The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. “Christ will come like that,” he said in a loud gay voice and stood there, gaping.

Mrs. McIntyre’s face assumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother. “It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go,” she said. “I do not find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world.”

The old man did not seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on the peacock, who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail. “The transfiguration,” he murmured.

She had no idea what he was talking about. “Mr. Guizac didn’t have to come here in the first place,” she said, giving him a hard look.

The peacock lowered his tail and began to pick grass.

“He didn’t have to come in the first place,” she repeated, emphasizing each word.

The old man smiled absently. “He came to redeem us,” 

Have you read Flannery O’Connor’s The Displaced Person? If not, read it now (content warning: racist language) and come back later, if you can; if you’re pressed for time, forget about this post and just read Flannery O’Connor. If you’re allergic to literature, here’s Wikipedia to give you a plot summary. If you want literary analysis, here’s a great link; make sure to check the comments underneath, as they amount to a well-above-average class discussion. The TV Guide version would be something like: “Conflicts arise when a family of World War II refugees is settled as workers on a farm in the Jim Crow South.”

A simple-seeming question, taken at face value: Who is my neighbor? The question does not per se mean you’re trying to justify yourself, any more than asking “What is truth?” makes you Pontius Pilate. But seriously, what makes someone my neighbor? Is it nationality? Proximity? Affinity? Consanguinity?

Let’s cut through the verbiage: The Polish refugees freshly arrived at the farm in O’Connor’s story are neighbors, because they are there. And whatever I am to make of my relation to any more than a few thousand or so of the 340 million American citizens in the United States, the Afghani refugees who live across the street from me, three or four doors down, are definitely my neighbors. Whatever differences in culture, habits, beliefs, and practices, they are my neighbors; they’re right here. Same goes for the man from Chad who runs the small storefront African grocery[1] at the other end of the street. He’s right here, same as I am – and for some of us, that seems to be the problem.

No, the problem is not the neighbor; the problem is us – or, rather, “us,” and what happens to “us” when the stranger we do not welcome, the outsider we do not receive, becomes our neighbor. The displaced person, the ostensible title character of the Flannery O’Connor story – the stranger, the outsider – is here among “us,” but he is not like “us.” He does not understand the elaborate pattern of our everyday mediocrity, the delicate balance of our self-justifications, resentments, petty hatreds, permissive allowances, half-truths, blind eyes turned and sins of omission, not even because he is better than we, but simply because he is not one of us. He hasn’t had time or circumstances to learn the game. So his presence among “us” changes us, each one of us, and leaves us all displaced.

Like the characters in the story, we live in our own chosen closed worlds, our little complacencies – part of Flannery O’Connor’s genius in this story in how sharply she depicts the passive aggression and veiled social barbs that make up almost all of the interactions among the American-born characters, white or black; at several points, some of them actively exploit the disruption to scheme, one against another. Yet in the end all, or virtually all, unite in turning against the outsider.

Our faith and confidence in our origins and in the world we know well can be a trap – and not only materially, in the sense that we can miss our true vocation and mission unless we rouse ourselves to change or grow as the need arises. The subtler trap is where our sense of identity and obligation bind us to the past in ways that deform our beliefs and our commitments. I remember, years back, reading Rod Dreher interviewing JD Vance, and being struck by how much they both defined themselves in terms of their childhoods and the cultures in which they grew up. Rod was a friendly acquaintance years ago; I knew Rod and Julie well enough to be genuinely saddened for both of them when I read that they had divorced. I’d never say this, were Rod not completely open about it: commitment to his past and his birth family destroyed Rod’s marriage. As for the Vice President, I obviously don’t know him personally, but his exceptional worldly success began with the narrative he built out of his dysfunctional birth family and his own subsequent struggles and victories. I would hope that he could see the responsibilities he has been given through a wider lens than the heritage of the American white working class. We live in a wide and troubled world, in times that will need unprecedented levels of cooperation and self-sacrifice on all parts even to address.

There is another dynamic in the O’Connor story: the hatred, fear, and offense at suffering, the desire to keep out the larger world with its tragedies and troubles. One character fears that the outsiders may have brought the evils of the concentration camps with themselves, “like rats with typhoid fleas;” another says bluntly, “He doesn’t fit in. I have to have somebody who fits in.”

So many of our hatreds and animosities can be traced to our fear of suffering, to “othering” sufferers in a pathetic attempt to dissociate ourselves from what we fear. Some in our country sneer at the sufferings of the poor in the Global South (a million miles from Flannery O’Connor’s American South) and blame them for their troubles; egregious cases in the press and in public life come to mind. Others bemoan their own fate, how they cannot imagine having children who would be doomed to grow up in the future world they quite justly fear – with no apparent cognizance that most of the children of today’s world are already growing up in like or greater hardship, simply on account of where they were born. If such children are mentioned at all, it is likely enough with a tone of admonishment, as if these ignorant primitives were unaware of the benefits of smaller families to themselves and to the planet. More numerous than either group are the millions who are completely oblivious to the sufferings of ordinary people elsewhere in the world, who assume (tacitly) that people everywhere live much as they do themselves, only “over here it’s more advanced” (really, read the story) – as if the glamour of the American brand or a stronger job market were attracting people who had been essentially fine in their countries of origin – not that there aren’t people who come to America that way, though ironically those people are generally the least likely to face any objections. While it is in some sense possible not to know what the rest of the world experiences and suffers, such ignorance is not innocent – not, at least, in a literate and mature adult. It seems fair to ask ourselves how much we really want to know, especially given our scandal at suffering in other forms.

A less obvious point: The Displaced Person shows you cannot escape your special gift or mission. It can become warped virtually into its opposite, or frittered away in dribs and drabs. O’Connor is masterful here. For all her absurdity, prejudice, and venom, Mrs. Shortley, the matriarch of the poor white workers on the farm, is a prophet; from the moment she sees an image from the Holocaust in a newsreel, the vision possesses her, however distorted by her manifest inadequacy. Her prophecy out in the fields has genuine power, though its meaning is lost on her. Mrs. McIntyre, as she herself continually protests, is genuinely a practical person; she is depicted as having inherited an essentially bankrupt farm in her twenties and going on to run it for decades. However, her inaction when her business practices are faced with a genuine moral dilemma sets up a fatal conflict; when the moment of truth arrives and a human life is in her hands, she silently and passively makes herself complicit in a terrible crime.

How do we parse all of this, in real life? In the story, Mrs. McIntyre has a troubled dream, in which she encounters the Irish priest who brokered for the refugees:

[O]ne night she dreamed that the priest came to call and droned on and on, saying, “Dear lady, I know your tender heart won’t suffer you to turn the porrrrr man out. Think of the thousands of them, think of the ovens and the boxcars and the camps and the sick children and Christ Our Lord.” 

“He’s extra and he’s upset the balance around here,” she said, “and I’m a logical practical woman and there are no ovens here and no camps and no Christ Our Lord and when he leaves, he’ll make more money. He’ll work at the mill and buy a car and don’t talk to me—all they want is a car.” 

“The ovens and the boxcars and the sick children,” droned the priest, “and our dear Lord.” 

“Just one too many,” she said.

The “one too many” in this fictional situation, and all too often in real life, is Christ.

As you could hardly help knowing, there’s been a lot of talk about the ordo amoris these days, thanks to an unlikely plug from the aforementioned JD Vance; a recent article here at Where Peter Is has a critical-minded take on the attempt to make the ordo amoris into a kind of personal algorithm. While we in our place and time are witnessing a hardening of hearts all around, in our country and in our world, the truly interesting point on the ordo amoris is in the Holy Father’s response to the controversy. He writes:

The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception. But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth.

It is easy to misread this, such that the Good Samaritan is presented to us as a merely human ethical model of universal fraternity. But there is no Good Samaritan without the Good Shepherd. Nothing runs deeper than the foundation of universal fraternity in Christ, through whom we have become sons and daughters by adoption. It is worth saying again: not in Christianity, but in Christ. This divine action must center and pervade every aspect of the true ordo amoris, an ordo grounded in the infinite divine eros invoked by Benedict in Deus caritas est.  This love involves no rationing; our finitude never defines charity away in advance. No; by pouring out love, first on God, then on those we encounter in life, grace is increased in us and the circle of our charity expands to the farthest horizon. This is the ordo amoris to which we should be looking.

 

[1]               Donatien, the grocer from Chad, has been notably neighborly and hospitable; in recognition of this, Val (aka V.J. Tarantino, my spiritual sister and fellow contributor at WPI) handcrafted a sign for him (his business had no sign at the time).

 

Image: Flannery O’Connor commemorative postage stamp, 2015, USPS.