#21

Dear Flannery,

I've been to another what-you-could-call family values conference and once again realize that I am not fit for polite society. This happens to me again and again, but since the events are few, in between them I forget how to safely conduct myself while I'm there. At these gatherings suddenly I am thrust into human interaction with mere acquaintances. I get to feeling comfortable when it appears that we are wonderfully like-minded and then I say too much. It's like I get greedy. Greedy for heaven I suppose, which I think of as a place where people are together who treasure reality and truth and rightness, all that is God's, above all else. Anyway, in the course of the dialogue, sooner or later, the faces of these people I'm talking with inevitably start to change. They seem to become afraid of something, and I know what. They seem to begin resisting something, and I know that too. But like an idiot I don't want to give up on them. So the conversation goes on and on and finally ends with them lecturing me. It ends with me dissolved into dust which has been ground underfoot and them put back all in one piece on their self-sculpted pedestals. This does not happen because they have won the day; it happens because I let them think they won, because I have placated them and flattered them that one inch which they took as a mile. I guess I don't like to end conversations on a bad note so I take the beating to end it on a good one. Yes, they seem to say to themselves, there are no questions or worries here, all is well, like we thought, like we always think.

No, I don't seem to be getting along with my own people. Maybe I should get some chickens like you did. (I have a friend who has two and actually have been asking her all about them. She gets at least two eggs a day which at least would be useful.)

I emerged from the above experience sorrowing. The thing is, as I talk with these people who are supposed to be on the same side as I am in this beastly culture war in which insanity seems to be increasingly victorious, they reveal themselves to be a new breed of church-institution-based moral relativist. When I suggest that we're losing the battle and that we might need a new strategy, they have all their arguments and excuses lined up neat and tidy. (And by losing the battle, I mean for individual souls; I know we're going to lose the war itself.) Hit unaware from behind by the devil, they refuse to admit they've been hit unaware from behind by the devil. They love to say, well, how can we win them [sinners] over unless we speak a certain way in certain words, unless we are compaaaasionate, unless we welcome them, unless we excuse their wickedness and call it a less condemning name? Do they not know that sin by any other name is still sin? I think they've convinced themselves it isn't! Truly! I suppose they apply this craziness to they themselves also and this is why they themselves don't use the words sin and repentance and redemption anymore hardly at all when it comes to anyone or anything.

Seriously, in religious/church forums, for sexual sins we now use words like problem and burden and addiction and pain and struggle instead of proper words like sin and wickedness. Apparently these really sleazy things people decide to do are nobody's fault anymore. Iniquity is not a choice; it's an involuntary psychological condition. They don't even admit that sin is pleasurable! Why else would anybody do it? It's astounding. In addition, they are what John Milton described as perfectly eager to shift off their personal religiousity onto some other human being or beings and blindly follow whoever's in charge at the moment rather than have to do any thinking or questioning or exercising faith in . . . what? Only  therockofourRedeemerwhoisChristtheSonofGod! Sorry. It's just astonishing.

In the meantime I proved to be a bit of a mess. It's so weird how our physical bodies sometimes (or maybe always?) respond to spiritual or emotional stress. In my case that day it was obvious and immediate. As I stood there being persecuted by my friends for my scriptural beliefs in timeless and obvious truths, my knees---one and then the other--- would take it upon themselves to jiggle up and down something awful for minutes and minutes! Violently, I would say. I don't know which was more frightening, the treacherous words coming out of these self-satisfied people's mouths or my own body reacting to them.

And to think I traveled across practically the whole country to go to this conference and be frightened out of my kneecaps. Well, at least one of our daughters and her family live there and we stayed with them and I got to be mauled by a chubby over-affectionate 10-month-old grandson for a week to balance things out.

Oh! On this trip I finished A Good Man is Hard to Find, the short story collection, once again which helped restore my peace and sanity. I read some out loud to my daughter one evening, the last two paragraphs in "The Artificial Nigger." (By the way, nobody, I mean nobody, except black people, can say that word anymore; it's referred to as the "N-word.) You wrote in a letter that the ending of this story gave you a lot of trouble, which trouble I am very glad you took.

 At home, putting myself back together, and considering becoming a hermit,
J.