savior self

OMGOMGOMGOMGOOMGOlittlebabyjesusGOMGMGOGOMGOG

I first read "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" by the beloved southern goth writer flannery o'connor during undergrad christian bubble days.  Here is what I remember thinking:

Why does the man agree to marry that girl?  Does he love her?  Is he trying to help her get away from her mom?  Why does he rescue her only to leave her at the restaurant?  What's with the random kid at the end?  Why is it so anticlimactic- him just driving away?  


the above serves as proof that i've spent most of my life BASICALLY ILLITERATE.  forget all those book-it pins and free pizza hut pizzas.  forget the baby sitter's club and nancy drew and choose your own adventures and oz (the whole series, not just one) days.  forget that time the eighth grade english teacher commended me on my ability to analyze poetry.  forget fifty gazillion tattered poetry journals that started to amass some time in seventh grade.  forget the fact that when I got my friends together for a little bible study in middle school, i wanted to start with REVELATION because it seemed the most cryptic and SYMBOLIC and meaningful.  forget it all.  hogwash. delusional.

i couldn't recognize even the most obvious fictional asshole.

and i feel like this is a pretty solid indication of my general worldview at the time.  i believed that people were mostly whoever they said they were.  I took basically everything literally, except for the symbols that pointed to jesus.  And I saw jesus christ everywhere.  So when i read "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," i stopped at the word save and started looking for a savior.  And when that wandering man came walking over the hill and offered to help those poor ridiculous women in the first few paragraphs, he walked right into jesus christ shoes as far as i was concerned.  i spent the rest of the story trying to figure out who he was saving and how.

funny how that goes... the whole looking for jesus to save glasses.  apparently i needed to be saved from jesus in order to learn to read and recognize an asshole when i saw one.