Letter #10

Dear Flannery,

People around me are dropping like flies. Not so much bodily, although my elderly across-the-street neighbors of 27 years have died a year apart, the husband and now the wife, and just this week their stately red brick house set on its hill, emptied, and got a For Sale sign stuck in its lawn. No, it's souls that are dying, deep down, which I think is much more sad. Physically we’ll all die one day, no exceptions. But we don’t have to be dead to anything right and good, ever.

The last few weeks I have been in a state of marveling over this phenomenon, which of course is a big waste of time. Marvel not, said the Lord, this is the way things are. I should know this by now, by my own experience with my own flawed self, aided by all this reading of wisdom I’ve been doing coming from the greatest thinkers the world has ever known, including you, plus all the practice I get by living in these times. Why can't I get it into my head that it’s always been this way, there’s nothing new under the sun, a good man is hard to . . . Yes, but these unprecedented incidents are now creeping up on me right where I live, surprising me, and leaving me in a foggy heap as if I hadn't learned a thing about any of it.

They are stacking up, but here's one case in point. I was recently asked to give a presentation at a luncheon to a small group of older women in my church. But when I let the powers that be know what I would feel capable of presenting (the information in my newest, gentle, reader-friendly book about certain basic truths and certainties being grossly misrepresented and denied in our culture today), I was turned down. Not only turned down, but told in writing that my subject was "not applicable," that the “rejection” I was “feeling” was not “intentional," and that I should improve my personality and better fulfill my duties. And here I thought that the topic was indisputably applicable, that it was intentionally rejected, and that me improving my personality and fulfilling my duties would have been some of the benefits of the little exercise!(There I go fogging up again.)

Bear in mind that much-promoted recent presenters at said luncheons have included a lady who displayed and discussed her plethora of puffy homemade quilts and a lady who treated everyone to an exuberant travelogue of her trip to Jerusalem. (I luxuriated in the quilts, but didn’t make it to the Holy Land.)

Are these your "good country people?" But I think it's worse than that. Like you said, "Ignorance is excusable when it is borne like a cross, but when it is wielded like an ax, it becomes something else indeed" (Mystery and Manners, 189-90).

This is the world, our culture, as it is now, just more of what you saw. There is still plenty to enjoy on its surface, like fancy luncheons, pretty quilts, and trips although second-hand to interesting places. But its heart has stopped beating. It has become an empty shell.

I don't know whether to give up or go back to the drawing board.

Your foiled friend,
J.