Athol Dickson writes on beauty.

Beauty is not always comfortable. Consider forest fires and lightning. Think of the summit of Mount Everest. Are they not beautiful in their own ways? Yet aren’t they also terrifying? Remember the great white shark again, or a black widow or a lion. Some beauty makes us so uncomfortable we feel the need to set ourselves apart from it. And our desire for distance from some kinds of beauty isn’t only due to danger. We were created to care for the garden. To work it. To organize it and arrange it. This explains the impulse many of us feel to make some kind of change in nature. We trim hedges. We separate flowerbeds from lawns. But what of those who take that impulse further? Who set fire to forests simply to destroy them, hunt for animals they do not eat, and fence off land they do not use? Beauty sometimes makes us sense our smallness. It reminds us we are not in control. It whispers “You are only mortal, and none of this is really yours.” Beauty is not always comfortable.

I read O’Connor’s short stories “The River” and “A Circle in the Fire” recently, and a phrase from the praise on the back cover resonated with me: “some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction written this century.” I normally interpret disturbing fiction as morally ambiguous or reveling in perversion for its nihilistic glory, but O’Connor’s fiction is disturbing in that it requires you to work on it and some of the details are ugly. It isn’t easy, and these two left me asking what I should think about them.

I think part of what disturbed me was my desire to see white and black hats.

In “The River,” a little boy, age 5, is taken to hear a rural preacher who speaks from the muddy river in which he baptizes his listeners. He talks about the kingdom of Christ being a river and entering that kingdom through the river. His message is confusing when he gives it and complicated when repeated by his congregation, but the idea of the river sticks with the boy, and it changes his life. He leaves his family, for whom everything was a joke, and embraces the theology presented by the river preacher.

At first, I thought it disturbing that even a poorly stated gospel message doesn’t result in hope or life. The preacher’s theology is bad. He’s flattered when people say he has healed the sick and wants that to be true, even though he claims he can’t heal anyone. What he says does point to Christ, but he appears to want the signs and wonders, those visible clues to the power of his ministry, so badly that he is willing to fabricate them. Maybe this desire to point to himself is what muddles his sermon. So the preacher and woman who takes the boy to have him baptized don’t wear white hats. They’re more flawed than that. Continue reading White-Black Hats →