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Reflection for March 26, 2006

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Shock Therapy

Flannery O'Connor tells of a young Southerner named Asbury Fox who lay in bed one day feeling sick and depressed. Sometime ago, Asbury had left home and the tired old myths of his rural south to go to New York and become one of those writers who were "savvy" enough to know the world was meaningless and had the guts to say so. But all he produced were two lifeless novels, came down with a fever and wound up back in his boyhood bedroom subject once more to the pieties of his mother. "I tried to fly like an eagle," he lamented. " I wound up nothing but a domesticated bird." (You can see why his novels didn't sell.) The local doctor found nothing wrong with him. So his mother suggested calling Reverend Bush. "If you think I need spiritual aid . . . you're quite mistaken," he said. "I'll tell him to go to hell." But then he had second thoughts. "Get me a priest - a Jesuit from the city," he said. He did this to upset his mother - but also felt a Jesuit would at least provide him with some intellectual stimulation.

"So you want to talk to a priest?" bellowed Father Finn (in a brogue) upon his arrival. Asbury replied, "It's so nice to have you come. There's no intelligent person here I can talk to." And wanting to engage in literary trivia Asbury asked, "What do you think of Joyce, Father?" The priest pushed his chair closer and said, "You'll have to shout. Blind in one eye, deaf in one ear." Asbury shouted back, "What do you think of Joyce?" The priest shouted back, "Joyce who?" and immediately launched into his own agenda: "Now. Do you say your morning and night prayers? . . . You don't. eh? Well you will never learn to be good unless you pray regularly. You cannot love Jesus unless you speak to him."

Since the priest brought up Jesus, Asbury tried to shift the conversation to an academic critique of the Gospels but the priest simply ploughed ahead: "Pray with your family. Do you pray with your family?" Asbury said his mother didn't have time and his sister was an atheist. "Then you must pray for them . . . Do you know your catechism? . . . Who made you? . . .God made you. Now who is God?" Asbury protested that God was an idea created by man. Fr. Finn cut him off again, "God is a spirit infinitely perfect." Finn then asks Asbury why God made him to which Asbury protests God didn't make him. But there's no turning Finn off: "God made you to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world and to be happy with him in the next. If you don't apply yourself to the catechism how do you expect to know how to save your immortal soul?"

"But I'm not a Roman Catholic," protested Asbury. The old man snorted, "A poor excuse for not saying your prayers." Asbury then slumped in his pillow. "But I'm dying," he shouted. "You're not dead yet," said the priest. "And how do you expect to meet God face to face when you've never spoken to him? How do you expect to get what you don't ask for? Ask him to send the Holy Ghost. I hope you're not so ignorant you've never heard of the Holy Ghost?" Asbury said the Holy Ghost was the last thing he was looking for. "And he may be the last thing you get," said Finn. "How can the Holy Ghost fill your soul when it's full of trash?" And with that he banged his fist on the side table. Then after giving Asbury a parting blessing, the priest said to his appalled mother, "He's a good lad at heart, but he's very ignorant."

I'm sure Flannery O'Connor saw in Asbury something of the skepticism so fashionable in modern society when it comes to matters of faith - a society that when the party's over gives way to lamentations like What's it all about, Alfie? But she doesn't leave Asbury unredeemed. A fierce bird like water stain on his ceiling reminds him of that Holy Spirit Fr. Finn spoke of and seeming to descend upon him converts his prejudice against all things religious into a genuine curiosity fraught with a promise of radical recovery.

Revision 1996

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-- Geoff Wood