keeping commandments out of love. Keeping them for fear of punishment is not obedience, only plain simple fear. Little wonder that at the story’s beginning Asbury was raging at the world, determined to die and by doing so, strike back at his mother and sister, after all there was nobody else who seemed to care about him. And then came his moment of truth when the hoped for death was denied. What a shock; to be suddenly bought back face to face with reality in that manner. As O’Connor herself said, there is a moment in all of her stories when supernatural grace enters. This is one of its more obvious manifestations. Until that shock of self-awareness, Asbury Fox hated the thought that there could be anyone or anything more important in the world than himself and especially that there might be some things always beyond his knowing and understanding.In a 1959 letter to Louise Abbot, O’Connor wrote, “Remember that these things are mysteries and that if they were such that we could understand them, they wouldn’t be worth understanding. A God you understood would be less than yourself.” And from her collected essays published in ‘Mystery and Manners’ comes, “For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man.” Like the simple child, who pointed out the parading king’s nakedness in Hans Anderson’s fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”; are we (like O’Connor) not entitled to ask when will this world of men make good their promise that some day all mystery will cease being mystery? It shouldn’t be all that difficult surely. After all, its only little more than thirty years ago that men began walking on the moon. ...
