It’s a shocking thing to say, perhaps, but sometimes it takes looking down the barrel of a gun to tell the truth about who you are and what you value.

I think I first learned this, at least intellectually, in a freshman English course at the University of Georgia taught by Mr. Davis, Ph.D. student and our instructor. His task one spring day was to teach us to read and write about fiction by exploring Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Good Man is Hard to Find. The story is all about a family who has an accident along a dirt road in the rural South and just so happens to run into a man., a murderer who has named himself “The Misfit.” The story centers on the grandmother in this hapless family—a self-satisfied, older woman given to platitudes and a certain shallowness of spirit—the story centers on her—and the Misfit.

Following many horrifying moments, at the climactic end of the story the grandmother stands face to face with this damaged and violent man. After a surreal conversation with him in which she begs for her life, she sees him for the tortured human being that he is. And in a moment of unguarded and dazed lucidity she speaks to him from a different, deeper place within herself. “Why you’re one of my babies,” she says. “You’re one of my own children!” As she says this, she reaches out her hand to touch him. It’s at that very moment that he shoots her.

But it doesn’t stop there. As the Misfit and his sidekick walk away from the killing, the Misfit comments, “She would have been a good woman if it had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

This is what some call Southern Gothic. I call it grim stuff—very dark, and in its own shocking way, very wise.

Yes, looking down the barrel of a gun can bring strange and sometimes wonderful things out of us. And, of course, it doesn’t have to be literal as in the case of the grandmother in O’Connor’s story, the character, by the way, that O’Connor calls the heroine of that story.  In a more figurative sense, looking down the barrel of a gun is any experience in which everything seems to be on the line, in which we have the potential to see our lives and the people in our lives in a stripped down or broken open way, a moment in which we have an opportunity to give voice to who we are, to what we see and to what we value.

I used to think of these as being times in which we discover “what we we’re made of,” but over time, I’ve come to see it a little differently. It’s not so much about getting to find out “what we’re made of” as if such a thing had a kind of static quality. Rather I think of it as being offered the chance to make something new—to make a world just for a moment that is lived out of the real center of our deepest humanity--who we are as children of the Most High—and to do this with no expectation of what will come as a result of it.

In O’Connor’s fiction these moments often come violently, in a way that gets her characters’ attention. Of such moments she comments, “There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected.” For O’Connor, then, the experience of everything being on the line can be a moment in which grace is offered to us.  

Jesus speaks about such moments in a slightly different way. Our gospel reading today is John’s account of part of what Jesus says as he looks down the barrel of his impending crucifixion and death. In this passage many call “The High Priestly Prayer” we get a brief glimpse at how Jesus sees such a moment in his own life and what he chooses to say and to do in the face of it.

What do we see him doing and saying?

Well, in this passage, we see a person at prayer, a person who when everything is on the line, creates a kind of space to be connected to the ground of his being, what in John Jesus always refers to as “the Father,” the one who is love poured out toward him and to toward his dear ones, his companions. We see Jesus at prayer.

The other thing we see is Jesus’ giving voice to the conviction that this moment, the moment in which life everything is on the line, when life is stripped down or broken open, can be a moment of glory, a moment in which God’s glory can be revealed through us.

And finally we see in Jesus’ concern for those he’s leaving behind, those who have been completely bone-headed thus far and who will yet betray him. We see Jesus’ concern that they will live preserved in peace as one with themselves and each other.

And so what have been or are your experiences in which everything is on the line? What might be the strange grace being offered to you or the glory being revealed through you in these experiences? What is the world you might make just for a moment that is lived out of the real center of your deepest humanity, who you are as one of God’s beloved children? What might enable you offer this with no expectation of what will come as a result of it?

In his August, 2003, New York Times column entitled “Beliefs”, Peter Steinfels wrote about a question many raised after September the 11th when the two planes hit the twin towers. His description of some responses to this question speaks to what both O’Connor and our gospel say can happen to us and did happen to many on September the 11th when everything was on the line.

“Where was God on September the 11^th?” many asked. One of the people that Steinfels looked to for a response to this question was our own Rowan Williams who was at Trinity Wall Street when the towers fell. He later published his thoughts in a small volume entitled Writing in the Dust. This is what Williams said about where God might have been on that clear Tuesday morning in September when so many suddenly found that everything was on the line.

For Williams, like for many religious leaders, there was no easy answer for where God was on that clear morning in September or in the face of any appalling events in which human beings suffering. Williams, like others, did speak of God being in the heroism of those who gave their lives saving others. But more than anything, for Williams, what I would call grace accepted and enacted and the glory of God seen, were found in the last words of so many victims that, thanks to cell phones and answering machines, families heard and we had access to. At the moment when everything was on the line, these words were meant “to reassure and to console those they loved, to anticipate their grief and to try to ease it.”

This is what Williams said about the messages that people left for those they loved: “These many farewell messages, did not use religious language—the use of religious language in fact seemed to have been reserved for the final testaments of the murderers. It was the nonreligious, deeply human words of the workers trapped in the towers that testified to what religious language is supposed to be about—the triumph of pointless, gratuitous love, the affirming of faithfulness even when there is nothing to be done or salvaged.”

Today on the last Sunday in Easter, this is still what Easter is all about: “the triumph of pointless, gratuitous love, the affirming of faithfulness even when there is nothing to be done or salvaged.” This triumph will always come to us anew as a discovery as a world, that with God’s help, we can create especially when everything is on the line. And so Williams went on to write of the messages left for loved ones: “God always has to be rediscovered,” and saying something for the sake of another in the presence of death must be one place of rediscovery.”

Works Cited or Consulted

“The Dark Side of the Cross: Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction” by Patrick Galloway ,which can be found at http://www.cyberpat.com/essays/flan.html . Galloway quotes O’Connor’s book of essays entitled Mystery and Manners. Of her own writing, O’Connor once said, “I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”
“Where was God? It is a question that might be asked every day—or perhaps not at all”
From Peter Steinfels column entitled “Beliefs”: August 31, 2002

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