Excerpts from “Disability and the Resurrection Body in Light of the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor” Concordia Theological Quarterly, summer 2025
One thing that is common to all human beings is the experience of physical suffering…. Modern people are conditioned to think of disability and suffering as utterly evil…. We hate the idea of not being able to do all the things we want to do, or that we used to be able to do, or that other people can do.
Disability can awaken us to our creaturely dependence upon God. Accepting our weaknesses and interdependency with others is a valuable life lesson. The message of the new creation assures the eradication of our diseases, disfigurements, and disabilities, to be sure. Indeed, these things are a result of the fall, but they are more than that. They are also helpful means to magnify something that was always true of human life, even before sin entered the world: finitude.
Deflated modern fantasies about self-rule and self-sufficiency help us to understand, in O’Connor’s own words, that “limitation is the gateway to reality.” …Simone Weil, said that “limitation is evidence that God loves us.” In other words, the very conditions that constrain us prepare us to meet the One for whom nothing is impossible.
We are inherently dependent beings. We are helpless. Self-sufficiency is a fantasy, and the poor, sick, and weary know it best. It is only those who are temporarily able-bodied who think they can take care of themselves.
The notion of our essential dependency is incompatible with the Enlightenment mindset, which is evident in this society’s fixation on personal autonomy. The belief that we can save ourselves is the great sin of scientism. “Since the eighteenth century, the popular spirit of each succeeding age has tended more and more to the view that the ills and mysteries of life will eventually fall before the scientific advances of man, a belief that is still going strong even though this is the first generation to face total extinction because of these advances.” – O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor recognized that the dangers to humanity do not spring just from the secular head, but that equally menacing is the secular heart. The Hazards of Sentimentality. There is nothing sentimental about O’Connor’s fiction. She defines sentimentality as tenderness lacking a spiritual foundation. “In this absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness,” she wrote. “It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps in the fumes of the gas chambers.” She means that every utopian dream, like scientism, arises from wanting to improve things and help people. The road to totali- tarianism is paved with good intentions. Everyone is just trying to make the world a better place. But the modern versions of those visions are estranged from God, who is our only help, and that upends the whole affair.
Life is a series of passive diminishments.
Today, instead of tenderness, the governing byword is “compassion.” I might paraphrase her thus: “In this absence of this faith now, we govern by compassion. It is a compassion which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When compassion is detached from the source of compassion, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in abortion and euthanasia.”
Nowadays, “compassion” is used to defend deadly embryonic research, adventurous genetic manipulation, physician-assisted suicide, and the commodification of persons, among other evils. When tenderness, compassion, and sentiment are isolated from divine love, they generally result in a deadly utilitarian calculus devised to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. The goal becomes the greatest happiness for the greatest number, by hell or high water.
A world—or a church—that lacks the crucifixion as its guiding image makes comfort and pleasure, or at least pleasantness, the supreme values.
Every rationalistic, materialistic effort to make the world a better place, when it is divorced from God, lands in death and bondage and ruin. Thus, we have secular soteriology and secular eschatology….
Our difficulties of body and mind serve to remind us of something that was already true of us before the fall: that we are finite in the presence of infinity; that we are dependent, not independent; and that there are limits to what we can become, even when we set our minds to it and work hard in school. … The reason that human beings continually falter in this life is because we crave mastery. But that is a road to nowhere. There are no self-made men.
Because of her focus on materiality, Flannery O’Connor’s soteriology was thoroughly sacramental…. Faith comes by hearing, but it also comes by touching. The flesh of Christ also has the power to give life and annihilate the influence of death and corruption because it is the flesh of the Word, who gives life.
Christ’s very flesh and blood is life-giving, and he gives them to us to eat and drink. We are incorporated into the body of Christ by the body of Christ. And he will raise us up on the Last Day. This is no gossamer gospel. The incarnation of the Son of God, his tears and bloody sweat, his bodily resurrection, and his glorious ascension are redemptive in ways we can see, touch, taste, and smell. To O’Connor, the cloying Christianity of her time (the 1950s and early 1960s) was just as antichrist as materialistic scientism, if in a different way. She wanted, by her stories, to drive us away from mass-marketed religious mush, the bland leading the bland, the gospel of niceness, to the incarnational saving realism of blood and cross and birth. She believed that only a jolt to our sensibilities can do that. Accus- tomed as many are to Pollyannaish expressions of Christianity, they mistake them for the true faith, just as over time, our tastebuds confuse saccharine for the real thing.
…Flannery O’Connor embraced the scandal of the cross. She was a fool for Christ. She was in love with the stone that makes men stumble and the rock that makes them fall (1 Pet 2:8). She knew that the great reversal Jesus brings, to which she al- ludes so often in her writing, would be a source of confusion and embarrassment. As O’Connor is reputed to have said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd.” The prophetess from Andalusia wanted to flip the script. She believed that sick- ness is a school for our growth.
Using a phrase she picked up from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Flannery O’Connor learned to accept that her life was a series of “passive diminishments.” Facing sickness and death, facing the stark raving reality of our mortality—these are the things that give us the most spiritual clarity.
O’Connor wrote, “To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” Here again, limitation is the gateway to reality. It is proof that God loves us. Before Eve and Adam ate the forbidden fruit, they did not need illness or injury to remind them of what they had not yet forgotten.
However, sinful humanity now has been captured by the mass hallucination of self-determination, plunged into a looking-glass world where progress is really regress. Pain is God’s megaphone, as C. S. Lewis described it, to get our attention and call us back to a spirit of receptivity. In that sense, the limitations imposed by suffering can be good for us and can even be received with thanksgiving.
The idea here is that facing the certainty of your mortality—as Flannery herself had to do daily—sharpens your focus, helps you to relinquish the glib nonsense, to overcome sentimental Christianity, and to focus on your telos (end or purpose) in Christ. Awareness of your own personal eschatology leads to the good life. Illness, injury, madness, and decrepitude might just be the spiritual tonic we need the most.
Full Article HERE.