Roland Allen

Her characters are haunted by the glory of God, "the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus," and thus lead bloody horrible lives and, like Jesus, die grotesque deaths. Their lives recall Jonah's, who ran from God at his own peril. O'Connor's vision of faith, according to Dark, is much more in keeping with the apocalyptic faith of scripture than is the sentimentalized spirituality heard on Christian radio. Salvation is terrifying precisely because it is apocalyptic--it radically changes our lives, prevents us from living comfortably, and opens our eyes to transcendent reality. O'Connor's stories portray a world where grace is terrible, mercy comes unbidden and the fear of God is real and warranted.

- This quote is from Melissa Jenks' review of David Dark's: Everyday Apocalypse: the Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, the Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons.

I was talking to my Stanford friend, Matt, on the phone yesterday and he told me that he had just reread Flannery O'Connor's short story, The Turkey. He also said that this has become his favorite O'Connor story.

As Matt described the story I realized that I didn't know it. So I got my collection of O'Connor short stories, headed to a coffee shop and read the story, which is absolutely fascinating.

I had totally overlooked The Turkey.

The Turkey is near the front of O'Connor's collection of short stories. It was one of the stories in her masters thesis at Iowa. While I've read most of her stories, I've paid less attention to the stories at the front of the book because some of them (like The Train, The Peeler, and Enoch and the Gorilla) are more maturely reworked in her novel Wise Blood and elsewhere in her later work.

The Turkey is about an eleven-year-old boy, Ruller, who chases down a wounded turkey and captures it. But, in the encounter with the turkey, he goes to deeper places and has a first encounter with the mystery of God and reconsiders the religious teaching and traditions of his family, and he toys with a sense of "calling." He also encounters the attraction of pride and sees consequences of following pride over taking a simpler path.

There are many themes in this short story that introduce the reader to themes that dominate O'Connor's later work.

I enjoyed reading The Turkey.

I also thought about other O'Connor themes and her prose. One collection of O'Connor prose is called Mystery and Manners. I talked to Matt about the concept of "mystery" as a theological idea. O'Connor says that "mystery" is an uncomfortable concept. I see that and have long thought about what she means by "mystery." Mystery is not a tidy concept in theology or literature.

I was also thinking about reading as I was driving home last night. I've had a recent encounter that left me thinking: "I bet that those people don't read." I'm not writing this to be mean, but I'm convinced that people who lack imagination do so, in part, because they don't read. So, they're left with a view of the world that is narrow and flat.