Legal Commentary

Dust To Dust

By Kevin Funnell

A negative reaction to the strong (albeit redacted) language in my most recent post left me feeling about some of the more brittlely and overtly pious Christians I run across the same way that former editorial writer for The National Review and the Dallas Morning News, Rod Dreher, felt about protesters on the right of the social divide over the movie Brokeback Mountain a few years ago. Quoting from one of his favorite Catholic novelists, Flannery O'Conner, about novelists, Dreher said some things (in an editorial for the Dallas Morning News I can no longer locate online) that apply beyond the subject of novels.

Ms. O'Connor once wrote that you don't have to have an educated mind to understand good fiction, but you do have to have "at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery." The mystery of the human personality can never be fully plumbed, only explored. To the frustration of ideologues, artists like Annie Proulx and Ang Lee undertake a journey to those depths and return to tell the truth about what they've seen ? which is not necessarily what any of us wants to hear. As Ms. O'Connor taught, "Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction."

In my view, if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to live. Life's dusty. It's especially dusty for a twenty-one year old white bread kid from small town USA who's plucked from his comfortable surroundings and figuratively (and literally in some respects) air-dropped into a cesspool filled with thugs and assassins, to swim or to drown. This man-boy has just witnessed the murder of a family by his companions, fought a half-mile running gun battle with hard-core killers (and patriots for another cause), during which he's certain he's killed at least two men at close range, lept onto a helicopter that was lifting off with him or without him, and experienced the terror of knowing (knowing) that the 'copter was going to crash and that either the crash would kill him or his pursuers would finish the job in a most painful fashion. He's filled with the utmost fear, rage, and, worse, despair. He sees God's face nowhere, only Satan's, and he's sure he's going to burn in Hell for eternity. This wasn't exactly his life plan unfolding as he might have intended when he was in grade school. At that moment, he is profane. How utterly "shocking and unnecessary."

It's called "life." It's "dusty." Learn from it or don't learn from it, but whatever you do, if "dust" offends you, read elsewhere.

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on August 09, 2010 (boomark / email).