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Taste Bread at Emmaus that
Warm Hands Broke and Blessed
by Michael P. Murphy
Like many, on my bedside table I keep a mini library. Most of the books cycle in and out but there are two or three anchor texts that stay in constant circulation—books that, well, keep me anchored. The Habit of Being, a posthumous collection of Flannery O’Connor’s personal letters (edited by Sally Fitzgerald and published by FSG in 1979), is one such book. Every year, it seems, I read each letter from this epistolary liturgy of the hours, this breviary of the Catholic literary imagination. I finish the last letter (to her cousin, Maryat Lee, just before O’Connor’s death in 1964), and then it’s back to 1948 and her agent, Elizabeth McKee. The Habit of Being is a singular, life-giving text.
A favorite letter in the collection is the famous defense of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist made during a dinner party conversation with writers and friends—some of whom, like Mary McCarthy (AKA “Mrs. Broadwater”), were influential culture creators of the New York literary set in the 1940s and 1950s. O'Connor recounts the incident to Betty Hester, the famous "A" in The Habit of Being, in a letter dated December 16, 1955:
Mrs. Broadwater said 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.”
I was reminded again of the power of the last sentence as I watched Maya Hawke render it so beautifully into cinematic being in the excellent O’Connor biopic, Wildcat, earlier this spring. In the scene in question, O’Connor declares the essential nature of the Real Presence in the Eucharist with both the implacable urgency and short-hand clarity of a prophet teaching in the temple. Jaws drop and eyes roll further towards Manhattan’s Upper East Side, of course—but then some in the scene begin to look at O’Connor with new eyes and begin to readjust their postures, the message having hit its mark.
*****
When I first read O’Connor’s zinger insight about the Eucharist as an undergraduate in the 1980s, it very much set me on the path that I continue to travel today. O’Connor’s fiction is, of course, the holy of holies when it comes to the Catholic literary imagination and her stories always have underneath a deeply articulated sense of Eucharist about them: the fecundating tension between brokenness and blessing. O’Connor called these kinds of collisions “advents of gracious catastrophes,” and they characterize most consistently, for my money, the hardscrabble drama of human experience as it unfolds as a mystery of our lives in God.
O’Connor called these kinds of collisions “advents of gracious catastrophes,” and they characterize most consistently, for my money, the hardscrabble drama of human experience as it unfolds as a mystery of our lives in God.
For me, such a dynamic, realist approach to life and faith was attractive and meaningful from an early age. Divorce hits children hard and I experienced these kinds of tensions firsthand in my family. My parents were a poster couple for what would become known as the California divorce epidemic of the 1970s. “Poster” seems appropriate here as my dad was an actual “Mad Man,” a big firm advertising executive at BBD&O who made his living selling the American Dream to people through the wonders of TV, print, and radio advertising. My mom, an erstwhile stewardess at Eastern Airlines and receptionist at CBS, became what they now call a “stay-at-home spouse.”
As I watched the first season of AMC’s Mad Men in 2007, I barked out loud to all who would listen: “I know how this story ends.” I mean, it’s not as if all those three-martini lunches won’t have some kind of consequence, I warned Don Draper through my screen week after week, and the cost is going to be quite dear. Just keep it up and you’ll see, my dapper friend.
The consequence in the universe of my childhood was, alas, more martinis for my dad— a true trickle-down affair that resulted in a broken family and begat a lot of pain and sorrow. But then, and increasingly over time, the pain and sorrow were met by real healing: more and more light and more and more grace. My father entered (and stayed) in Alcoholics Anonymous and rebuilt his career; my mother, a now divorced woman in socially stratified Orange County, re-entered the workforce with little more than a high school degree and a can-do attitude. She became a successful insurance agent against some pretty tough obstacles. Both worked hard and overcame much in the way of injury—the ones they were given by life, the ones they gave to themselves and to each other, and the ones they bore in silence. There were no symbols, as far as I could tell, but there was lots of Eucharist.
My dad retired to Arizona—a move he always regretted. He was a worker through and through; and Type-A personalities, as a rule, do not do retirement well, even in Sunny Arizona. In 1997, my dad’s health began to fail. I was teaching and just beginning doctoral studies in Berkeley when I began getting “Your father is in distress. Come immediately if you can” phone calls—and this became the pattern, on and off, for the next three years. My mother would often join me in Phoenix (by then my parents had amassed many years of good rapport), and she was a cherished presence and support. My sister, who lived in Germany with her growing family, would visit when she could.
It should not surprise you, dear reader, to learn that, during the heyday of his life, my dad was an inconsistent communicant. But he grew in his love for the Eucharist as he aged and, being Irish, was a dyed-in-the-wool sacramentalist. Beginning in childhood, and throughout his life, he racked up so many anointings and spit and dirt sacramental comebacks that we sometimes called him Lazarus. When I’d get the “Your father is in distress” call, I’d hop on the next plane, take a cab to my dad’s house, grab his car, and then put down roots with him at Desert Samaritan Hospital in Mesa. In early 1999, the pattern held. I received the late-night call, flew to Phoenix, and my mom arrived at the hospital a couple of days later—just as my dad was returning to the brightness of himself. For my part, I thought it a good time to retreat and take a shower.
When I returned to the hospital, I beheld a marvel—the shape of which I had never witnessed before or since. Approaching the room, I noticed the door was cracked slightly open, a bright ray of light reaching into the darkened hallway. As I stepped closer, I began to feel an inexplicable, radiant warmth and felt it deeper still as I saw my parents in buoyant conversation on my dad’s hospital bed. My mother was sitting on the lower end massaging lotion into his feet, smiling and laughing and rocking back and forth in a soft, loving rhythm. I looked at my father’s face, almost an O’Connorian character in its way, transmitting so much—all at once and over again— feelings of love, recognition, wonder, and gratitude. I also divined a flash of incredulity in his visage—a disbelief that the woman whose heart you broke would be present to care for you on your deathbed so good naturedly and so unreservedly. My dad’s face, having registered the gift of this encounter, settled into a deep, resigned peace—a sign of the quiet understanding that only the wounded and the healed know. Undetected by them, I quietly stepped back and left the scene, filled with a rising, unutterable joy.
My dad’s face, having registered the gift of this encounter, settled into a deep, resigned peace—a sign of the quiet understanding that only the wounded and the healed know.
This experience, I’ve decided, is perhaps the most Eucharistic I have experienced in my life. There were no symbols or empty gestures. There was, instead, an experience of true communion. A corporal work of mercy was given and received, and the space was filled with the corpus of Christ, filled with the fruit of the Eucharist, filled with another form of Eucharistic taking and eating. My parents experienced holy communion from human brokenness, experienced a grace that made a mark on them and became as ample a force as St. Paul records in Second Corinthians. “My grace is sufficient,” says the Savior, “power is made perfect in weakness”—not merely in symbol, word, or gesture, but in physical acts of accompaniment, self-donation, mercy, and love.
*****
O’Connor’s point about symbolism as it relates to the reality of God certainly has technical qualities to contemplate—and it would take pages of sacramental theology and rehearsals of the finer points of theological aesthetics to show why. But the essential point she makes is rather direct and simple: communion is a full contact, participatory affair. The Eucharist extends the act of Incarnation, not as an amulet or a charm but as a living reality of nearness, intimacy, and, yes, redemption.
In the essay "Novelist and Believer” (1963) O’Connor indicts the theology of symbol practiced by America’s best-known transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In her critique she takes serious umbrage with the late modern penchant to sequester holy encounter to the realm of the excarnate, symbolic, and abstract. Here, she illustrates the consequences of such thinking:
When Emerson decided, in 1832, that he could no longer celebrate the Lord's supper unless the bread and wine were removed, an important step in the vaporization of religion in America was taken, and the spirit of that step has continued apace. When the physical fact is separated from the spiritual reality, the dissolution of belief is eventually inevitable.
When the physical realities of our fallibilities and injuries are hidden or explained away or ignored, the dissolution of belief is sure to follow. Symbols are not close enough. Only the experience of grace is sufficient, and it lives in the physical places of vulnerability and powerlessness.
I have never told anyone, not even my parents, about the Desert Samaritan experience of Incarnational presence. My parents have both passed on but when I think of them, I think of the hospital bed reunion. What a perfect setting, and it bolsters my faith that everything that is lost in our lives will be recovered.
My parents have both passed on but when I think of them, I think of the hospital bed reunion. What a perfect setting, and it bolsters my faith that everything that lost will be recovered.
Marianne Moore advises in her poem “Poetry” (1935), that it is the “literalists of the imagination” who participate most authentically with the “raw material” of life, with the real. Denise Levertov works with this image in “On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus” (1981) and orients it to the plane of theological realism. We would do well to enter into the recognition and mystery of this disposition —into the miraculous gift of Christ’s incessant, non-symbolic Eucharist—with the totality of our being.
On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus (1981)
Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
It is for all
‘literalists of the imagination,’
poets or not,
that miracle
is possible,
possible and essential.
Are some intricate minds
nourished
on concept,
as epiphytes flourish
high in the canopy?
Can they
subsist on the light,
on the half
of metaphor that’s not
grounded in dust, grit,
heavy
carnal clay?
Do signs contain and utter,
for them
all the reality
that they need? Resurrection, for them,
an internal power, but not
a matter of flesh?
For others,
of whom I am one,
miracles (ultimate need, bread
of life) are miracles just because
people so tuned
to the humdrum laws:
gravity, mortality--
can’t open
to symbol’s power
unless convinced of its ground,
its roots
in bone and blood.
We must feel
the pulse in the wound
to believe
that ‘with God
all things
are possible,’
taste
bread at Emmaus
that warm hands
broke and blessed.
