Moment of Grace

One time, I was waiting to board the train at the MRT station when some guy approached me and point-blankedly asked, if I believed I had been redeemed, if I have already accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour. Remembering Kumar’s reply to the same question in that hilarious B-movie Harold and Kumar, I said, “yeah, He’s a cool guy” and quickly left him.

The guy in the train station reminded me of Hazel Motes in Flannery O’Connor’s brilliant 1952 debut novel, Wiseblood, an allegorical and farcical masterpiece about isolated characters in search for spiritual truth. Coincidentally, the opening scene in the novel takes place inside a train, where Haze (his nickname obviously indicates spiritual blindness), upon encountering Mrs. Hitchcock, at once attacks her with a sneering observation that establishes his character at the stroke: “I reckon you think you been redeemed”.

However, the major difference between my salvation-preaching ‘friend’ and Hazel Motes is that the latter had decided, once and for all to join the hedonistic, freedom loving secular world by repudiating Christ and all that he has come to believe about Him. The sense of guilt instilled on him by his mother’s harsh brand of Protestantism, as well as his grandfather’s bible-thumping, fire-and-brimstone style of preaching was gripping his throat and sucking the life out of him that rebelling from everything that he had been taught and believed in was his only way out to gain his freedom and independence. Rejecting Christ meant establishing the automobile-based Church of Truth Without Jesus Christ Crucified, largely to encourage people to turn away from Christ, with as much zeal as any fanatical bible thumper.

However, most of the people Hazel encounters when he did his rounds are utterly indifferent to his new convictions. Even those who profess to be interested turned out to be frauds and scoundrels. Here, the novel becomes peopled with grotesque characters, those with unusual characteristics, exaggerated attributes and behaviors. For the author, the grotesque represents mental and spiritual deformity.

Wise Blood is richly-layered: each peeling reveals a different topic each time. How people deal and cope with being displaced and marginalized; the arrogance and self-righteousness that keeps people from seeing themselves and the most important thing, that Christ is central in the redemption of humankind.

The novel is set in the largely Protestant American South, which, as the author had earlier described in other venues, remains “Christ-haunted”, if no longer “Christ-centered”. But what makes the novel astoundingly Catholic, however, is the author’s portrayal of the moment of grace as an encounter with holiness and as a moment of epiphany and that even physical as well as emotional violence are essential parts to one's transformation.

The obvious reference to this, as good Catholics should know, is St. Paul, fulminating enemy of Christ who was waylaid on his way to Damascus, briefly blinded before becoming a passionate apostle. Similarly, Hazel was “stopped” in his car on his way to preach, but this time, however, he knew the battle was over. And with the same zeal and conviction as when he consciously rejected Christ and his teachings, he took it upon himself to indict, try, convict, and carry out the terrible sentence on himself, as a means of penitence. Misguided but passionately sincere he meets a fate that may be tragic but ultimately hopeful. He blinded himself.

The Holy Week is nearing, and we may yet be greeted by news of penitents lashing their bloody backs, or allowing themselves to be nailed to the Cross. Like St. Paul and Hazel Motes, they may have been “stopped” in their tracks and forced to see and accept the truth.