.

Woman at Book Club: You said that what really inspired you to write the book was you wanted to write a book that would get people interested perhaps in medicine. But there was so much in the book about faith and different types of faith, and so how did you come to have so much of this, of another theme in your book?

VERGHESE: Well, you know, the honest answer is I don’t really know. It all just sort of evolved that way. And I think when you’re in medicine, you agonize over matters of faith.

DE SAM LAZARO: The confluence of faith and medicine, and the mission hospital itself, attracted Duke University Divinity School dean Gregory Jones to Verghese’s book. It was a timely find, just before a recent trip to discuss his church’s own mission work.

GREGORY JONES, Duke University: It becomes a shaping institution that plays a really significant role in any developing country and one that we need to pay a lot more attention to. My trip to London was actually to deal with issues around southern Sudan, and so I was struck by the significant role this hospital was playing in the novel about Ethiopia.

DE SAM LAZARO: And even though its setting seems distant, Jones says the novel’s context is very relevant to many students he sees at Duke.

Gregory Jones

JONES: I think a lot of Christians go into nursing or medicine or other health-related vocations out of a deeply formed and felt Christian vocation, but sometimes the practice of health care, in the United States particularly, often pushes those apart. And I think the novel portrays that in a really beautiful way.

VERGHESE: I joke but only half joke that if you show up in an American hospital missing a finger, no one will believe you until they get a CAT scan, MRI and orthopedic consult.

DE SAM LAZARO: All the emphasis on machines, he says, adds cost to the health care system, and comes at the expense of one of our most important rituals — a visit with one’s doctor.

VERGHESERituals are about transformation. You know, we marry with great ceremony to signal a transformation. We are baptized in a ritual to signal a transformation. The ritual of one individual coming to another and confessing to them things they wouldn’t tell their spouse, their preacher, their rabbi, and then even more incredibly, disrobing and allowing touch, which in any other context would be assault. You know, tell me that that’s not a ritual of great significance. If we short-change the ritual by not being attentive, or you are inputting into the computer while the patient’s talking to you, you basically are destroying the opportunity for the transformation. And what is the transformation? It’s the sealing of the patient-physician bond.

DE SAM LAZARO: Ironically, Verghese says, research is emerging that corroborates the importance of this bond, the virtue of the Samaritan healer.

VERGHESE: We’re learning that you can have a powerful effect on patients, or a powerful negative effect on patients based on context, based on your tone of voice. They are actually associated with significant chemical changes in the brain. The Parkinson’s patients’ dopamine levels go up with a placebo. We’re now able to show that the words of comfort trigger biological reactions which are the very things that you want, and you can use drugs to get there, or you can use words of comfort to get there, which would make your drugs so much more effective. It’s an incredible insight, and you know, a couple of decades now of practicing medicine, it’s lovely to come full circle to where I started, but with the science to back it up.

DE SAM LAZARO: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro.

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 Dickinson, 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’Connor’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.

Father Thomas Joseph White

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.

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

Brad Gooch, author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor

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’Connor 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.

The church of their childhood was gone, the white clapboard church with the steeply pitched roof and the abbreviated spire. It had been replaced by a much costlier building, monumental in style though modest in scale, with a crenelated Norman bell tower at one corner and a rose window above the massy entrance. Someone whose historical notions were sufficiently addled might imagine that centuries of plunder and dilapidation had left this last sturdy remnant of grandeur, that the bell tower might have sunk a dozen feet into the ground as ages passed. The building was reconsidered once or twice as money ran out, but the basic effect answered their hopes, more or less. “Anglicanism!” her father had said, when he saw the plans. “Utter capitulation!” His objections startled the elders, but did not interest them particularly, so they drew discreet conclusions about his mental state. Nothing is more glaringly obvious than discretion of that kind, since it assumes impaired sensitivity in the one whose feelings it would spare. “As if I were a child!” her father said more than once, when the decorous turmoil of his soul happened to erupt at the dinner table.

This was a grief his children had never anticipated. Nor had they imagined that their father’s body could become a burden to him, and an embarrassment, too. He was sure his feebleness inspired condescensions of every kind, and he was alert for them, eager to show that nothing got past him, furious on slight pretexts. The seven of them telephoned back and forth daily for months. He was in graver pain than he was accustomed to, and his dear old wife was failing. He was not himself. Ames sat with him for hours and hours, though even he was not above suspicion. They pooled strategies for softening the inevitable blow of his retirement, which would have been a mercy if it had come about under other circumstances. Ah well. He came back to himself, finally, reconciled to loss and sorrow and waiting on the Lord.

Now Glory was the family emissary. At holidays they went as a delegation, there to signal reconciliation not quite so complete as to induce her father to struggle up those stone steps. The no longer new pastor was youngish, plump, smiling. His admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr brought him to the brink of plagiarism now and then, but he meant well. She was always the object of his special cordiality, which irritated her.

For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows looking out on God’s good world, with God’s good sunlight pouring in through those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church.

One of the stories in your book is about an anatomy class. In it you refer to the sacred study of medicine and to monk-like medical students. You use almost sacramental language to talk about human anatomy. What is the common thread between those two worlds and the two vocabularies of medicine and the spiritual or religious life?

I certainly think that the medical student enters a world that is full of ritual and that is full of new meanings to familiar things. For instance, the human body, which you mention as an important part, of course, of the anatomy class, is very familiar to all of us, but by becoming a medical student one finds oneself in a position of dissecting that human body and coming to know it in a very different way. None of this is easy. Like a religious vocation, all of it requires both a great deal of work as well as a giving of self and an immersion in something that was not previously part of one’s world view.

Spiritual life has as much to do with story and narrative, it seems, as medicine does. How do these three things come together?

I really do agree that medicine and narrative and spirituality intersect. Narrative — of course we can all see immediately that we are interested in stories about people because we are human, and we are inherently curious about what other human possibilities there may be. Medicine is also about narrative, and when a patient comes in to see me as a physician and when they tell me their symptoms and their experiences, what they are telling me is the first part of a story. Really, my job is to understand that story and to be able to interpret it and to tell them how the story goes from there, or to tell them the second part of the story, and without that the task and the encounter between doctor and patient is not satisfying, unless there is that story. When we come to spirituality, I think that there is a similarity because, again, in all religions people seek to understand where they came from, where they are going, and where they fit right now. So I think you are quite right. I think these three phenomena, these three enterprises, do have narrative in common.

The anatomy class story involves a cadaver with an interesting tattoo: “The Lode Keeps Me — Mark 16.” A biblical story about the preparation of Jesus’ body for burial and his resurrection figures importantly. Is there any basis in reality for the tattoo? What do the medical students learn from it?

My own anatomy class was a very important experience for me, because it was the first point in my education when I understood that the doctor relates to the human body and to the patient in multiple ways, and maybe you might even say sort of in transcendent ways, because the doctor relates at so many different levels. The doctor relates to the symptoms that are being expressed, to their understanding of the physiology, to their understanding of the statistics and odds that surround treatment. So there are different intersecting layers of understanding that are happening, and that first struck me full in the face as a young early medical student when I began to dissect, and this human stuff was flesh and bone and blood. I should say that the tattoo used is a work of fiction, and there was no such tattoo, for better or for worse. For me there is something of a second life, a second gift, in the anatomical gift that some people choose to make to science and to the study of medicine. The anatomy lab spoke to my feeling that we as human beings live very mortally and very physically, and yet that’s really not all there is to it. I am a practicing Christian, so the Jesus story is a very important story for me, and when I think about that story, even if we step away from its core religious importance, simply as a story the story of a man dying and coming to life again is a story about us as beings transcending the mere flesh that we inhabit.

Last year you wrote a piece in the Toronto Star about your church and its meaning for you. Can you say more about that?

St. Stephen-in-the-Fields is a lovely little church, and the reason it was called St. Stephen in the Fields was that at the time that it was built it was on the outskirts beyond the university of the very early place that we now know as modern Toronto. You had to go down beyond where there were the paved roads of any kind or defined roads even and go down this little dirt path — this was in the 19th century — to get to St. Stephen-in-the-Fields. That’s how it acquired the name. Now it’s a church that sits in a place called Kensington Market, a vibrant multicultural place, which to me embodies a lot of what a functioning multicultural society should be. It’s sort of a boiling pot of all sorts of things happening, and my church happens to be one of the things in that pot. One of the difficulties a lot of urban churches face its that it’s hard firstly to get enough people to come into the church, and frankly many of those churches serve people with needs, and those people’s pocketbooks are not as amply padded as some other pocketbooks. There’s a natural difficulty in a lot of these churches surviving financially. That’s kind of the situation that St. Stephen-in-the Fields finds itself. I think it’s a great church, and I think it should stick around.

In the piece you describe yourself as a modern church-goer (”faithful, critical, and hard to please”) searching for a place to pray and finding a spiritual home that “forces me to scrutinize my faith,” that “shields us from some of the compromises of the rest of the world” and “stands in the fields of my inner landscape, where I’ve always wanted a church to be.”

The thing that sent us shopping was that our previous lovely church did meet its financial end, unfortunately. That was a Baptist church. I come from a multifaceted background in that I was born Catholic, went to a Catholic school in Canada, and I married a woman who was raised in the Greek Orthodox as well as the Anglican tradition. So we were married in an Orthodox church and then spent some time at a Baptist church, and now we’re at an Anglican church, which I guess [in the U.S.] would be called Episcopalian. So as you can see we don’t feel hemmed in by the particularities of denominations.

Does being part of a faith community like that influence how you practice medicine or figure in the kind of a doctor you are?

It does. It is very important for me, because it is kind of like my bone structure in that I don’t really think about it, but I need it all the time to stand up. Certainly when I go and do medicine my mind is preoccupied with patients and symptoms and diagnosis and treatments, and that’s what whirls around in the mental gears, so to speak. But in tough spots, sometimes when I have to confront not just a technical challenge but a challenge in my medical practice to me as a person and as a human being who happens to be a doctor, I find that I often know that what I need to do is to rely upon my “bone structure” and to rely upon my spirituality and my faith to help guide me and help me as a person through difficult human times as a doctor.

Do you reveal that to your patients?

I typically don’t. The kinds of situations that can be difficult for me as a doctor — I’ll give you an example. I work in an emergency department. It’s a pretty busy, hectic place. So it’s difficult for me when patients are angry, and sometimes patients and families are quite upset, and they are being in difficult circumstances, and this can happen. Sometimes people are outright abusive towards the staff, so this is one type of thing that is difficult to deal with. So I turn to my faith, but I don’t think it helps the situation for me to tell an angry patient that I’m trying to do the right thing for them because of my faith. It’s not part of the conversation, really. There are many other examples of things that are difficult. I mean it’s not just an issue of confrontations between doctors and patients, but really for me as a doctor — another common situation is if there are difficult decisions to be made within a family. Rarely are these decisions absolutely clear. Usually it’s subtle, it’s complicated. All these kinds of things — I don’t feel that it’s my place to inject too much of my own underpinnings, because the situation is about my patients. It’s in my background and it helps to guide me, but it’s not the situation at hand.

Do patients seek it out, do they desire to draw on those underpinnings, and how do you deal with it?

I’ve certainly seen quite a diverse range of reactions. I practice in a very multiethnic and multireligious community — Christians, Muslims, Jews and Hindus and, you know, the entire spectrum. I see everything. It’s interesting too that we do tend to be quite accepting on one hand of people’s religious expressions, as we should be, and at the same I do think that we don’t know quite what to do with it as professionals and as people who do health care. We accept and we support, and that’s certainly a good place to be, but sometimes we’re not sure what to say beyond that as a profession.

Hospital chaplains also play a part in narrative medicine. What do you observe of their role?

The chaplains that we have are wonderful. Certainly in the emergency department sometimes bad news can be very significant and very sudden. We have a lovely chaplaincy service that we are able to call on. That’s something that I frequently do. I frequently ask people if they would like a chaplain. Sometimes people do, sometimes people don’t. Sometimes people have their own spiritual community that they turn to in that kind of situation. I think that to make that offer as a health care professional is a worthwhile thing, because it allows that door to be open, and it says, even if it’s someone of a different faith or one is unsure what their faith is, if as a doctor or as a nurse one says would you like a chaplain, we can find someone to speak to you and if not of my faith then of your faith, I think that says a lot because it acknowledges that that story is going on and that discussion can happen.

What’s been you experience of the teaching and practice of medical ethics?

The teaching of ethics is probably quite good and the teaching of clinical skills is also quite good, and there has been a big movement in the past couple of decades to really instill that in the curriculum, so I think that is a big step forward. I think that the biggest challenges to physicians, once they actually start to practice medicine, are the conditions in which they practice. For instance, it’s one thing to teach a physician how to take a sensitive, caring, patient-focused history and to communicate with the patient properly. Once that physician goes into practice and their HMO or their administrator tells them, “That’s great, and by the way you have to see 12 patients every hour without fail,” then it doesn’t really matter that the physician knows exactly how to do it and what to do. The conditions of work make it impossible. There are similar issues, perhaps, in the ethics of doing medicine. There’s a fantastic book by Jerome Groopman, HOW DOCTORS THINK, and one of the things he talks about is some of the motivations for doing things, and doctors are generally motivated by the right things but can be led in this direction or that direction by pharmaceutical representatives, by how much they are paid to do one type of procedure versus another type of procedure, and Dr. Groopman explores that with great insight and sensitivity in his books. Those are, again, the kinds of ethical problems that come up in practice. So it’s one thing to be taught how to behave ethically. It can be difficult if doctors work in a setting that becomes ethically slanted.

What are you reading yourself right now?

I read anything I can get my hands on. Right now I’m reading a book by Shalom Auslander called FORESKIN’S LAMENT. It’s actually about his relationship with God. He’s American and was raised, I believe, in upstate New York in an Orthodox Jewish family, and he has a very visceral and personal relationship with God that he explores in this memoir.

There has been a long and well-known line of doctor-writers over the years. How you draw on that body of literature? Do you feel a part of that rich tradition?

Yes. It is a rich tradition. I don’t think that I realized how rich a tradition it was until I was doing it…I never really thought about the doctor-writers who are out there. I think it happens because doctors and writers both deal with human story and human narrative. I love reading, but I read pretty much anything that grabs my interest. I can’t say that I pick out the doctors in the crowd. I just sort of read all of it. One of my contemporaries in Canada is Kevin Patterson, who is a doctor and who just has a new novel out called CONSUMPTION. Then of course in the US some people who are well known to you, I’m sure, are Jerome Groopman, Atul Gawande, and Oliver Sacks, and the list goes on — William Carlos Williams — and Chekhov, who’s not American but a good example.

What have you learned from writing and medicine about human suffering, about the purpose of medicine and the meaning of suffering? I’m thinking, among other things, of the stem cell research debate in which there are some who emphasize its potential to relieve human suffering and others who seem to emphasize the need for suffering and that suffering has meaning.

I’m very much someone who believes in doing everything possible to relieve human suffering, but the difficulty is that in certain debates, like for example the stem cell debate, it’s not enough simply to say that we want to relieve suffering, because there is a cost associated with it. There’s an ethical debate, and so that becomes quite different. for example. than relieving suffering by using medication derived for instance from plants. It’s a different discussion, because the balance of the debate must weigh into it when we talk about something like stem cell research. But certainly when we talk about relieving pain, for example, using a medication, I find it hard to argue against that, and I think that is a very consistent attitude of modern medicine. There may have been a time when some doctors might have said well, we won’t give you this drug to relieve your abdominal pain because it’s going to be more difficult for us to make a diagnosis if we relieve your pain. It’s very interesting because as that particular question, namely whether giving pain medication makes it harder to diagnose different types of abdominal pain, has been investigated, it’s been shown very clearly that giving pain medicines does not reduce the ability to diagnose what’s going on in someone’s abdomen at all. I certainly think that when we talk about relieving suffering in a therapeutic context, then it makes a lot of sense. There can be times when people have to make very individual choices. For instance, in oncology two people with the same condition can have very different perspectives on what they want to be done. Some people may choose chemotherapeutic treatments which have lots of side effects, which are well known, because that may prolong their life. In a sense they are choosing to have a longer life on earth and to accept the suffering that extended life will give them and to them that’s worth it, to experience mortal life albeit with suffering. Others would say that’s not what they want. Others would say, “I would rather not have that particular chemotherapy. There are too many side effects. For me it’s not what I want.” For them the suffering would be onerous and the extension of their life would not make it worthwhile. So these things are very individual, and I think that we have to recognize, both as doctors and writers, and this is really where my sensitivity as a doctor and a writer comes back to your question — I think that we have to understand that these are individual stories, and individual stories embody individual questions and individual decisions, so once we understand that certain decisions are about a person’s individual story, then we can accept that there may not be one right answer for two or three people in technically the identical situation. They may have different stories, and those stories may require different endings.