A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[David Morris]

I don't think Alice has yet provided a definition of RC vs Calvanist Grace.
 I'd like to hear it.

On Sunday, December 2, 2012, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> Literature is not a religion for me. I have no intention of bending my
> knee at the altar of   any writer's holy halitosis in order to improve
> myself.  I have to like it or I don't read it, not enough time. I laugh all
> the time while reading, but not reading this dame. Just bein real. Happy
> for those who enjoy it and ready to acknowledge that thoughtful pleasure is
> good for the soul, just not my cuppa tea.
>
> As far as different visions of grace, Catholicism, Calvinism etc. , the
> historic and religious variations on this theme are far broader than Calvin
> or Roman Catholic interpretations and that diversity is evident in P's work
> where we find every permutation  and anti-permutation of spirituality,
> social affinity,  thinly disguised cruelty, cosmic wars and  anarchist
> golfing fun .
>  There was a time when I read almost exclusively the Bible for 7 years
> followed by  a long investigation of Jewish mysticism and history,
> Christian history, textual analysis and similar writings.  During that
>  second period of time Pynchon provided a POV that helped me begin to
>  disentangle myself from both anger and reverence for western history.
>  Still I find the ancient Hebrew priests who wrote the Bible and Orthodox
> high priests of Catholicism or Calvinism to all present a particularly
> loathesome, colonialist, xenophobic ,nasty and useless vision of God,
> cosmic law , Jesus, the way etc. and feel no obligation to be enthralled by
> those in thrall to this vision.
> In my experience, if anything important and liberating and insightful is
> offered in any writer or artist or experience, it will be found in many
> other places, so not to worry.
> "Your nature and the integral nature of the universe are one and the same:
> indescribable but eternally present.
> Simply open yourself to this."
> Hua Hu Ching
>
> On Dec 2, 2012, at 7:54 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
> > O'Connor is funny. Indeed, she describes her work as comic, though she
> > insists that her comedy does not distract from the seriousness of her
> > themes. We are invited to laugh at the violent misfits, at the
> > southern inanities, the gothic rags that fix the characters in a faded
> > fashion of the southern decadence. Our laughter makes us complicit,
> > for we cannot sustain indifference and the rejection of her grace,
> > especially on political or anti-religious grounds is only a
> > Calvinistic vice inherent in the reader not the author or her story.
> > There is nothing depressing about this; indeed, the grace that
> > O'Connor uses so skillfully, is a comic element, a carnivalesque
> > celebration of freedom, of the free will. So Harry swims away from
> > Paradise, in O'Connor's brilliant tale, "The River", and toward God's
> > Grace. Like Slothrop, or Oedipa, or Dorothy, Harry is running from
> > home and back to a Kansas that is, we fell, not Kansas anymore, a
> > Zone, a paralax of parallel universes moving toward Grace.
> >
> > So, Pynchon and O'Connor, two Catholics, make use of Grace. The trick
> > is to understand what Catholic Grace is, and, as Mark intimated, how
> > it is not Calvinized.
> >
> > Of course, the religion of the author, of the reader, matters not at
> > all. But not knowing what an author is up to, or rejecting it in
> > preference to some inhernet vice, some irrational disdain for all
> > things cultic, is a limited way to read demanding fictions.
>
>
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