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Miss Sauvé
Homily on Flannery O'Connor
for the Sunday following Corpus Christi Day, 2002:
The part of her fiction that most fascinates me, then and now, is
what many critics referred to as “the grotesque,” but what she herself
called “the reasonable use of the unreasonable.” [Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and
Manners: Occasional Prose, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, eds. (New
York: Farrar, Straus, 1969)]
A modest example comes to mind. In a short
story .... the setting sun appears like a great red ball,
but she sees it as “an elevated Host drenched in blood” leaving a “line
like a red clay road in the sky.” [Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy
Ghost” from A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1971)]
In a letter to a friend of hers,
O’Connor would later write, “…like the child, I believe the Host is
actually the body and blood of Christ, not just a symbol. If the story
grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Eucharist in it.” In
that same correspondence, O’Connor relates this awkward experience:
I was once, five or six years ago,
taken by [Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] to have dinner with
Mary McCarthy…. She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big
Intellectual. We went and eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth
once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. Having me
there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few
words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward
morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the
Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said that when
she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy
Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she
thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I
then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell
with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now
that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a
story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest
of life is expendable. [Sally Fitzgerald, ed.,
The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Vintage:
New York, 1979) 124-125]
....There is, of course, something
entirely preposterous and, well, unreasonable, almost grotesque, about
the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. We claim, with a perfectly
straight face, to eat the body and drink the blood of the Eternal Word
of God, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity who, according to
some, shouldn’t even have a body to begin with. But therein lies
precisely the most outlandish feature of the Eucharist: namely, that it
embodies the essential scandal of the Incarnation
itself.
--
Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.
From James Joyce
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young
Man
Chapter 3 :
Why was the sacrament of the eucharist instituted under the
two species of bread and wine if Jesus Christ be present body and blood,
soul and divinity, in the bread alone and in the wine alone? Does a tiny
particle of the consecrated bread contain all the body and blood of Jesus
Christ or a part only of the body and blood? If the wine change into
vinegar and the host crumble into corruption after they have been
consecrated, is Jesus Christ still present under their species as God and
as man?
-- Here he is! Here he is!
From The Gazette, Montreal,
of Sunday, August 20, 1995, page
C4:
"Summer of '69," a memoir by Judy Lapalme on the death
by accidental drowning of her 15-year-old younger brother:
"I had never tasted pizza until Jeff died. Our
family, of staunch Irish Catholic stock with more offspring than money,
couldn't cope with the luxury or the spice.
The Hallidays, neighbors from across the street, sent it
over to us the day after the funeral, from Miss Sauvé's Pizzeria,
on Sauvé St., just east of Lajeunesse St. in Ahuntsic. An
all-dressed pizza with the hard hat in the centre....
I was 17 that summer and had just completed Grade 12 at
Holy Names High School in Rosemont....
.... Jeff was almost 16, a handsome football star, a
rebellious, headstrong, sturdy young man who was forever locking horns
with my father.... On Friday, Aug. 1, Jeff went out on the boat... and
never came back....
The day after the funeral, a white Volkswagen from Miss
Sauvé's Pizzeria delivered a jumbo, all-dressed pizza to us. The
Hallidays' daughter, Diane, had been smitten with Jeff and wanted
to do something special.
My father assured us that we wouldn't like it, too spicy
and probably too garlicky. There could not be a worse indictment of a
person to my father than to declare them reeking of
garlic.
The rest of us tore into the cardboard and began
tasting this exotic offering -- melted strands of creamy, rubbery,
burn-your-palate mozzarrella that wasn't Velveeta, crisp, dry, and
earthy mushrooms, spicy and salty pepperoni sliding off the crust with
each bite, green peppers.... Bread crust both crisp and soggy with
tomato sauce laden with garlic and oregano.
It was an all-dressed pizza, tasted for the first time,
the day after we buried Jeff....
The fall of 1969, I went to McGill.... I never had another
pizza from Miss Sauvé's. It's gone now -- like so many things."
Ten thousand
places
| AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw
fláme; |
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| As tumbled over rim in roundy wells |
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| Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each
hung bell’s |
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| Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its
name; |
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| Each mortal thing does one thing and the
same: |
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| Deals out that being indoors each one
dwells; |
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| Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and
spells, |
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| Crying Whát I do is me: for that I
came. |
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| Í say móre: the just man justices; |
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| Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings
graces; |
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| Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he
is— |
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| Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand
places, |
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| Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not
his |
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| To the Father through the features of men’s
faces. |
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins,
1844-1889
Flannery O'Connor
She died on August 3, 1964 at the age of 39.
In almost all of her works the characters were led to a place where
they had to deal with God’s presence in the world.
She once said "in the long run, a people is known, not by its
statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells. Fiction is the most
impure and the most modest and the most human of the arts."
Encounter - 02/17/2002:
Flannery OConnor - Southern Prophet:
... When a woman wrote to Flannery O'Connor saying
that one of her stories "left a bad taste in my mouth," Flannery wrote
back: "You weren't supposed to eat it."
Etes-vous
sauvé? 10:42 pm
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Celebrity 
Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline,
pure.