ADSX: Day Two
Mary Magdalene in Milly
Flannery O’Connor attended morning prayer and Mass every day at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Milledgeville. Just after noon today we did the same, along with a dozen or so other people. An elderly deacon presided. As it turns out, today is the feast of St Mary Madgalene—which I did not know at the time, because I am a bad Catholic and a chronically inattentive person—and the deacon preached on Mary’s exemplary acts of trust in Jesus, her almost frantic searching for him, only to find that she is herself first seen and already called by name by him.
In an enigmatic response to Mary’s gesture of affection, her shock of gratitude at being recognized by him, Jesus says to her, “do not hold onto me.” In its Latin translation, Jesus’s famous phrase noli me tangere also names a type of painting depicting this scene, which has a long history in Western pictorial art. Painting the scene was practically a compulsory rite of passage: almost every Western artist whose name we would all likely recognize took a shot at this trope at some point: Fra Angelico, Titian, Hans Holbein, Picasso. It is a powerful and destabilizing scene, in which the urge to hang on to the Risen Christ is explicitly spurned, the true price of love is revealed as dispossession, both of one’s self and of one’s beloved.
Since we have been talking about “Christian Nationalism,” this seems like a good time to note that the same phrase Jesus utters to Mary Magdalene has been used in a number of military flags throughout American history, including the famous Gadsden flag, whose motto “Don’t Tread on Me” is a translation of the Latin phrase. An 1861 flag created in celebration of Alabama’s ordinance of secession featured the words “Independent Now and Forever” on one side and Noli Me Tangere on the other, beneath an image of a cotton shrub. It was introduced shortly after the state legislature voted to secede from the United States, and flew atop the state capitol in Montgomery for a month.
It would not be the first nor the last time that a phrase from the Bible was lifted out of its context and conveniently repurposed for an entirely contradictory end. When Jesus told Mary Magdalene “do not hang on to me,” he meant something very different from “don’t tread on me.” In fact, there is a way to read the mission of Jesus in exactly the opposite sense, i.e, as a self-offering of love to a world that can respond only by trampling on him. This is the vision of Silence, the brilliant 1966 novel by O’Connor’s contemporary and fellow Catholic, the Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo. Toward the end of the novel, Endo’s Jesus says that “It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.”
But even the most elementary rules of scriptural interpretation have never troubled colonialists or imperialists or slavers in need of a pious imprimatur for their cause. We aren’t talking here about “lacking fingers for nuance,” as Nietzsche once said. It’s clearly a very old and established American tradition to bastardize Scripture for the promotion of nakedly individualistic and/or nationalist interests.
That the Jesus who willingly accepts the cup that is presented to him would ever utter the phrase “don’t touch me” in the sense of “don’t f—k with me” should be obvious. But it is not, to a populace who by and large does not read Flannery O’Connor.
If nothing else, O’Connor’s Jesus was not a figure who could be easily conscripted for just any capitalist or white supremacist cause. But it’s not just other people who do this; everyone does it who says “Jesus was an X,” when X = a cause or identity to which I already subscribe. You won’t ever find capitalists saying “Jesus was a socialist,” or Marxists saying “Jesus was a capitalist,”—at least not capitalists or Marxists who still want to claim Jesus for their team. Most of us do not possess the kind of honesty it would require to admit that Jesus would totally not be on board with my personal or political program is. Whenever we say “Jesus was an X,” what we really mean is, “Jesus was what I am.”
O’Connor’s work consistently presents a Jesus who cannot be so easily enlisted to underwrite our pre-established commitments. He “thown everything off balance,” in the words of The Misfit from “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The difference between The Misfit and the rest of us is that the Misfit is honest enough to admit that the Jesus of the gospels simply cannot be reconciled with his own life as it is, that he either has to change his life or give it over to “meanness.”
As a tribute to O’Connor on the centenary year of her birth, John has been making appearances around Milledgeville and elsewhere dressed as Hazel Motes, the nihilist prophet protagonist of O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood. Hayes/Motes has been reading passages from the novel at select sites around the region. You are really selling yourself short if you aren’t following it all on the ADS instagram account.
Much as we did on the first day of Tour Six in 2018, we spent the final hours of daylight today on the sprawling grounds of Central State Hospital, once the world’s largest mental health facility. I have written about it in A Deeper South (pp. 98ff.), but the place has become even more forbidding and decrepit than it was then. The hole in the fence at the Men’s Prison that I crawled through in 2018 is now so engulfed in kudzu that it isn’t even visible. The entire complex is an almost impossibly vast case study of the architecture of dereliction, and of the peculiarly American penchant for blurring the line between hospitalization and incarceration. See for yourself:
