Leftovers

What you see in Tupperware containers at the right is what many of us will be having for dinner the next few days. I love leftovers, maybe even more than the Thanksgiving dinner itself. So today I thought I'd serve up some leftovers from a previous blog. A couple weeks ago I mentioned that during my two plus years working at Andalusia I've become more keenly aware of how death is the engine of life and that all of us - whether we care to admit it or not - are dependent upon the death of another creature for our existence. This pertains as much to the life of the spirit as to our physical lives. As Craig once told a group visiting the farm, in Flannery O'Connor's novels and stories there is no redemption without violence (think of the grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard to Find or Ruby Turpin in Revelation). I would take that even further and assert that in O'Connor's fiction there is no life without death, even if it is a metaphoric dying to self and rising to new life. Again, think of Ruby Turpin or O.E. Parker in Parker's Back where, at the end of the story, the title character is splayed cruciform on a pecan tree. Now this blog is not the place for literary criticism or theological musings. My purpose here is simply to evoke a sense of life as it is presently being lived at Andalusia and as it was, as they say, "back in the day." However, as a Catholic thoroughly steeped in the Christian narrative and from what she observed almost daily on the farm, Flannery O'Connor had an acute awareness of the dependency of life upon death, and this is certainly reflected in her art.
- Mark