The General with a sword in his mouth

"Then it came to her, with an unpleasant little jolt, that the General with the sword in his mouth, marching to do violence, was Jesus."

This is the ending to Flannery O'Connor's "Why Do the Heathen Rage?". I have been trying to read an O'Connor short-story everyday this week, and I have been delightfully disturbed with each story. O'Connor's brutal and unconsoling depictions of ordinary people and everyday life cuts deep into the reality of that shadowy line that runs between the light and the dark in every person. Grace emerges in the unlikeliest ways and in the most peculiar places for O'Connor's characters, and it is in her often-times inverted and concealed perception of redemption that the reader is invited into a sobering and ironic experience of grace. The world is a horrible place, yet it is only in seeing God and his goodness over-against such banality, brutality, and horror that there is that possibility of hope. This is not a life-denying sentiment, but rather a glorious and severe apprehension of the God that has acted through the darkness of the cross. Seeing God and goodness is so often hidden from our "natural" and ordinary viewpoint, and it is in stories such as O'Connor's that grace is shown to be uncovered in unexpected and surprising ways.