Ugliness - A Lenten Meditation

Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation” narrates the personal apocalyptic of Ruby Turpin, a smug Christian farm wife who’s redemption begins with her attempted murder in a doctor’s waiting room.  God’s unlikely messenger literally beats Ruby over the head with a book (a symbolic Bible) and then goes for her victim’s throat.  It’s an enacted parable worthy of the greatest - and craziest - of the ancient Hebrew prophets:  Isaiah streaking through Jerusalem for three years (Isa 20.2-4), Jeremiah smashing a Ming vase on the town’s toxic waste dump (Jer 19.1-15), or Ezekiel playing with toy soldiers (Ez 4.1-3).  Frustration frequently drives prophetic preachment beyond syntax to action, beyond verbage to viscera.  Ruby gets the message through her head.  The Lord opens her eyes by blackening one of them.

But the God-bitten seer in the story commands our attention.  O’Conner makes her visionary physically repulsive.  This story uses the word “ugly” seventeen times, and seven of them describe this teenage oracle.  Acne has pulped her skin until we read that it is “blue” and “seared” and “purple.”  She is fat and unfashionable.  And her name is Mary Grace.

The daughter of one of O’Conner’s friends asked why the author made Mary Grace so ugly.  “Because,” replied the mother, “Flannery loves her.”  Upon hearing of this catechism the author replied, “Very perceptive.”  The explanation intrigues, but does not appear to explain.  How did love drive a writer, omnipotent within the world of her story, to curse her God-bearer with a repulsive face, a clumsy body, and mute rage which finds escape only in the blazing blue of her maniac’s eyes?  A writer of O’Conner’s undoubted skill could have made her Mary as beautiful as any sacchrine saint from the brush of a Renaissance master.

Perhaps that is just the point:  we insist on the virgin’s attractiveness to hide from ourselves the cost of carrying Christ.  “Hail Mary, full of grace,” and we imagine the mother of Jesus demure in adolescent beauty.  Baptists reject the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, but embrace an even less-biblical dogma of the Immaculate Complexion.  It never occurs to us that the womb which spoke the Word into the world may have paid the price in every other part of the body and mind which broke at the foot of the cross.   O’Conner gives us a Mary so full of grace that she must pound it into the heads of those who are too self-satisfied to know they need it.  She reveals a God-ravaged virgin, a Madonna unmade by the intensity of the Shekinah. 

Lent is a good time to think about our culture’s addiction to comfort.  It is also a good time to ponder our penchant for beauty.  In his book Oh Shepherd, Where Art Thou? Calvin Miller portrays a plastic-perfect preacher and remarks on the documented relationship between looks and leadership.  “Church growth pastors,” he observes, “are by and large ‘good looking.’”  As are underwear models, sports commentators, and TV news anchors.  Somehow, we believe, collagen-pouted lips produce a more acceptable sermon.  Like apples of botox in settings of silicone is a word spoken by classic bone structure. 

The Bible, however, tends to indicate that close encounters with the Almighty do lasting damage to skin-deep charms.  Even Job revividus finds fragments of ash clinging to the deep shadows under his eyes.  Jacob limps for life after the angel of God supplexes him off the top ring-rope.  Tradition describes Paul as short and bald, and his face no doubt spasmed and ticked from the divine cruise control which corkscrewed into his groin.  Isaiah 52.14 says that the exertions of Golgotha left the Suffering Servant ravaged.  “A ruined face,” runs The Message, “disfigured past recognition.”

The desire for a pretty Christ springs from the yearning to be pretty Christians who primp and pout at the makeup mirror of a pretty Christianity.  Frank Miller, in his mighty novel A Canticle For Leibowitz, describes a Catholic abbot contemplating the statue of a secular antichrist set up outside a center for euthanizing the unfit. 

He recognized it as one of the composite human images derived from mass psychological testing in which subjects were given sketches and photographs of unknown people and asked such questions as: ‘Which would you most like to meet?’ and ‘Which do you think would make the best parent?’

In the end the tonsured old relic ponders the sissified pseudo-savior and decides that

He could with effort imagine the statue saying: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ but could not imagine it saying: ‘Depart from me into everlasting fire, accursed ones,’ or flogging the money-changers out of the Temple.

Lent comes to us in blue-faced, blazing-eyed ugliness, in the Saguaro-spined and prickly particularity of a God who hates sin.  The anteroom to Easter is the seeming dead-end of a tomb not designed to handle through-traffic.  We make small sacrifices as a reminder that Christ cares nothing for cosmetics and comfort, and will willingly burn our souls to cinders to make us instruments of salvation.  The feet of those who bring the gospel may be beautiful; their faces often frighten both owner and observer.  Maybe we would be more willing to beat and choke with the inarticulate cry of salvation if we had already given up on being loved for our good looks.

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