Walk in the Dark Valley
As soon as the maids
had left, the two old men got up and hurried to her. “Look,” they said, “the
garden doors are shut, and no one can see us; give in to our desire and lie
with us. If you refuse, we will testify against you that you dismissed your
maids because a young man was here with you.” “I am completely trapped,”
Susanna groaned. “If I yield, it will be my death; if I refuse, I cannot escape
your power. Yet it is better for me to fall into your power without guilt than
to sin before the Lord.”
Daniel 13:19-23
Even though I walk in
the dark valley, I fear no evil; for you are at my side. Psalm 23:4
But when they
continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the one among
you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” John 8:7
Piety
“Lady,” The Misfit said,
looking beyond her far into the woods, “there never was a body that give the
undertaker a tip.” (From A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery
O’Connor).[i]
Study
A good man is indeed
hard to find in today’s readings. First, we encounter the two elders of Babylon
and their wicked plot on Susannah. Then, we meet a whole consort of men ready
to stone a woman accused (not convicted) of adultery to death.
The first reading leads
us to the intervention of Daniel to save Susannah. In the Good News, none other
than Jesus of Nazareth comes to the rescue.
In the Flannery O’Connor
short story quoted above, The Grandmother was not so lucky. Grace may save her
in eternity, but she was not going to escape the fore-shadowy death that
awaited her fate in the 1963 story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
As she set out with her
family on the Tennessee-to-Florida drive, she was first to the car after carefully
dressing up in her Sunday best, complete with hat and gloves: “in case of an
accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was
a lady.”
(If this were an Alfred
Hitchcock film, the piano music would ominously crescendo here in a minor key.)
During a rest stop at
The Tower, a roadside gas station-barbeque restaurant, she got into a pessimistic
conversation with the owner Red Sammy and his wife. Sammy was ripped off after
giving two men credit for gas the prior week.
“It isn’t a soul in this
green world of God’s that you can trust,” she said. “And I don’t count nobody
out of that, not nobody,” she repeated, looking at Red Sammy. Susannah and the accused woman would likely
agree with that assessment.
“A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy
said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and
leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”
A short while later, just
outside “Toomsboro” (more piano music), her son reluctantly agrees to try to go
back in time in a hunt for an old plantation house. Bailey was so right when he said: “…[T]his is
the only time we're going to stop for anything like this.”
All at once, they would be on a hill,
looking down over the blue tops of trees for miles around, then the next
minute, they would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking
down on them. (O’Connor need not hit us over the head with
Psalm 23 references like “They descended into the valley of the shadow of death
below.”)
However, while searching
along a dirt road, cat caused Bailey to wreck the car, only to be saved (in the
spoiler-altered short-term, not in the John 3:16 long-term) by “The Misfit,” a
recent escapee from prison.
The “good man” theme
arises ironically. The henchmen are slowly walking family members to their pistol-point
execution in the woods. Meanwhile, The Grandmother – in an attempt to win over
The Misfit and spare her life – attempts to compliment him, saying, “I know
you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you
must come from nice people!”
Unlike the two elders in
the story from the Tanakh, The Misfit knows he is a lost cause.
Nome, I ain’t a good man,” The Misfit
said after a second as if he had considered her statement carefully, “but I ain’t
the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of dog
from my brothers and sisters. ‘You know,’ Daddy said, ‘it’s some that can live their
whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is,
and this boy is one of the latters. He’s going to be into everything!’” He put
on his black hat and looked up suddenly and then away deep into the woods as if
he were embarrassed again.
Not
ready to give up yet, The Grandmother asked: “Do you
ever pray?” The dialogue continues as
the screams from the family members getting shot roll out of the trees in the
valley of death.
Maybe The Misfit has a better picture of heaven and
hell than does this pious Church Lady.
There was [another] piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by
a pistol report. “Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and
another ain’t punished at all?
The Grandmother has built her self-imposed moral
code on the characteristics that she believes make people “good.” She places
great stock in being a lady, for example, but emphasizes surface appearance
over deeper substance. Despite her professed love for Christian piety, she is
unable to pray when she finds herself in a crisis and even begins to question
the power and divinity of Jesus.
Action
The Misfit sees that the punishment is always disproportionate
to the crime and that the crime, in the end, doesn’t even really matter. He
also harbors genuine bafflement about religion. Whereas The Grandmother accepts
faith unquestioningly and weakly, the Misfit challenges religious beliefs and
thinks deeply about how he should follow them or not follow them. He has chosen
to live under the assumption that religion is pointless and adheres to his own
kind of faith: “No pleasure but meanness.” His moral code is violent and never
wavers, and in the end, he is the one who seems to triumph on earth.
The Grandmother’s careless application of the label
“good man” reveals that “good” doesn’t imply “moral” or “kind.” For her, a man
is a “good man” if his values align with hers. Red Sammy was “good” because he
trusted people blindly and waxed nostalgic about more innocent times—both with which
The Grandmother identifies. The Misfit is “good” because she reasons, he won’t
shoot a lady—a refusal that would be in keeping with her moral code. Her
assumption, of course, proves to be false. The only thing “good” about the
Misfit is his consistency in living out his moral code of “no pleasure but
meanness.”
Which
one – The Grandmother or The Misfit – reminds you of the elders who raped
Susannah and the pious men in the courtyard with stones in their hands, ready
to unfurl them at the woman caught in adultery?
These
days we may feel like we are walking in the dark valley surrounded by unknown
virus-sized “Misfits” about to attack us.
Faith in God – true piety – is the moral code that will save us in the John
3:16 fashion. Nothing more. Nothing less.
PS: The family might have gotten to Florida is
they just kept their social distance.
