Grace

As a youth, I was transfixed by this picture by Grunewald--the Temptation of St. Anthony--which I thought a horrible misnomer.  What could possibly be tempting about monsters clawing at your flesh?  I became obsessed with the figure in the lower left and made countless copies of it, red sores on green flesh, which somebody along the way thankfully tossed. I was equally perplexed by Flannery O'Connor, a writer I admired for her Southern Gothic sensibility, not the discussion-stopping pronouncement that her writing was about grace.  What grace is there in being shot by a kidnapper? It took me literally decades to realize that St. Anthony wasn't fighting the urge to debauch--my earthbound definition of temptation--he was fighting despair that God or goodness or righteousness didn't exist. He was fighting to be graced with hope. And the obnoxious grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is on the brink of being murdered when she finally has the grace to drop pretense and see people as basically the same: "You could be my child," she says, right before he plugs her. In Catholic school, the fourth grade nun drew pictures of two milk bottles on the black board, one big and one small.  They were to connote souls and it didn't matter the size of your soul, your mission was to fill it up with grace to the brim. Top it off!  And that's what I wish all of us for the New Year. A bottle full of grace.