There may be some debate about who deserves the title “the King of American literature,” but, at least to my mind, there should be no debate over who deserves to be “the Queen” – let’s give the crown to Flannery O’Connor. She is, however, a very unlikely queen. Unlikely, not only because her body of work is so small but also because of its nature. Her stories are not sweet and nice. They’re not sentimental or romantic. Rather, they are mostly horrifying. Nightmare-inducing. Unladylike in the extreme.

Her characters are nasty, bitter, hypocritical, prejudiced, arrogant, self-centered, naïve, and generally hard to like. They are bruised and broken, crippled mentally and often physically. Rather than provoking our pity and sympathy, they often provoke harsh judgments and indignation. In other words, Flannery’s characters are very much like your neighbors, your friends, your family members . . . and you.

Flannery’s mother and relatives were completely traumatized by her writings. Her mother once asked her editor and publisher Robert Giroux, “can’t you get Flannery to write about nice people?” 

Flannery dedicated the collection of stories published under “A Good Man is Hard to Find” to her friends Robert Fitzgerald and his wife Sally. She did it, she said, for two reasons: first, because they were her adopted kin and secondly, “if I dedicated it to any of my blood kin they would think they had to go into hiding.”

T. S. Eliot was once asked what he thought of her stories and responded that he was “quite horrified” by the ones he read. His nerves couldn’t stand “so much disturbance.” I sympathize. Flannery’s stories often come at you like drunken highwaymen who ravage, pillage, and beat you senseless. 

But in spite of appearances and initial impressions, the ultimate subject of all her stories was the grace of God, “All my stories are about the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” They are all about grace, though they don’t always look or feel like it. But, as she herself once said, sometimes “grace comes like a bullet in the side” – i.e. God’s grace works in mysterious, unexpected, and sometime painful ways.

Though her stories are dark and unsettling – they are all designed to direct the reader toward God’s grace. And this means that they are fundamentally comedic – comedy not tragedy is central to them all. 

This is especially striking since Flannery’s own life was not an easy one. She contracted lupus and by age 25 she began to experience some of the serious consequences of this terrible disease. The deterioration of her joints and the severity of the pain she endured, forced her to resort to crutches by the time she was 31. 

But as often happens in God’s wise providence, Flannery’s suffering became a great blessing to her. She wrote to a friend, “I have never been anywhere but sick. In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.” Sickness focused her thinking in a way that might never had occurred if she had enjoyed good health.

Chronic suffering often produces a glum, cynical, self-pitying outlook on life – the sufferer begins to view the world from the perspective of his own misfortune and turns into a professional “victim” of the cruel fates. Flannery could easily have taken on the role of the tragic artist with all the melodrama that entails. In fact, she was exactly the opposite. 

She firmly rejected the view that life is tragic, “Naw, I don’t think life is a tragedy. Tragedy is something that can be explained by the professors. Life is the will of God and this cannot be defined by the professors; for which all thanksgiving.” 

In Flannery’s thinking, tragedy could not be central to good story-telling because it runs contrary to reality. She saw everything in life as the fruit of the triumph of Christ over the world, the flesh, and the devil. For this reason, her stories were, in her mind, comedies. As she wrote to a friend, “the Devil can always be a subject for my kind of comedy one way or another. I suppose this is because he is always accomplishing ends other than his own.”

Satan is always the straight man, always used for a deeper purpose than he ever suspects. Jesus’ victory means that the devil is now the great fool, the preeminent stooge. 

This perspective may also explain why some Christians are so unnerved by her stories. A comedic world, disturbs some Christians as much as a violent one (and sometimes more). Comedy is too unserious for us, too unpredictable. We have lost the perspective of the sovereign, triune God who has accomplished the great victory of history through His Son and thus, can laugh when His enemies plot against Him. 

Humor is an essential and powerful part of our witness. Laughter reminds us that the gospel has turned our tragedy into a comedy and we must never ever forget that. In addition, there’s nothing more disconcerting to the world than when you refuse to take their threats seriously. Laughter is one of the Church’s most powerful weapons. Nehemiah reminds us that the joy of the Lord is our strength and in doing this, he is pointing us to God’s joy – God’s merriment over the victory of His Son, His delight in seeing His purposes worked out in the earth. When we remember His joy, we are strengthened.

Flannery’s life was filled with suffering but overarching everything was her joy over the hilarious grace of God which made the sufferings of life not worthy to be compared with the joy that has been secured for us in Jesus. Her stories reflect this reality. For Flannery, the only tragedy was refusing to see that God had provided the great remedy for the disaster into which sin had brought us. In this regard she was well aware that she was writing for an audience who believed God was dead. Thus her message was the great comedic story of how sin had doomed us all but how God’s grace is greater than all our sin. Grace turns the tragedy of our story into the great comedy of all the ages.

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Steve Wilkins is the pastor of Church of the Redeemer in Monroe, LA.