Saints vs. Scoundrels by Dr. Benjamin Wiker

Author:Dr. Benjamin Wiker
Language: eng
Format: epub

We hear Mrs. Turpin chattering away smugly the entire time she’s in the waiting room, condemning others and praising herself, all the while posing as a sincere Christian. Finally, overflowing with self-affirmation, she exclaims, “When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’” At this, Mary Grace throws the book she was reading across the room, hitting Mrs. Turpin above the eye. She then leaps upon Turpin, trying to strangle her. The doctor and nurse wrestle the girl off the plump Mrs. Turpin’s neck and give her a sedative. But Mary Grace, as the story’s prophet, isn’t finished. She must reveal the truth about Mrs. Turpin to Mrs. Turpin. The “revelation” she utters is horrifyingly blunt, put in the form of a command, almost an exorcism: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” The revelation entirely crushes Mrs. Turpin’s pride in being a “good” Christian. At bottom, her sin—pride—is revealed as the very sin she shares with Satan. A chastened Mrs. Turpin then has a vision of all the other fools and lowlifes she so cheerfully dismissed as beneath her, dancing and singing their way into the glory of God’s Kingdom, while she drags in at the very end, the first becoming last and the last becoming first. It was not long after Flannery finished writing “Revelation” that her health took its final downturn. I imagine that after death, she danced and sang her way into the glory of God—crutches left behind, along with her lupus-broken body. Do I know that she is among those honored on All Saints’ Day? God alone knows. I like to think so, given how patiently (and humorously) she bore her illness, and how she forced herself to write about the deepest of Christian mysteries under the shadow

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