Luke 11.33-36
The short story writer Flannery O’Connor enjoyed a loyal but circumscribed following of readers during her lifetime. The life and career of this brilliant young woman, a devout Roman Catholic who spent much of her life in Milledgeville, Georgia, ended in 1964 when she was just 39 years old. Since then, her work has increasingly gained the literary recognition it deserves.Her stories weave together penetrating insight, acerbic humor, irony, and subtle allegory. Unlikely prophets abound and God’s grace lurks in absurd encounters.They are stories that deliver a visceral shock of self-knowledge for the reader with “eyes to see and ears to hear.” All of this of course, should sound like familiar terrain to us followers of a certain story-teller from ancient Galilee.In a talk given to a group of young writers, O’Connor offered the following words about the art of short story writing:
When you write, your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see, and they will not be a substitute for seeing. For the writer of fiction, everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it. It involves judgment. Judgment is something that begins in the act of vision, and when it does not, or when it becomes separated from vision, then a confusion exists in the mind which transfers itself to the story.[i]
O’Connor had an intimate and creative relationship with scripture, and it is easy to imagine how this evening’s gospel passage from Luke may have shaped her understanding of the writer’s art. Her words about writing fiction somehow seem relevant to anyone seeking to live an examined life, but especially the Christian, who is called to see clearly, to judge rightly, and to enter into the vision of Christ in order to tell his story in the midst of a confused and confusing world.
What is this vision? To what kind of seeing are we called? What “substitutes for seeing,” to use O’Connor’s phrase, can distract us, and what confusion can transfer itself to the story when right vision is blurred or blinded? These are the kinds of questions that may well arise in our hearts if we listen to the injunction of Jesus: “Consider whether the light in you is not darkness.”
In Matthew’s gospel, the image of the raised lamp primarily suggests witness and proclamation of the kingdom. For Luke, there’s a different twist. The raised lamp appears in two separate passages, both immediately followed by an appeal to our faculties of sense perception. In the eighth chapter of Luke, we hear:
No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a jar, or puts it under a bed, but puts it on a lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have more, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away. (8.16-18).
The healthy eye and the attentive ear enable a kind of seeing and hearing that we might describe as a transformed consciousness, a new orientation toward God, others, and ourselves that Jesus called the Kingdom. The word metanoia, usually translated as “repentance,” is much more accurately and literally translated as “a large mind.” This enlarged mind, this expansion of our perceptual capacity by the slow working of grace to take in more and more of the largeness, light, and love of God, is the vision to which Christ calls us. It is the vision that transformed the apostle Paul and to which he called the Christians at Philippi when he wrote, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” The spiritual organ of this new mind is a fully opened eye that seeks the beholding of God, even and especially when that seeing is difficult and the light is blinding.
The kind of enlarged perception b[...]
