Not that I know anything about the South, being the Yankee that I am, but Wyman Richardson has some excellent reflections on Flannery O’Connor’s statement about the South’s being “Christ-haunted” that are applicable to us all:
Kierkegaard spoke often, if shrilly, of the need to recapture Christianity for Christendom. Such is the case today. “We in the South may be in the process of exorcising this ghost which has given us our vision of perfection,†wrote Flannery O’Connor. Good. Let us exorcise the ghost of the phantom Christ that comes to us on the last whispering remnants of the almost-completely-gone culture of the Bible Belt and renew ourselves in the concrete reality of nails, wood, bread, wine, flesh and blood: “the blunt assertion†of fact. “The Christ of faith over the Christ of history,†the neo-orthodox used to say, as if the a-historical phantom of a God was enough. It is not.
One must be centered on the Christ who lives in the realm of raw fact, Waugh’s “blunt assertionâ€: fact that cannot be explained away by the nuances and sophistry of wordsmiths and theologians gone awry but rather that must be confronted and responded to in all of its glorious and embarrassing naked starkness. Give us the real Jesus who spoke real words and whose story is recorded in a real book. Give us a real church of flesh and blood people who are committed to this real Christ. And away with the ghosts.
I put my favorite line in bold. You can read the whole thing at Communio Sanctorum.
