Letter #2

Dear Flannery,

I didn’t read your stories or novels until I was as old as they were, that’s half a century, or couldn’t remember if I had. But it’s just as well because before everything important inside me began to change I wouldn’t have understood them. Back then I’m afraid I would have reacted like a great many people reacted when your stories were new and how it seems most still react today. No, I wouldn’t have written you the kind of letter you got from the old lady in California who said that a person who comes home from work at night wants to read “something that will lift his heart,” implying that your stories had not lifted hers. In those days I had plenty of respect for published material just because it was published and I wouldn’t have presumed to tell a famous author what to do. But your meanings would have gone over my head, missing my heart by a mile.

Actually, it’s getting difficult to imagine what I would have thought in the days before everything changed. It’s almost impossible. I seem to be forgetting some of what or how I used to think before ten years ago. The new is doing its best to blot out the old, and in some ways that is good, but I know I must remember it all---  with gratitude.

I must say, though, that I just read your story, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” once again, and knowing beforehand the horrible thing that was going to happen at the end, could only manage it in the light of day. That one does that to me. The consequences of unchecked human nature can be so frightening and tragic. But Sheppard, even he, the false shepherd, the false, self-appointed savior, did finally, at the very end, experience a mighty, wrenching shift inside, and that’s the greatest, most wonderful miracle of all. I like how Leif Enger describes a real miracle: "no cute thing but more like the swing of a sword." Still, you described it more completely as: grace that “cuts with the sword Christ said he came to bring.”

With a lifted heart,

A Reader