I've been living inside the strange grace of Flannery O’Connor’s imagination—where grotesquery becomes gospel and every wound hums with the low, electric current of divine confrontation. I’ve returned, again and again, to Parker’s Back—a story soaked in mystery and flesh, inked in the theology of Incarnation.
O’Connor did not write from sentiment. She wrote from scar tissue. Her stories do not soothe; they confront. They insist—almost violently—on one unrelenting truth: spirit is not separate from matter. To pretend otherwise is not merely dishonest. It is heresy.
To be enfleshed, as Christ was enfleshed, is to bear the unbearable weight of both divinity and decay. It is to ache with the whole body for the healing of the whole world. Not just the salvation of souls. Not just some pieced-together theology of escape. But for this world—this burning, breaking, beloved world—to be transfigured. The Kingdom, after all, is not waiting in the clouds. It is “within you,” Jesus said. Among you. Within bodies.
So I want to say this plainly, without qualification:
To dismiss suffering—to regard it as a necessary prelude to paradise, or to speak of the world’s unraveling as merely “a sign of the times”—is not faith.
It is cowardice clothed in piety.
It is spiritual bypassing.
It is a refusal to weep with those who weep.
Last week, the president posted an image of planes taking off with the gleeful words: “Let the deportations begin.”
And since then, ICE has brought down hell among the working people of Los Angeles and many other cities. They've tossed flash bangs to dissuade the gathering crowd. They've waited outside courthouses where immigrants—doing things the right way—were seeking asylum and legal protection. Mothers torn from their children. Fathers disappeared into cages. All while the president rejoiced. And the pro-lifers cheered.
Is this pro-life?
Is this faith?
Silence is complicity. But even worse is celebration in the face of terror. Shame on everyone who supports this evil.
Ezra Klein wrote, “The emergency is here.” He wasn’t being alarmist. He was being accurate.
The signs of crisis are not metaphysical—they are material:
Human beings kidnapped and disappeared by a system we pretend is legal
Programs for the poor, the disabled, the voiceless—slashed and burned like the forests under threat.
A proposed autism registry, that should terrify every human with memory.
And a chorus of public lies, desecrating truth like spit on the Gospel.
I feel this grief in my body. In my nervous system. In the shortening of breath. In the tightening of my jaw when I read the news. That matters. Not because I am the center—but because the body knows: someone else’s suffering is not abstract. It is embodied. Like Christ on the cross. Like the migrant crossing the desert. Like the trans kid facing erasure. Like the mother being told, again, to carry what may kill her.
Prayer without action is not prayer. It is a form of religious theater.
We cannot whisper “thy kingdom come” while building walls to keep the kingdom out.
And yet I’ve heard Christians—many—say with untroubled confidence:
“We always knew the world would get worse. Our hope is not in this world.”
But O’Connor, like the mystics and prophets before her, would call this what it is: a heresy.
To deny the sacredness of this world—to abstract hope into some unbothered realm beyond genocide, hunger, or fascism—is to blaspheme the very act of Incarnation.
If Christ did not come into flesh, then what are we doing here?
If God does not dwell in bodies, then the Eucharist is a lie.
And if bodies do not matter—black bodies, brown bodies, disabled bodies, poor bodies, queer bodies—then the crucifixion was just a myth, not a revolution.
Ram Dass once said, “Compassion is not a mental construct. It’s the trembling of the body when you see someone else in pain and you know it as your own.”
And Chogyam Trungpa taught that the spiritual path begins with raw fear—that moment when all strategies collapse and you realize you’re not above the suffering, you are inside it.
So I will keep pleading—not from a place of political outrage, but from a deeper place.
A spiritual marrow-place.
A place of trembling.
I plead for Christians to remember that we are not saved from the world.
We are saved with the world.
Because the Cross was not an escape route.
It was a door into radical solidarity.
And the Resurrection?
It was not a magic trick. It was a declaration that matter matters.
