Thinking about Flannery O’Connor, the funny, unorthodox, and excellent Christian novelist who wrote of the “inescapable Jesus.” If you’ve never read Wise Blood, with its central character Hazel Motes, I recommend you find that one hour you would have lost before you ever knew you had it and read this short novel. Here is a brief introduction from an essay by Stephen Sparrow. The link to the rest of the essay is below.
Listen you people. I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgement because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar…
Where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.
Now, if the reader teases out the meaning of those words, he ends up with a frightening scenario. All explanations have vanished: all justification for living, gone: everything has collapsed in a heap. The virtue of Hope lies dead. Of course O’Connor would be the first to say that Faith is not about comfort zones. In 1959 she wrote to her friend Louise Abbot saying; “What people don’t realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.” But the irony here is that for those who profess no faith, there are likewise no comfort zones. The bottom line is that Atheism is also a Faith
Read more: http://mediaspecialist.org/ssinescapable.html#ixzz0yBOQO4p3
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