October 11, 2007
Wise Blood
"Nobody with a good car needs to be justified," according to Hazel Motes, the preacher escaping from his fundamentalist upbringing in Wise Blood. He starts the Church Without Christ, trying to escape from the Christ who haunts him and the whole South. In his sermon to the crowd leaving the Theater, as he stands on the hood of his car, he proclaims that there was no Fall, no Redemption, nor any need for any of that.
The medical profession, and its willing victims, has adapted Hazel’s sentiments. No one with a scalpel, or access to medicines, or stents and CABG and joint replacements, or vitamins and minerals, or a certain exercise routine, needs justification. Flannery wrote to Cecil Dawkins in 1958: “The Liberal approach is that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt, and is ultimately perfectible by his own unaided efforts. Therefore, evil in this light is a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc. and all mysteries will eventually be cleared up. Judgement is out of place because man is not responsible.”
It is an unreal world in which we live. We have convinced ourselves that only what we see and can prove is real. But worse, we ignore very obvious evidence that our efforts have little effect on the suffering we combat. One of the most glaring examples is CABG. From the beginning known to be life-saving for very few subgroups of coronary artery disease, repeatedly demonstrated to be over-utilized by any criteria, the procedure continues to be done on millions, ignoring what is a known reality and promoting the fantasy that has been created.
The reality which medicine ignores ultimately amounts to a denial of Jesus. If Jesus came in the flesh, and was who he said he was, the Anointed of God and God in the flesh, the very image of the Father, then we cannot ignore his impact on the world. If Jesus was raised from the dead, than nothing is the same. Everything in the world has to be seen through that fact. We cannot pretend for the sake of good science, good medicine, that there is no resurrection, that there is no spirit, that things just happen according to mechanical laws. The world is intrinsically personal, in that all things cohere in the person of Jesus.
Posted by Robert Maddox at 04:14 PM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2007
Help from Flannery
Although a few doctors have become famous novelists, and many novels are about doctors, few novelists speak to the problems of modern medicine as clearly and concisely as Flannery O'Connor. She did not write about medicine at all, though there are a few doctors as minor characters, and a office setting for a story. But she wrote against the perversions of modernity, of which medicine is one of the chief.
Ralph Wood's book has been very helpful as I have re-read her stories. The first few times through, I thought they were great stories, about people I know, and well-written, though frequently disturbing. Her letters reveal some of what she was trying to accomplish in her stories, and reveal much of her delightful and delighting personality. Credenda has a good issue on her work.
Several lectures by Duane Garner and Steve Wilkins this past weekend made some of the brilliance of her stories even clearer. Flannery wrote Southern literature, a genre so far superior to its predecessors and contemporaries that it is frequently derided and ignored. She concurred with Walker Percy that the peculiar advantage of Southron writers was that the South had lost the War. That, together with her personal suffering from SLE, her loss of her father to the same, and her other peculiar circumstances all combined to allow her a clear insight to the ills of modern society.
Good Country People and Greenleaf are both short stories with a hard message for modern medicine. I suspect that each of the stories have a significant message for us, even and particularly for Christians in the medical field. Many of the "villains" of the stories are good Christian people, who, like Mrs. May in Greenleaf, believe that "Jesus" should be kept private, like other words used only in the bedroom. Mrs. Greenleaf, on the other hand, is a careless, gross, even grotesque Christian, who does shocking and impolite things. But in the end, Mrs. May, gored in the heart by that bull standing in for Jesus, she sees clearly, and can't stand the sight.
That reminds me of a patient that CutOnTheDottedLine wrote about. It is so easy for us to hypocritically judge the apparently misplaced and confused faith of others. (I am not suggesting that Alice does, but rather myself). God will be their judge. They frequently have an insight that we need to learn, and God has let them be fools for our sake, even as Paul was willing to be for us.
Most of Flannery's short stories can be read in a blink. They are so tightly and carefully crafted that every word is important, and I know that I missed much the first few times I read in a hurry. So I intend to read back through a few and perhaps jot the medical lessons.
Posted by Robert Maddox at 05:38 PM | Comments (2)