Speaking of super-goodness, I have a bone to pick with Manichaeism. I mean, life’s tough enough without a heresy specifically designed to make us feel bad about our frail and mortal selves.
We’ve fought hard to expectorate the cosmic dualisms encountered along the way but this one seems especially determined to stick in the windpipe. At the centre of Manichaean belief lies the pitting of largely good spiritual realities against largely bad material realities. Although originating in the third century AD, (much later than the formation of Genesis), there’s a correspondence with those earlier dualisms we explored. When it’s stated seven times that the material universe God brought into being is supremely good, you know the emphasis is about more than simple storytelling.
The unequivocal vision that the universe is originally good and only good is all the more telling given the imminent spoiling events of Genesis Chapter Three. Yes, things got broken but the truth still holds: created matter is inherently good. Why do we need to hear this to the point of perfect hearing? The Cosmic Dualists and Manichaeans have long since disappeared, haven’t they?
Well, I’m not so sure. A particular poison of Manichaeism is the idea that the body can be bad/evil simply because it is material and not spiritual. Fast backwards to those God v Devil sermons. God was presented as over there, and the world, the flesh and the Devil over here. We’re all stuck on this side whether we like it or not and there’s a whole universe of effort ahead to never make it over to God’s lovely side. By default, we’re not reasonably good but unreasonably bad. And that’s especially because of all that filthy flesh we’re hauling around and illicitly pleasuring. Feeling good about ourselves and our bodies is manifestly evil, because that’s corrupting pride – Obvs!
My particular spiritual / literary bone of contention here is: is it any wonder this false, hopeless caricature of Christianity tends to blunt inspiration, stunt imagination and kill any revival in Christian storytelling stone dead?
Of course, I’m not suggesting insidious forms of self-loathing can’t ever make for a good read. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis would hardly have stood the test of time were that not the case. What I am thinking is that they’re unlikely to make for a good write. Kafka didn’t appear to be the happiest chap ever to grace God’s earth and his last wish was for his works to be burned. Even Flannery O’Connor’s uncompromising stories are at least imbued with an oblique sense of grace; that goodness is fundamental if it were only genuinely sought out. I plan to expend all my fiction writing energies trying to top this line in A Good Man Is Hard To Find:
“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”1
The personal awakening began when I simply stopped listening to those dismal sermons and started paying attention to the actual Scriptures they ought to have been about.
For the entertainment of y’all across the pond, there was a quaint UK children’s program called Bagpuss on TV when I was growing up. As a writer, it’s tough to admit I’m struggling to sum it up in words, but here. See what I mean! Yet clever old Bagpuss was teaching me something in secret all those years, (I mean apart from how to become a bona fide English eccentric). And it was all there in the ending. I fast realised that Bagpuss was the object of Emily’s love precisely because he was an old saggy cloth cat, baggy and a bit loose at the seams.
The penny (cent?) dropped when I also learned of the undeflectable love of the God of Genesis One and realised I was just like battered old Bagpuss held firmly in Emily’s embrace. Just loved. For no other reason. Because inadequate. Even whilst discovering that inadequacy is not my true nature, identity or destiny - because He loved me into being, fur n’all, and that love makes me fundamentally good.
Volcanic gratitude erupted from me in response, and this is surely the flow state of authentic Christian storytelling: despite our weakness, to commit to crafting tales of explosive and disruptive beauty. It’s a very different way of wanting all our stories to burn.
Header photo: Jordy Schaap, Wikimedia Commons
Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works, Literary Classics of the United States Inc, NY, 1988, p 153