Three Beautiful Things 11-24-2025: I Further Develop Yesterday's Reflections on Mortality, Compassion, and the Divine

 1. My blog post yesterday about mortality, compassion, and the Divine elicited a handful of thoughtful and positive responses that buoyed and uplifted me. One email, in particular, from Westminster Basement member Diane's brother, was especially insightful and very encouraging. 

I got to thinking today that my ruminations about mortality, compassion, and the Divine began over fifty years ago, long before I became an old man. 

I confronted these realities almost immediately after I survived a serious accident at the Zinc Plant in 1973. 

In fact, it was the way that my literature courses at NIC helped me think about nearly being killed that led me to major in English and study fiction, poetry, and drama for the entirety of my adult life. 

I never really thought about being an English major in terms of job prospects -- although that worked out.  I became an English major because I wanted to wrestle with these big questions, with the meaning of life (especially in light of a random event that nearly cost me mine). Studying literature turned out to be the best avenue for me to do that. 

2. It was in 1974, during my junior year of college, my first semester at Whitworth, that I experienced two profound thunderclaps of awakening to the relationship between mortality, compassion, and the Divine. 

These two thunderclaps struck in close proximity to each other. I'm not at all sure which came first. 

An English professor from Wheaton College was the featured speaker for a lecture series at Whitworth that fall and she had an AC/DC impact on me. 

I was thunderstruck. 

Most prominent in my memory was listening to her discuss the short stories of Flannery O'Connor. 

O'Connor's stories often climax in a moment of violence that awakens the victim's better self, the victim's compassion, kindness, and sense of oneness with all things. 

They are moments of grace, what O'Connor referred to as the violent intrusion of grace. 

The idea is that these characters were so asleep, so dead to kindness and decency, so entrenched in habits of being judgmental, petty, narrow-minded, self-centered, and rigid that only a sudden and shocking moment of violence could awaken them. 

I began to realize, listening to Beatrice Batson when I was twenty years old, that what O'Connor compressed into a moment of storytelling gave me a clear picture of the grace of mortality. 

I began to ponder the idea (and the reality) of how refusing to deny that we will die is a powerful source of seeing what binds us to all mortals. We are fragile. We need each other. We are going to die. 

When this violent grace intrudes upon characters in O'Connor's stories, the characters suddenly see light. To my way of thinking, they see the light of the Divine and how the Divine calls us to see our inseparability from others, whether we like them or not. 

In O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", just before the Misfit shoots the grandmother, the grace that has finally broken through to this bigoted, narrow-minded, superficial character moves her to say to the Misfit, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children." Then she touches him on the shoulder. 

The grandmother's confrontation with mortality as she's about to be shot, fills her with grace, clears her head, reveals to her the light of the Divine, and she responds with kindness to the Misfit. 

For nearly all of us, being awakened to the connection between mortality, compassion, and the Divine is a longer, slower process. It doesn't happen in a moment. 

But it's not reserved for the aged.

I began to see this connection,  thanks to Flannery O'Connor and Beatrice Batson, when I was twenty years old. 

3. When I heard Beatrice Batson at Whitworth College, I was, at that time, taking my first Shakespeare class from Professor Dean Ebner who had been a student of Professor Batson's at Wheaton. 

In Professor Ebner's class we read King Lear. 

It's the story of a self-centered and authoritative king who decides, at the age of eighty, to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. To secure their share, all the daughters have to do is flatter King Lear. He commands each to tell him why she loves King Lear the most. 

Two of the sisters comply, but the third, Cordelia, won't play along and King Lear banishes her. The two flattering daughters later turn on their father and they banish him, at eighty year old man, to homelessness and when he is turned out, it's onto a bare heath in the midst of a tempest. 

The suffering King Lear experiences on this heath in this storm transforms him. 

Confronted with his mortality, the hard-hearted and self-centered egoism, his disregard for those who have suffered under his rule, and his sense of himself as above feeling what the wretches do begins to be washed away by the driving wind and rain of the tempest. 

Lear confronts the tempest, as if he is confronting the Divine itself, challenging it to bring on all the power and pain it's got and that's what happens. He experiences grace through exposing himself to the suffering that accompanies being mortal. 

King Lear awakens after the storm a transformed man. The long repressed kindness, compassion, and capacity to ask for and to extend forgiveness awakens in him and leads to one the most heart-breaking conclusions in all the world's story telling. 

The story of this old king's suffering and transformation, of his softened heart when he reunites with Cordelia, and his mortal suffering at the end of the play left me thunderstruck. 

Those claps of thunder have never left me and for over fifty years now I have been trying, with very mixed success, to live in the grace of the Divine as I came to understand it from Flannery O'Connor, Shakespeare, and Beatrice Batson.