Making a Scene

A visionary light settled in [Mrs. Turpin’s] eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of [lower class whites and blacks], and whole battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the rear of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right… They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.
—Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation”

We want to think well of ourselves, to believe that we’re good and decent people, honest as the day is long, generous to a fault, hospitable and kind to strangers, willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. And of course, we’re kind to puppies. But in reality, we’re like all but the saintliest of saints—we take pride in our own accomplishments and are genuinely perplexed, if not a bit upset, when others aren’t as passionate about our aims as we are. It’s hard to try to better ourselves without measuring against those who choose a different path and then judging them.

Mrs. Turpin put great stock in the way she composed herself. She looked down her nose at anyone who wasn’t her equal. In her revelatory vision, she was simply shocked to see a bridge to heaven that had people like her walking behind all the folks she looked down upon.

It’s easy as a reader to shake our heads at her pretensions, her ignorance. But the brilliance of O’Connor’s story is that, just as I make judgments about Mrs. Turpin, I become her. She indicts my own sense of pride, because I suspect that if I were seeing her vision, I’d be in that last group, too, even as my self-claimed virtues burned away.

Maybe this is what it means to enter the kin-dom of heaven, to be separated no longer from anyone, by neither vice nor virtue, prejudice nor honor. As I look forward to Jerusalem with Jesus this season, I want to see who’s in the crowds. Who’s throwing down their coats at his feet? Who’s shouting Hosanna? Are they like me? Can I possibly be like them?

Along the Way, I wish you God’s peace on today’s stage of your Lenten spiritual journey. May Christ’s companionship bless you with confidence for the day, comfort you in trouble, and put a spring of joy in your step.