17B Honoring with our lips, not our hearts, Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, 12-step Eucharist
September 4, 2024, Saint Mark’s Little Rock Joanna Seibert
“This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”
If Jesus told a story today about honoring God with our lips but not our hearts, he might share Flannery O’Connor’s last short story, “Revelation.”
The story begins in a southern doctor’s waiting room, where a smug Ruby Turpin surveys and assesses the others seated around her. Next to her is the mother of an overweight, homely daughter, Mary Grace, whose face is blue with acne and is reading a thick blue book. She is home from a school in the north called Wellesley.
Mrs. Turpin feels tremendous self-satisfaction regarding her position in the waiting room and the world. Her caste classification boils down to race and property.
Inevitably, Ruby Turpin’s reflections about her superior position break into a joyful speech, “When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different!... Oh, thank you, Jesus, thank you!”//
At that moment,/ Mary Grace can no longer tolerate this self-satisfaction and hurls her book, Human Development, at Mrs. Turpin, hitting her over the left eye. Mary Grace then lurches across the waiting room and lunges for Ruby’s throat, yelling, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!”
Mrs. Turpin finds this comment unsettling and wonders if it may be a message from God ( Mary Grace, Catholic, Holy Mother): “How,” she asks God, “am I both a hog and me? How am I both saved and from hell?”
Ruby returns home and now questions God out loud. As she contemplates the “message,” she has a vision of the souls of the characters from the waiting room walking up to Heaven. “There were whole companies of the dirt poor, clean for the first time, bands of blacks in white robes, battalions of people she considers freaks and the lowest dregs of society shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession is a tribe of people she recognizes like herself, having always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right...They march behind the others with great dignity and are accountable for good order, common sense, and respectable behavior. They alone sing on key. Yet she can see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues are being burned away.” And all the souls are shouting Hallelujah.
There is, of course, a difference between Mrs. Turpin and the chief priests and elders. When Ruby has “the book thrown at her,” she stops to see if there is a message. The priests never do. Jesus’ message of change is too painful. The Mary Graces of our lives represent “Holy people,” whom we do not see as authority figures since we feel superior to them due to our education, social standing, and race.”
We are here tonight because we all also encountered the holy Mary Graces and listened to them. They are sponsors and those we meet in 12-step groups. Mary Grace can also speak to us from inside of us as well as outside. O’Connor says Mary Grace may not be pretty. Mary Grace was probably not the authority we would ever listen to./ Let us continue to look the Mary Graces in the eye,/ attempt to sit closer to them in the waiting room,/ and, if possible, ask them to tell us a little more about Human Development so that we may continue to sing Hallelujah.
Joanna Seibert. joannaseibert.com