How Flannery O'Connor, Dante, Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Steve Miller Band can get you to Heaven.

Hello there, sorry it's been so long. I'm going to try and get back into a regular rhythm doing this, and in other news I may start a podcast about Church Heresies.

But this is my blog! Therefore I will jump straight into explaining this most likely incredibly confusing title! So whenever I get ideas in my head, they start relating to other things like a grasshopper jumping from leaf to leaf. As a result, I end up with some very interesting recipes that lead into (what I hope) is an interesting thesis.

(Now I actually want these people to be in a band together)

Flannery O'Connor's short stories are, for the most part either downright horrifying or exceedingly melancholic. However, my favorite, The Enduring Chill, is probably the only one to end on a hopeful note. In it, an unsuccessful playwright goes home after contracting an illness that no doctor has been able to cure. Being basically an emo college student, he lives at home languishing, believing that death will arrive soon. He has a Jesuit priest over in an attempt to get some kind of intellectual stimulation, but the priest turns out to be deaf in one ear and simply shouts at the conceited and lazy youth to say his prayers or face Hell.

Now thinking he is ready for death, the boy is appalled when the doctor tells him: "Hey! This illness is pretty rare! But you won't die! It'll just get progressively more painful the older you get. But don't sweat it! You'll live!"

So yeah, not exactly the result he wanted. However the last lines give us some hope for his plight: "He saw that for the rest of his days, frail, racked, but enduring, he would live in the face of a purifying terror... The Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend."

The conclusion gives us hope that despite his physical sickness, the protagonists soul is far from lost, and in the face of this suffering, there is hope.

The next ingredient in this thought process is Gerard Manley Hopkin's poem: God's Grandeur. Its a great poem, but the last line is all we need to focus on for this. "The Holy Ghost over the bent world broods, with warm breast and with, ah, bright wings."

So clearly we see the connection between Hopkins and O'Connor, where the former sees the Holy Ghost coming with a purifying fire, while the latter sees it as a Chill for her protagonist to experience his own cleansing.

But either way, we are experiencing suffering that purifies us, so that's the first part of the thesis.

Now for the second part, I will bring out Dante and Steve Miller Band. So in the song 'Jet Airliner' there is a line that goes: "You've got to go through Hell before you, get to Heaven!"

Moving to Dante, we see that he goes through Hell and Purgatory (In the Divine Comedy) before he ever approaches Paradise. So if you thought you'd never find a Dante reference in Steve Miller's songs, think again!

All joking aside, we put these four things together and we get a thesis that is always good to be reminded of. We have a life for a reason, and sometimes life sucks. Actually, a lot of times it sucks. But the really neat thing about that is that it purifies us and makes us desire improvement. And unlike Hell, we can actually make things better here. And the best part is that if we take Life's sufferings in the best way possible, and let them purify us, we've got Heaven to look forward to.

Whew! That's been a thought in my head for a while. Again, I will hopefully be back to doing this regularly.

Stay Happily Virtuous! Even in the midst of suffering!

So, if a man is prejudiced against back rubs, does that make him a Massagyonist? (As a side note, the spell check suggestion for this word I invented is Bassoonist)

Kronk memes are always winners: