The Word Alone Is Certain Good
Bay St. Louis
My grandmothers were both musical. Meemaw, on my mother’s side, was more evidently so. Having attended Loyola on a saxophone scholarship, she taught piano for many years. She would accomplish much in painting, photography, and leather working, among other things, before returning to school at the age of 70 to earn an MA in musical composition. An educator throughout her life, she was also, like Michelangelo, always learning.
Grandma Fitz, on the other hand, was not so outwardly accomplished, though to put it thus does no justice to her feat of raising eight children, mostly as a widow, my grandfather having died when Grandma was just 44. One of the earliest gifts she gave me was a sense that poetry mattered. And not only that it mattered, but that it mattered for its own sake. Poetry, for her, was a matter of sheer delight. It was part of the fabric of peace which seemed somehow to invest a life that could otherwise have been—and no doubt often was, in its way—chaotic.
Grandma had a way of wondering about the world that was, I think, profoundly connected with her love of poetry. I remember walking down with her to the beach in Waveland, Mississippi, in the evening when the tide was out. She would wade so slowly through the ankle deep bands of sea between the sandbars, and she would stand for long stretches looking out across the bay or back toward the land where the sun was setting through the oak trees. To her, a sunset was not a prosaic thing. A horizon was a prayer. And we, her grandchildren, in all our foolishness, our wildness, our childishness, were miracles. I’ll never forget, either, visiting her for the last time just a few years ago, and how when I stood to leave and said to her one more time, I love you, Grandma, she looked at me as though she were hearing those words once again for the very first time.
After Hurricane Katrina, Grandma told me a story of one of her last living friends, Marion Tricou. Mrs. Tricou spent a great deal of her childhood at Bay St. Louis, and, like Grandma, she spent most of her life in Lakeview, the northernmost neighborhood of New Orleans, on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. She did not evacuate before Katrina, and when the flood came, she had to be rescued from her home. She was, of course, very old by that time and fairly infirm, but to get to the rescue boat, she had to swim a short way. And she did, as though she were a girl again. So the things that we love, the things that we do again and again from delight in the doing, become who we are.
It is thus a matter of no small importance for us that we learn to delight in words. For the flood of all being is coming. It will break upon the earth at the end of time and times, and, in its quieter way, it will break upon each of us when we die and our words are weighed before the Word.
Something like that is the great grace of poetry. Grandma, who remembered her poems to the end, when she could hardly remember anything else, was alive to the Word because she had always been alive to words.
The Word alone is certain good. Here, in prose, I take up an old argument with perhaps my favorite poet, William Butler Yeats, whose “Song of the Happy Shepherd” insists that “words alone are certain good.” And, after all, what else is finally left to us but words? What is left of the great kings and heroes of ages past but words? Where is Troy? Where is Achilles? Where lie Odysseus and Aeneas? All lie entombed–and gloriously alive–in words. Again, what was God’s first gift to Adam, his first offer of a share in God’s creative life, if not words? In bidding Adam name the animals, God, whose word made all that is to be, allowed us, too, a share of authority. If Adam could not create the hippo and crocodile, the elephant and the giraffe, he could at least give them their names. We are meaning-making animals because we are word-making animals. And our words do have power, a power made most imminent in the person of Jesus Christ, the Word, who speaks and causes things to be. Who says, Get up, Rise, Be healed, Your sin is forgiven, and makes it so. The task of our lives is in some way to harmonize our words with the Word until our being is perfected in Him.
Nonetheless, words can get in the way of things. Words can become so familiar to us that they strip the realities they convey of their glory. Words become like so many sparrows, flitting through the hedgerows of being, twittering unnoticed at our feet. It takes a moment of wonder for a sparrow to be restored to itself, for the glory of the bird to break upon us so that we can be astonished—yes, truly, not one of these falls to the earth without the Father’s notice. And not one of us humans, these most unusual things, walks the earth without the Son’s blood having been shed for him or for her.
Likewise, from familiarity and overuse, from weariness and weakness, from addiction to screens and a failure to imagine a heaven any better than money can buy, words lose their savor. They become mere tools, to be produced and predicted for the accomplishment of our paltry goals. They become distractions. In the end, they lose their meaning, and we, the meaning-makers, lose ours.
In a letter from July of 2024 on the role of literature in spiritual formation, Pope Francis reminds us of the need to delight once again, as a Church, in words. Reading, he writes, offers us many things—an oasis where we can avoid other less wholesome choices, a respite from the cares and anxieties of the day, an opportunity to open up new interior spaces as we strive to find the Christ who dwells in the depth of our own being.
Literature, he continues, is critically important for the development of our souls because, perhaps even more so than in consuming film or painting or sculpture, reading demands that we become, as it were, co-authors of a text, imaginatively recreating the world the author has set before us, bringing to bear our own memories, emotions, likes and dislikes, tastes and desires. And this process of becoming co-creators recalls again God’s sharing of his creative power with Adam and reminds us of the very task of our lives, that of harmonizing our being with God’s desire for us.
Frank Kermode recalls in his book The Sense of an Ending that the physician Alkmeon says, with Aristotle’s approval, that we die because we cannot connect the beginning and the end. Which is to say that we are not God. But in fiction and poetry, we fashion beginnings and ends. We create deathless things, things possessed of as much unity and perfection as we are capable of bestowing. And in reading such things, we begin to understand what it is like to comprehend the beginning and the end. For we are not meant for death. We are meant to live eternally, but this demands our being written into the Word who is beginning and end. We meet him in the pages of Scripture, which itself connects the beginning and the end of all things. In a world of fragmentation, specialization, and division, literature offers instead unity, oneness, the transcendental which is perhaps most commonly left off the list in favor of goodness, truth, and beauty.
As Pope Francis says, there are many heartening signs with respect to a renewal in our understanding of literature. Seminaries are increasingly providing for more devotion to fiction and poetry as a means of forming the hearts and moral imaginations of priests to be, for even in the seminary, as in much of the rest of the world, literature is often seen as so much fluff—a luxury at best, a wasteful passage through la la land at worst. Schools at every level are considering anew what it means to provide a liberal education, an education which is not merely an experiment in enlightened leisure but also conduces to the increased moral, imaginative, and intellectual freedom of the student. Good fiction and poetry remind us constantly of just how high the stakes are in a human life—remind us that however great or unassuming the individual is with respect to wealth, honor, power, money, fame, and all the other things with which we so often concern ourselves, every person constitutes a proving ground of eternal consequence. The human is the Catskill eagle among earthly beings, the one who, to borrow from Melville, can descend into the blackest mountain gorge and in its deepest dive still fly higher than any bird of the plain.
The challenges to cultivating a literary revival in our time are, of course, great. One of the consequences of sin is that we do not automatically admire what is good. It’s not enough to set Dante or Shakespeare or Melville or Cather or O’Connor or Bishop or Morrison or any of the others before our children or our students and expect their immediate delight. Our taste in literature, like that in music or painting or even food, often takes time. It takes the patient work of good teachers who are able to distill the pleasure of great words and initiate others in their own enjoyment.
The Church, as Pope Francis reminds us, has throughout her history pointed to the importance of literature, even that produced by “those outside,” as St. Basil called the great writers of pagan antiquity. In them, he pointed out, we find a great training in rhetoric and ethics, and even those seeds of the Word which cannot but delight the Christian reader. Who, reading Book VI of the Aeneid, can help but find in Anchises’ speech a prophecy not simply of the secular greatness of Rome but also of her spiritual glory–Rome who would indeed spare the conquered and battle down the proud, bringing the world, one day at last, we hope, beneath the gentle yoke of Christ?
St. Paul, in his speech at the Areopagus, draws heavily on the Greek poets. St. Augustine, wary as he was of the dangers of literature, models much of his Confessions on the Aeneid. St. Thomas sets his great devotional songs in verse. St. Francis ushers in the age of the troubadour, young Karol Wojtyla fortifies himself against the evils of his day through the glories of the Polish poetic tradition. And there is an enormous flowering of literature among the great Christians of the last century. Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, Waugh, Sayers, O’Connor, Undset, Percy, and so on, are not content with the plain prose of things but are compelled by the beauty of the One they seek to give voice to that beauty in fiction and in verse. Having been made, we are called to be makers, and in as near a style as we can manage to the intricacy and brilliance our God sets forth.
And literature, though in the ultimate sense one of those useless things which shows its greatest worth in its final uselessness, has a great many things to be said for it when we consider why we ought to take it up in our time, when the effort to do so is arguably substantially greater than in many previous generations. Fluency in the tradition is no longer something that can be assumed. But it is worth pursuing.
For all their ultimate gratuitous uselessness, the great poets are, nonetheless, useful, eminently so. Poetry and fiction can train our imaginations and so shape our souls for the good. A great writer not only shows us characters embroiled in all manner of moral action but also allows us to feel those actions and their effects as if we ourselves had become the moral agents in question. I myself have any number of vices. But I have avoided a good many others precisely because good authors first revealed their horrors to me. I have never been a gambler, for instance, largely because of a scene in War and Peace. So effectively does Tolstoy capture the monstrous weight of the gambling debts mounting up on young Nicholas Rostov’s shoulders that still, years after reading, I can feel the terror of that scene. If growing in virtue is primarily a matter of action and of learning to act properly according to the dictates of the concrete circumstances at hand, then reading great books can allow us to act at secondhand and so grow better equipped for doing what is good and avoiding what is evil. And, as the Greeks knew, great literature allows for the purgation of pity and terror, those feelings which, if not addressed, so often seethe over from the shadow side of ourselves into the light. The tragic hero becomes the pharmakos, the medicine, in place of the man who was once at Grecian festivals, at the peak of Dionysian frenzy, torn limb from limb by a maddened horde, his remains burnt, his ashes scattered from a cliff upon the sea.
Shaken, unsettled, we go away from tragedy restored to ourselves precisely in the degree to which we find ourselves once again more strange.
Then, too, literature allows for the imaginative distillation of moral truths which might otherwise elude us by their tendency to induce yawns and other signs of boredom. Dante’s Divine Comedy, for instance, can tell us a great deal of what we want to know about St. Thomas Aquinas’s moral psychology—one of Dante’s teachers, after all, was one of St. Thomas’s students—but there’s something very invigorating about finding the wrathful in Dante’s Inferno immersed in a river of boiling blood or the lustful whipped about in a hurricane or the gluttonous bedded down in their own slop.
Above all, literature has the power to give us back to ourselves, showing us ourselves as we are, as we might have been, and as we still might be. Literature connects the beginning and the end, showing us how we might in time and with grace do the same. There are two ways in which it seems supremely suited to accomplishing this. One method is to present us with a vision of an entire life, beginning to end. Perhaps my favorite example is Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, a trilogy tracing the course of Kristin’s life from earliest girlhood to the moment of her death. The story contrives (without any feeling of contrivance or force) to share with us the course of grace in Kristin’s life. In its rendering of her father’s nobility and suffering, of her mother’s hidden wounds, and especially of the long, tortuous course of Kristin’s love for her husband, Erlend, the story reminds us of God’s power to work good in the world, to allow the courses of sin and suffering to carve wells in the depth of the soul such that a human life may become in the end an altar for the lamb who was slain and who makes the sinner whole again in the end.
More commonly, perhaps, fiction shows us the long progress of a character’s life up to the moment of grace and leaves us, with the protagonist, to wonder what’s to come. Dante descends from his final vision of the Trinity back to the midst of the journey of life. He must once more make the ascent, and the goal is not guaranteed him, however great the grace of his comedic experience. Evelyn Waugh, in characters like Charles Ryder of Brideshead Revisited or Guy Crouchback of the Sword of Honor trilogy, likewise brings us to the moment when some grace has been seized and leaves things there. For Ryder and Crouchback, as for us, the question always remains—what do we do with the grace we’ve been given? Will we follow it out to the end?
For bringing us to this moment of grace and bidding us reach imaginatively from the moment of crisis into eternity, few can surpass Flannery O’Connor when she is at her best, which is usually in her short stories. It is hard, of course, to say much of anything about the Church and her literature without mentioning O’Connor, and not because she is the only Catholic writer worth thinking about but because, among other things, she gives us a supreme example of someone who is passionately concerned with fiction as it exists with respect to salvation. There is an urgency to her work, a sense that eternity hangs in the balance of every moment and that, for her as writer and for us as readers, what happens to her characters is a matter of infinite importance. She is a writer who brings us face to face with the shadows because she has asked Christ to take her with him into the shadows of her own heart. And the results, if at times difficult to stomach, nonetheless bear long contemplation.
O’Connor herself, in an oft-quoted passage reminiscent of one from Plato’s Republic, comments on the means she chose for herself as a storyteller: “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
Hence the host of lunatics, murderers, cripples, and freaks who populate Ms. O’Connor’s pages. And while O’Connor’s stories may well possess the power to bring the atheist, the agnostic, and all their friends to conversion, I want to suggest that it is very often most of us—not just the brilliant atheist, not merely the clever agnostic—but most of us, the ordinary good people, who are in fact the hard of hearing and almost-blind for whom O’Connor’s work is most salutary.
Consider, for instance, the endlessly delightful “Good Country People.” What a world of women O’Connor supplies us. Mrs. Freeman, with the three gears of her visage. Mrs. Hopewell, who breathes in self-satisfaction and breathes out platitudes to remind us all that it takes all kinds and nobody’s perfect and a smile never hurt anyone, this last most pointedly directed at her hulking daughter Joy, half Captain Ahab, half Ignatius J. Reilly, stumping about the house on her prosthetic leg and her Ph.D. and screaming Malebranchean dicta to the heartless heavens. Into this covey comes Manley Pointer, the yellow-sock wearing, sweating salt of the earth Bible salesman who, from what seems his sheer simplicity, asks Joy—who, by the way, has given herself the battleship of a name Hulga—on a date.
Equipped with his Bible valise, Manley meets Hulga at her door, and the two embark upon a walk across the countryside. Along the way, Hulga daydreams about seducing this young simpleton, imagining how she will bring his world crashing down around him. But, when the two climb up to the hayloft in a secluded barn, her expectations, and ours, begin to crumble. After certain preliminaries. Manley insists that Hulga say she loves him, and then asks her to prove her love. “How?” she asks. “Show me where your wooden leg fits on.”
Manley proceeds to open his Bible case—you won’t need the Bible, Hulga reminds him, to which he rejoins that you never can tell. His case contains just two copies of the good book. He removes one and opens it. It is hollow and holds a flask of whiskey, a deck of pornographic playing cards, and a box of condoms. Young Manley is not what he seemed. And as Hulga’s astonishment begins to show, Manley finally turns on her.
The ending of the story, no matter how often we’ve read it, rewards every re-reading.
Not so violent as some of O’Connor’s other endings, this one in fact can feel intensely satisfying. Bravo, we are tempted to cry, when Pointer delivers his parting salvo– “And I’ll tell you another thing, Hulga…you ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!”
Bravo, indeed. What a broadside to all the tribe of brilliant atheists and their nothingness. And there’s something to that. But I propose that, if we find in Manley Pointer an unwitting mouthpiece for any genuine contempt for the atheistic viewpoint, we also need to find in Hulga something of the unwitting prophetess, revealing ourselves to us. Because, one way or another, most of us are so many Pointers. We say one thing and do another. We give scandal to our fellow sinners, our fellow sufferers. We smuggle in our gluttony and our lust under cover of the Word, and we abscond with the props to other people’s living, leaving them crippled, half-blind, alone in the hayloft.
In another of her stories, “Revelation,” O’Connor supplies what is to my thinking the very greatest example of her ability to press us beyond the bounds of our ordinary being in the world, to shout for those of us who, even as we practice faith with good will, lose sight, in the midst of the journey of our life, of just how astonishing an enterprise it is to which Christ has called us. “Revelation” presents to us a woman named Ruby Turpin who spends a great deal of her inward time considering her place with respect to all the other types of people in the world.
“Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them—not above, just away from—were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the homeand-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there were colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with registered white-face cattle on it. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.”
Again, it is just perhaps possible to see a little bit of ourselves, and of our moral and social situation more generally, in Mrs. Turpin. The world is obsessed with classifying and dividing, with naming and calculating and calibrating until in an ultimate fit of tenderness we send all away to the gas chamber, to bring Miss O’Connor into conversation here with Walker Percy.
At the end of the story, we are treated to the revelation of the title. And O’Connor’s writing here is worth the excruciating pain of the waiting room that foregrounds the story.
“Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her 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 white-trash, clean for the first time-in their lives, and bands of black people in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end 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. She leaned forward to observe them closer. 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. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.
At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”
Here is a large and startling figure for those who are almost blind. Here is a reminder to those of us sunk in the mire of everydayness that the call of Christ, the call to come and share the master’s joy, involves change beyond our reckoning. To change is to grow and to change often is to grow into perfection, St. John Henry Newman reminds us, and our being made perfect will mean being made so radically different from what we are at present that we can scarcely imagine it except, here in fiction, to write that even our virtues, even what we got right, will be burned away into something new.
Such a passage as this brings home Pope Francis’s reminder that “It is clear, then, that the reader is not simply the recipient of an edifying message, but a person challenged to press forward on a shifting terrain where the boundaries between salvation and perdition are not a priori obvious and distinct. Reading, as an act of ‘discernment’ directly involves the reader as both the ‘subject’ who reads and as the ‘object’ of what is being read. In reading a novel or a work of poetry, the reader actually experiences ‘being read’ by the words that he or she is reading.”
Through reading, we learn again to listen to the voice of another, to enter imaginatively into and share in recreating a world another has given to us. In this way, literature teaches us how to connect the beginning and the end, reminding us that we must be made one with him who is the beginning and the end. We need reminding that our lives are not the babble of idiots but are tales told by the Father, who makes all things significant, who through the Word writes us into the fabric of being.
Great literature restores us to ourselves. It gives us back our words. It returns to us, shaken free of the veils of custom and familiarity, our love.
