The Fragile Self

Just at the West End of this church lies St Mary’s Passage. It’s a major point of interest for many of the tour groups that are beginning to return to Oxford. Just opposite the West Door of the church is a door into Brasenose College. On the wooden door is carved the face of a lion, either side holding up the lintel are the carvings of two satyrs, who look rather like fauns. And then just along the lane stands on old iron street lamp. On a snowy day, the resonances with the Chronicles of Narnia are more evident for all to see. And tour guides tell a thousand different stories to suggest that this little corner of Oxford inspired the imagination of C S Lewis. I often listen to these stories through the window of the parish office. The stories they tell - embroidered, embellished, often exaggerated – make the discrepancies between the gospels seem rather tame by comparison.

Of course, Lewis’ reputation as a novelist and as a Christian apologist is well-known, and yet as I listen to the gospel this morning, I find myself thinking about another novelist, who grew up in a very different world from that of central Oxford, and yet who writes with far more power and eloquence about the fragility and vulnerability of being human. A devout Catholic, who grew up in the American South in the mid-twentieth century, and whose frail health led to her death at the tender age of 39, Flannery O’Connor wrote a collection of short stories and novels, which are often shocking, provocative, even grotesque in the scenes they describe. No fantasies about talking lions for Flannery O’Connor – instead, she writes with brutal realism about fragile and flawed characters. As she says, ‘The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature for his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character. Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn’t write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated…For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul’.

This is precisely the drama described in our gospel today. Jesus foretells his passion: ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands’. The Greek here needs a little unpacking. The phrase ‘Son of Man’ in Aramaic means ‘the Human One’ and so we could translate this phrase as ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into the hands of men’ or ‘The Human One is to be betrayed into human hands’. This insight gets us to the heart of the story of the Fall, as our humanity betrays our humanity. And then before we know it, we find the disciples not only failing to understand what Jesus was saying, afraid to ask. They then fall into argument and bitter dispute. They were arguing about who was the greatest.

While her own writing is informed by the theological truths of the Fall, Redemption and Judgment, Flannery O’Connor recognises that ‘these are doctrines that the modern secular world does not believe in’. And that presents her with a particular challenge. And part of the reason why she resorts to telling stories that are hard, difficult, horrific, even grotesque, is that she is helping us to perceive what is most deeply true about human existence. She is enabling us to ‘penetrate the surface of reality’ and to take seriously that aspect of human experience that the doctrine of original sin was actually seeking to describe, the tragic dimension of our lives.

Of course, tragedy is largely absent from the pews and book shops of the postmodern West. We study it in old books and plays. We use it casually to refer to plane crashes and disasters, but we are more hesitant about acknowledging its presence in our own lives, or acknowledging our brutal complicity with violence, oppression or injustice, when confronted with the history of slavery or the ashes of Grenfell Tower. We struggle with our desperate inability to acknowledge the destructiveness of our own fears and desires. We feel powerless in the face of our helpless entanglement in the little dramas where we choose the easy consolation of identifying with the victim without recognising our own complicity in the horrors of the world, our own capacity to hurt and wound. Sometimes it takes the tangential literary means of the novelist, rather than the didactic moralising of the preacher, to see these things.

Jesus responds to the conceit of the disciples by presenting a little child and saying ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’

I wonder what the child signifies in your imagination when you listen to this story? Is it innocence? Openness? Vulnerability? Fragility? May be all these things, but I wonder: how do we make sense of this accent on childlikeness without infantilising one another?

Of course, the child is particularly significant in the writings of Flannery O’Connor. The children in her stories are not particularly innocent and certainly not pious, although when she speaks of their interior life they are often peculiarly alert to the presence of God. They often stand on the margins but they observe everything with extraordinary perceptiveness. They are possessed not so much by innocence as a particular kind of wisdom. They are offended by false religiosity. Intuitively, they know when people are faking it. The children in her stories are alert to lies and hypocrisy. And when somebody assumes a bewildering sense of entitlement or imagines that they are the greatest, they see through such fragile egotism.

I wonder how this passage reads when we see the child not as some kind of mythological symbol of innocence, but as one who is wise and perceptive like the child in the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. Perhaps the question posed at the beginning of our epistle comes then into much sharper focus: ‘Who is wise and understanding among you?’

Of course, in the literary world of Flannery O’Connor, there is not only a profound sense of the fragility of being human, with all its complexity and muddle, there is also grace. There is mercy. There is compassion and love. And although the child is often a bystander, on the edge of things, again and again this is what the child sees, and what those of us who imagine that we are grown ups, sometimes strain to see.