A Temple of the Holy Ghost

REV. MR. TAYLOR COLWELL ’23, ARCHDIOCESE OF WASHINGTON

“The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.” This concluding line of Flannery O’Connor’s "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" is an anomaly in her work. Paradoxically, the greatest American Catholic writer of fiction seldom wrote of Catholics, preferring instead the small-town, Protestant setting of her native Georgia after the Second World War. Here is a rare story in which she writes explicitly of Catholics, and even of the Eucharist.

She portrays the spiritual coming-of-age of “The Child,” a twelve-year-old girl whose older, second-cousins Susan and Joanne visit for a weekend away from Mount St. Scholastica’s convent school. Upon returning from the county fair, they recount for the child what they saw: a mysterious tent in which a hermaphrodite (called a “freak”) reveals his condition, and speaks to men and women separated by a curtain in a rapturous, quasi-liturgical dialogue of serene praise to God for his perplexing state. At the heart of this dialogue lies the refrain that he and his audience are all “temples of the Holy Ghost,” created by God and made holy by the dwelling of his Spirit.

Fascinated by this puzzling revelation, the child experiences her own epiphany the next day, when she and her mother attend benediction at Mount St. Scholastica’s after driving the cousins back. Before the Sacred Host, the child is struck by the presence of God and a sudden desire to turn from her sins of pride and unkindness. She returns home changed, and the image of the elevated Host leaves its cosmic traces in her imagination as she watches the sunset.

Like all O’Connor’s stories, its contents are strange Strangeness, in fact, is her method of awakening her readers to the surprising work of grace. She wrote, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” In this case, the “freak” in the tent is an icon of the sacredness of the human person in his most intimate dimension. In his acceptance of his strange condition, this “freak” knows himself to be created by a God whose ways are beyond our understanding, who has sent his Spirit to dwell within us bodily creatures.

The strange figure in the tent prepares the protagonist for her encounter with the strangest mystery of them all, the Holy Eucharist, where the one in whom “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9) still encounters us today. As with the child, he surprises us with our sacredness and our sinfulness. Meeting us in real, perplexing, tangible form, he does not leave us the same. Encountering him in the Eucharist prompts us to live as temples of the Holy Spirit—adopted children in whom God dwells.

In all its strangeness, the fiction of Flannery O’Connor is fired by Eucharistic revival. Using figures drawn from her homeland, she, a strange Catholic, imparts the essence of Eucharistic faith. She wrote once of the Eucharist, “If it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.” Because it is far more than a symbol, the Eucharist continually transforms and sparks conversion: in literature, art, culture, and in each one of us.