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Reflection for September 25, 2005

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"Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you."

In the later sections of Matthew's Gospel the evangelist depicts Jesus (just before his arrest) losing patience with self-righteous people who believe their mere façade of virtue is the real thing - "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees. You are like whitewashed tombs . . . full of dead men's bones."

We all need a wake-up call now and then as did Mrs. Turpin in Flannery O'Connor's story "Revelation". Mrs. Turpin lived in the South of the 1950's. As the story begins we find her in a small town doctor's waiting room. Seated around the space are a well-dressed, pleasant looking woman and her stout nineteen year old college daughter who's reading a book and, by contrast, an old woman in tennis shoes, a sniveling child in a dirty romper and its "white-trashy" mother wearing bedroom slippers.

The scene makes Mrs. Turpin recall a frequent daydream of hers in which she ponders the various levels of Southern society. At the bottom are the "colored" people; then come the "white-trash"; then people who own a house; then people (like her) who own a house and land -and so on up the ladder. As usual the daydream leaves her feeling how blessed she is to be so middle-class, superior to those below her. Soon she's engaged in conversation with the nice lady, addressing matters like the poor work ethic of black employees. Occasionally both have to put up with "crude" comments of the "white-trashy" woman. Possibly disturbed by the odor of the woman's child, Mrs. Turpin remarks that she raises hogs that are "cleaner than some children I've seen."

All the while Mrs. Turpin notices that the nice lady's college daughter keeps staring at her with increasing hostility over the edge of her book. It makes Mrs. Turpin uncomfortable but nothing happens until Mrs. Turpin exclaims in a fit of self-satisfaction: "When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, I just feel like shouting, 'Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!'" At this point the college girl's book hits Mrs. Turpin right between the eyes! - as she shouts, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!"

Now there's a wake-up call! Sometimes God has to resort to a little shock to snap us out of a deadly complacency that's become a way of life. The blow certainly had that effect on Mrs. Turpin. At home she fretted over the experience. She couldn't believe anyone would think her an old wart hog, in any way mean or insensitive. But as she hosed down the hogs that evening, her mind was now vacant enough to see the purple streak in the evening sky turn into a "vast, swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire."

On it was a horde of souls ascending to heaven, white trash, bands of black people in white robes, "battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping". And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people like herself, "marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order 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." Mrs. Turpin knew there was a message in that vision that might somehow change her whole life and attitude.

By the way, the college girl's name was Mary Grace and the book she threw at Mrs. Turpin was entitled Human Development. Flannery O'Connor had a great sense of humor.

Reprint from 1996

-- Geoff Wood