In 1926, Jesuit paleontologist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was removed from his teaching position at the Institut Catholique in Paris. With strict orders that future study be restricted to purely scientific realms, Teilhard settled in China where he completed his first major work, The Phenomenon of Man. Perhaps Teilhard worried that this complex argument for the compatibility of cosmic evolution and orthodox Christianity would be seen as a violation of his censure. And although it was not published until after his death, he opened the preface with, “If this book is to be properly understood, it must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less a sort of theological essay, but purely and simply as a scientific treatise.”1 This proved a challenging task for his readers. Adlus Huxely introduces the post-houmously published book as a “gallant attempt to reconcile the supernatural elements in Christianity with the facts and implications of evolution....”2

Among other people, Huxley included, to read Teilhard’s Phenonmenon of Man as more than simply a “scientific treatise,” was a Southern-fiction writing American. In a letter dated September 14, 1961, Flannery O’Connor wrote to Thomas Stritch, “I’m much taken, though, with Pere (sic) Teilhard. I don’t understand the scientific end of it or the philosophical but even when you don’t know those things, the man comes through. He was alive to everything there is to be alive to and in the right way.”3 O’Connor confesses in another such letter that her recently published short story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge”, was “a physical proposition that I [O’Connor] found in Pere (sic) Teilhard and am applying to a certain situation in the Southern states and indeed in all the world.”4 Further still, in a review of The Phenomenon of Man, O’Connor writes, “it is doubtful if any Christian in this century can be fully aware of his religion until he has reseen it in the cosmic light which Teilhard has cast upon it.”5 It is clear that O’Connor borrowed mightily from his work fully conceding that the scientific substance was far beyond her reach. Further, were he alive when O’Connor was publishing, it is quite possible that Teilhard would have approved of her reading on the Phenonmenon of Man.

Teilhard’s influence on O’Connor can be expanded in a comparison of their mutual affection for the verb ‘to see’. Teilhard begins his foreward declaring, “that the whole of life lies in that verb (to see)—if not in the end, at least in essence...I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes, and realises that a universal will to live converges and is hominised in him.”6 Any reader familar with O’Connor’s short stories should easily identify many such “scales falling from the eyes” scenes. O’Connor’s often grotesque cast of characters are notorious for stumbling through life blind until an occasion of grace allows them to see their depravity and spiritual need. “Themes of blindness and of sight, of sudden revelation and of violent death permeate her work.”7 In fact, so much has been made out of O’Connor’s affinity for this particular verb and the role of literal vision in her character’s encounters with grace, that Miles Orvell concludes, “O’Connor’s first principle is thus rooted in the perception of the world and not in some disembodied cogito: rather, video ergo sum.”8

In a recent (November 2001) interview with Image, contemporary novelist David James Duncan artfully dodged a question aimed at revealing his own “conversion” or “awakening” experience by referring his interviewer to examples of spirituality as presented in a few of his works including, “My own resolution of ‘the Mickey Mantle Koan’ in River Teeth...’” and “Everett Chance’s experience of his dead father’s presence in the short story called “Just Wind and a Creek” in River Teeth.”

I can find no evidence that Duncan has read Teilhard. However, it is clear from a quotation above chapter 3, book 3, in The Brothers K, that he has read “Everything that Rises Must Converge”.9 This particular selection, “Quit yo’ foolishness,” she said, “before I knock the living Jesus out of you.”10 graces a chapter entitled “Kinds of Salvation” and best fits the character of Everett M. Chance. However, rather than exploring Everett’s character through the 645 page monster, The Brothers K, this paper will instead focus on two of Duncan’s short stories, found in his 1995 River Teeth. One of these stories is nothing but a wayward chapter from The Brothers K, as it is the story of Everett’s release from the Wahkiakum County Work Camp. The other is autobiographical and deals with the death of Duncan’s older brother. Both point in very much the same direction as Flannery’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and help explore the themes of convergence and seeing.

O’Connor’s Perspective:

“I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.” (Flannery O’Connor, from “The Fiction Writer and His Country”) ”

According to Fitzgerald, the title “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is “taken in full respect and with profound and necessary irony.”11 This irony is directed towards those readers of Teilhard who were attracted to his vision of the omega point because it offered a detour around the Crucifixion.12 However, as both Christ and O’Connor have demonstrated, rising and converging are costly and necessary processes on the path to that omega point. In O’Connor’s story, as Julian reels in the tragedy of his mother’s lesson, he descends rather than rises. O’Connor subtly corrects this shortcut view of death and resurrection, perhaps reminiscent of Christ’s experience (1 Peter 3:18-19).

The characters who carry her message are familiar to her readers. Julian is the “ignorant intellectual,” a martyr of the likes of Saint Sebastian. He is also much like Hulga-Joy in “Good Country People”. Despite his college degree, he still lives at home selling typewriters unable to break his dependence on his mother, “who was supporting him still....‘Someday I’ll start making money,’ Julian said gloomily—he knew he never would.”13 His mother is equally familiar in her role as an overweight, arrogant, racist, white southerner who has failed to take notice of changing racial and social times. “ ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘if you know who you are, you can go anywhere.’ She said this every time he took her to the reducing class. ‘Most of them in it are not our kind of people,’ she said, ‘but I can be gracious to anybody. I know who I am.’”14 Both characters are flawed, blind to their flaws, and thus, well positioned for the painful process of rising. In this rising, Julian is given vision to see, although at the price of his mother’s life.

The elements that rise to converge are strongly hinted throughout the story. Julian’s mother’s blood pressure had risen, as had her weight. The “reducing class” at the Y is appropriately if not ironically named. Also, there is a sense of rising in the shifting racial and social milieu. Julian’s mother says, “It’s ridiculous. It’s simply not realistic. They (blacks) should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”15 When these two forces, his mother’s corporeal rise and the rise of the blacks, come to a head, Julian notices “Rising high above them on either side were black apartment buildings, marked with irregular rectangles of light.”

Twice the refrain, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” echoes. One understanding is that it takes much less time to die than to be born. Rising may be painful, but converging is fatal. It begins when a large black woman boards the bus wearing a hat identical to the one in which Julian’s mother was convinced she wouldn’t “meet herself coming and going.”16 Here we see Teilhard's chapter on “The Personalising Universe” from The Phenomenon of Man explicated, humankind inextricably boundup. We share in a common humanity and will invariable all find ourselves coming and going in another. Julian fails to see this for what it truly is, albeit overjoyed that “Fate had thrust upon his mother such a lesson.”17 Julian says, as he tries to drive home the lesson, “That was your black double,”18 unaware that his mother is having a stroke. This followed by the painfully poignant, “From now on you’ve got to live in a new world and face a few realities for a change. Buck up, it won’t kill you.” But this is exactly what happens. While she lays slumped at his feet, “The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.”19

What O’Connor has accomplished in this explication of Teilhard’s philosophy is to uncover the self-deception that prevents us from seeing ourselves in the light of the cross. For it is in that act that Paul can write, in Romans 10:12, “For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile.” Julian’s preoccupation with his mother’s antiquated social and racial views, and his false liberation from prejudice, disallow him from realizing his own dangerous divorce from humanity, his intellectual aloofness. “He walked along, saturated in depression, as if in the midst of his martyrdom he had lost his faith.”20

Duncan’s Perspective:

“I’d never heard of Zen koans at the time, and Mickey Mantle is certainly no roshi.”21

In an article titled “Wonder, Yogi, Gladly,” Duncan champions wonder as the secret, grace-unlocking, sight-giving quality to which truth seekers must submit. “Wonder is not an obligatory element in the search for truth. We can seek truth without its assistance. But seek is all that we can do. There will be no finding. Till wonder descends, truth is unable to reveal itself.”22 In the same article, Duncan equates wonder with grace as two conditions that are beyond comprehension. For Duncan, Teilhardian convergence is about wonder. Wonder is what falls upon a man after the rising process has culminated. A moment of wonder is to Duncan what a moment of grace is to O’Connor.

“Wonder may be the aura of truth. Or something even closer. Wonder may be the feel of truth touching our very skin.

Like grace, wonder defies rational analysis. Discursive thought can bring nothing to any object of wonder. Thought at best just circumambulates the wondrous object, like a devout pilgrim circles Jerusalem, or the Bo Tree, or Wounded Knee, or the Ka'ba.

Philosophically speaking, wonder is crucial to the discovery of knowledge, yet has everything to do with ignorance. By this I mean that only the admission of ignorance can open us to fresh knowings--and wonder is the experience of that admission. Wonder is unknowing, experienced as pleasure.”23

As disclosed in his Image interview, the short story “Mickey Mantle Koan” exposes one of Duncan’s wonder moments. True to Teilhard’s thesis and O’Connor’s explication of such, a painful rising process precedes wonder. In a candid and revealing manner, Duncan tells the story of losing his brother to, “what his surgeons called ‘complications’ after three unsuccessful open-heart operations.”24 Duncan’s relationship to his brother may be typical of a younger brother’s worship of an older brother. However, the admiration went further than is required by mere genealogical chance. Of his brother, Duncan writes, “He was my most intimate friend, but a hero to me even so.”25

The young Duncan processed his brother’s death in a peculiar way. He writes, “What my orthodox, baseball-worshipping brain fixed upon instead was the top-of-the-line Wilson outfielder’s glove I would now be inheriting....”26 The complication had to do with baseball, and a particular one at that. “...the morning after his death, April 7, 1965, a small brown-paper package arrived at our house, special delivery from New York City, addressed to John...and inside, nested in tissue, was a baseball...with bright blue ballpoint ink, a tidy but flowing hand had written,

To John—

My Best Wishes

Your Pal

Mickey Mantle

April 6, 1965.”27

This particular baseball, and more importantly its misgiven timing, became for Duncan an unsolvable puzzle. It, more so than his brother’s death, began to unravel him. And, as O’Connor’s character Julian could also attest to, “The bad thing about falling to pieces is that it hurts. The good thing about it is that once you’re lying there in shards you’ve got nothing left to protect, and so have no reason not to be honest.”28 Duncan did get honest, however the koan continued to puzzle him for years.

To blend the solution to the koan, “meditating upon one of these mind-numbing pieces of nonsense is said to eventually prove illuminating,”29 with the descent of wonder, is perhaps the best way to describe what happened to Duncan one late summer evening four year past the arrival of the Mick’s ball. “I suddenly fell through a floor inside myself, landing in a deeper, brighter chamber just in time to feel something or someone tell me, But who’s to say we need even an old ball to be happy? Who’s to say we couldn’t do with less? Who’s to say we couldn’t still be happy—with no ball at all? And with that, the koan was solved.”30 Beware that Duncan also writes, “But a koan answer is not a verbal or a literary or even a personal experience. It’s a spiritual experience.”31 And also, “The problem with talking about spiritual experience is that such experiences by definition belong to the spirit, and transcend language, so you end up sounding like a fool.”32 Disclaimers acknowledged, it appears that Duncan’s experience of solving a koan is very near to an O’Connoresque moment of grace, or sudden revelation.

Duncan spent countless hours meditating over the koan. O’Connor’s character was struck without premeditation. The similarities are nonetheless worth noting. There is the process of rising, during which elements within a character’s hemisphere seem to be pitted against him or her. To that point, Duncan satirically remarks that timing is everything with the arrival of a baseball. There is convergence. The rising elements collide and a character is exposed to the intrinsically interconnectedness of it all. This is the moment of wonder, the “No ball at all!”33 moment where Duncan was able to see the meaning in it all.

The story of Everett Chance’s release from a work camp where he served time as a draft dodger is both similar and dissimilar to Duncan’s experience with the autographed Mickey Mantle baseball. This short story further expands Everett’s character from The Brothers K, dwelling on his response to his father’s death.

“And in the midst of the grove’s two-way straining, there was nothing Everett had to force himself to reason out or to imagine or to believe in order to see life and death entwined, making a world together.”34 For over a year, Everett longed to enter the forest and bask in its spruce stands. However, once there, he fought any temptation to piety. Even as he dropped to his knees, and felt the soft decay of natural death beneath him, not prayerfully but in a “shut-up-and-kneel type”35 gesture, he drained a quart of Rainier beer. What Everett didn’t need to reason out, or believe in, was the wonder that penetrated that forest, that wrenched his heart. Instead of reason, there was sight. The promise that Everett had made to his father, that he wouldn’t break out of camp to see him one last time before cancer took him away, collided heavily with the unmolested stand of old growth forest. The imagery here is of two hundred foot tall life reaching both skyward and earthward, a “poetry of gesture,”36 a “two-way yearning.”37 There is rising. “Trapped, fifty-fifty, in his joy and his sorrow, trapped between the death-loam and the endless rising life, he found he could say no more.”38 There is convergence.

Both authors lend support to Teilhard’s premise, “I doubt whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes, and realises that a universal will to live converges and is hominised in him..”39 What Duncan and O’Connor have both done is to devote human experience and story to Teilhard’s “scientific treatise”. Both O’Connor’s Julian and Duncan’s Everett have borne the rising, felt the converging and found sight in the process.

List of Works Cited

Baumgaertner, Jill Pelaez. Flannery O’Connor A Proper Scaring. Chicago: Cornerstone Press, 1999.

Duncan, David James. The Brothers K. Doubleday, New York. 1992.

Duncan, David James. River Teeth: Stories and Writings. Doubleday, New York. 1995.

Duncan, David James. “Wonder, Yogi, Gladly.”http://www.theotherside.org/archive/sep-dec97/duncan2.html

Fitzgerald, Sally. Letter of Flannery O’Connor: The Habit of Being Vintage Books, New York. 1979.

Hardy, Donald E. and David Durian. Style. “The stylistics of syntatic complements: Grammar and seeing in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction.” Vol. 34, 2000.

Image: A Journal of the Arts & Religion. “A Conversation With David James Duncan.” Vol. 31, 2001.

O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. 1971.

O’Connor, Flannery. Everything That Rises Must Converge. Noonday Press, New York. 1965.

Ovell, Miles. Invisible Parade: The Fiction of Flannery O’Connor. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1972.

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. Harper Collins, New York. 1975.

1  Teilhard, Pierre. The Phenonmenon of Man, 29.

2 Ibid., 19.

3  Fitzgerald, Sally. Habit of Being, 449.

4 Ibid., 438.

5  Baumgaertner, Jill Pelaez, pg.

6  Teilhard, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man, 31.

7  Baumgaertner, Jill Pelaez. Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring, pg ??.

8  Hardy and Durian,168.

9 On September 16, 2002, at a book reading in Seattle’s Elliot Bay Books, Duncan confessed to having read every available work of Flannery O’Connor (also Kerouac, among others).

10  Duncan, David James. The Brothers K, 219.

11 O’Connor, Flannery. Everything That Rises Must Converge.

12 “Evolution he (Teilhard) saw to be a process involving all matter, not just biological material, the cosmos undergoing successively more complex changes that would lead ultimately to "Omega Point, which has been variously interpreted as the integration of all personal consciousness and as the second coming of Christ.” www.encyclopedia.com

13 Everthing That Rises Must Converge, pg 406.

14 Everthing That Rises Must Converge, pg 407.

15  Ibid., pg 408.

16 Ibid., pg 406.

17 Ibid., pg 416.

18 Ibid., pg 419.

19  Everthing That Rises Must Converge, pg 420.

20  Ibid., pg 407.

21  Duncan, David James. River Teeth, 130.

22  Duncan, David James. “Wonder, Yogi, Gladly”.

23  Ibid.

24  Duncan, David James. River Teeth, “The Mickey Mantle Koan” 119.

25  Ibid., 127.

26 Ibid., 127.

27 Ibid., 128.

28 Ibid., 129.

29  Duncan, David James. River Teeth, “The Mickey Mantle Koan” 130.

30 Ibid., 132-33.

31 Ibid., 133.

32  Image Vol. 31, “A Conversation With David James Duncan” 59.

33  Duncan, David James. River Teeth, “The Mickey Mantle Koan” 133.

34  Duncan, David James. River Teeth, “Just Wind, And A Creek” 234. (Italics mine)

35 Ibid., 235.

36 Ibid., 234.

37 Ibid., 234.

38 Ibid., 237.

39 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenon of Man. Forward.