Lately, I’ve been thinking that life, in all its messiness and beauty, could best be described as an ever-present struggle to hang on to hope, to seek the good and to choose to see beyond the broken material world to experience the reality of the sacramental life. There is an ever-present need, at least in my own life, to reorient my goals and priorities toward the person of Christ. We humans speak often of curveballs, audibles and disappointments. This wasn’t what I’d planned. This is not as it should be.
As a mother, I most frequently experience this tension and the desperate need to readjust my heart and refocus my attention on God's love and goodness in relation to my children: their respective setbacks and struggles pierce my heart much as Christ’s sufferings pierced his own mother’s.
And yet, of course, we all must go on, choosing the trifecta of hope, faith and love over the alternative: fear and despair. So much of life amounts to this humble reorientation towards the will of God. And happiness in this world lies, I think, in one’s ability to accept what comes from the hand of God and then make the necessary adjustments to one’s own perspective.
Walker Percy, a popular, successful Southern writer and Catholic convert, had intended to work as a psychiatrist in his early career. But when he was struck with a bad case of tuberculosis after exposure to an infected person during an autopsy, his life and career were permanently sidelined.
Years later, the National Book Award winner would reflect, "I was the happiest man ever to contract tuberculosis because it enabled me to get out of Bellevue and quit medicine."
At the time, though, Percy must have felt utterly adrift. He obviously could not know the future: he could not see what incredible things God had in store for him. To have your hopes, dreams and future dashed upon the rocks of disease, to be rendered helpless and incapable of utilizing your hard-earned education, would have seemed insurmountable in the moment. Instead of practicing medicine, Percy would spend several years recuperating in two different sanatoriums, reading Soren Kierkegaard and envying his able-bodied brothers who were overseas fighting in World War II. (This was also, notably, when Percy became convinced that science could not explain the deeper questions about life and existence and began attending daily Mass, leading to his eventual religious conversion.)
Of course, by the time he got sick, Percy was no stranger to having to adapt to less-than-ideal circumstances — his father had committed suicide when he was 13 years old, and his mother died in a car accident two years later when she drove off a bridge. The man who would go on to become a much-celebrated writer and thinker was destined by God, it would seem, to spend much of his life recalibrating, attempting to find his footing in a chaotic, disordered world. And yet, as the unlikely protagonist in Percy’s famous The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling, asks, “Have you noticed that only in the time of illness or disaster or death are people real?”
Fittingly, I first began composing this essay mere hours before my three-year-old son Sam was admitted to the local children’s hospital for pneumonia, where he would spend the next three days receiving oxygen support, blowing on pinwheels and coughing, and watching the movie Minions. My delightfully mundane, predictable life of shuttling kids around, making meals and writing about Southern novelists came grinding to a halt as I sat bedside with my son and prayed to God for his recovery.
A seemingly small life disruption, temporary as this one (thankfully) was, is still a disruption, a sobering reminder of our fragile and fleeting mortality, our need for the healing mercy of Christ and the hard truth that our search for peace and meaning occurs precisely amid the unique plan God has set before us.
Flannery O’Connor, my all-time favorite writer, was also a Southern Catholic, known for her 31 short stories and two novels that epitomize the Southern Gothic literary tradition. An up-and-coming writer with a promising career, she studied sociology and literature before earning an MFA from Iowa State University. O’Connor was publishing short stories and had begun work on her first novel, Wise Blood, at a writer’s community in New York when the ground seemingly fell out from under her: at age 25, in what should have been the prime of her brilliant career, she was diagnosed with lupus, the very disease that killed her father when she was 16 years old.
O’Connor had no choice, then, but to move back home to her mother’s farm in rural Georgia, where she would live out the rest of her short, difficult life on crutches and in rapidly declining health: writing in the mornings when she had the energy, reading Thomistic philosophy, attending Mass and raising peacocks.
Yet, despite what must surely have been a devastatingly painful and crushing setback, particularly when one considers Flannery’s burning ambition to create good art (and her belief that this was her ultimate calling), O’Connor’s letters to friends are littered with her sharp humor and steady acceptance of God’s hand in her life.
“I’m making out fine, in spite of any conflicting stories,” she wrote at the time of her diagnosis. “I have enough energy to write with, and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can, with one eye squinting, take it all as a blessing.”
On the surface, Flannery O’Connor’s life was violently derailed, marked by severe limitations. She suffered every day, with no clear answer from God as to why. Yet Flannery could somehow see beyond that, finding hope and meaning outside the material world, and pursued her calling to the best of her ability.
“To call yourself a Georgia writer is certainly to declare a limitation,” said O’Connor, “but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to reality.”
So much of life is, indeed, clinging to the hope of Christ and orienting oneself toward his mercy, grace and mysterious providence. In the moments big and small of bewilderment, changed plans, hospitalizations and grief, we can choose the peace found in the sacramental life, in the enduring and unseen things of Christ. In our limitations and derailed plans, we can seek the new and beautiful paths God is placing us on. And we can walk forward in faith.
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