God and the Grotesque

Divine Encounters in the Unlikeliest Places

I’ve been reading Rumi recently and came across a poem that repulsed me.  Muhammad and the Huge Eater relates the tale of a glutton Muhammad invites to his home as an overnight guest.  During dinner he massively overeats, as gluttons are wont to do – so much so that the maid chains his bedroom door shut out of spite. There’s no way to pretty-talk around what happens next, so I’ll just give you Rumi’s words:

So, dreaming he’s by himself,

He squeezes out a huge amount,

And another huge amount.

But he soon becomes conscious enough

To know that the covers he gathers around him

Are full of shit . . .

Trembling with shame, the glutton tries to steal out of the room to wash himself, but of course it’s locked.  And so Muhammad makes himself invisible and opens the glutton’s door to allow him to escape, seemingly unobserved.  A servant later approaches Muhammad with the glutton’s soiled sheets, complaining.  To which Muhammad responds, smiling: “Bring me a bucket of water.”  Then, over the servant’s protests, he gets to work.  In the meantime the glutton returns,

And sees the hands of God

Washing his incredibly dirty linen.

I’ll be honest with you, when I first read this poem, my first thought was . . . gross. Redemption, grace, unconditional love: these are beautiful, wondrous things, and so to my mind merit beautiful, wondrous representation.  For example, in a Bach chorale, or a delicate fresco by Fra Angelico, or the lovely parable of the prodigal son.  Most definitely not in a pair of poopy pants.

Yet as time wore on, I found myself haunted by the poem, or more specifically, by the image of God cleansing the glutton’s mess.  Shit is disgusting, certainly, but so is sin.  And like shit, sin is our own shameful creation, a thing we want to hide from others and even ourselves.  That God, the creator of the universe, would humble himself to wash our dirty linen is a strange but powerful expression of his love and grace.  Rumi’s God is intuitively and intimately familiar to any parent who has changed a child’s diaper, again and again.

This is the grotesque: crude, disturbing, more than a little gross.  And, counter-intuitively, a place to encounter the divine.

Defining the Grotesque

The grotesque can perhaps be best described as what it is not.

In his 1974 work God and the Grotesque, Professor Carl Skrade identified the elevation and deification of rationalism as the root of our modern predicament.  By “rationalism”, Skrade meant “that position which holds that the essence of man and the key to all meaningful understanding of man and his place in the cosmos is reason.” And “reason”, Skrade held, was “to submit truth and reality before the bar” of two abstract principles.

The first such principle is that of non-contradiction – i.e., it is not possible for something to be and not be at the same time.  As Skrade puts it, “If something is black, it cannot be white; if there is a mountain, there must be a valley.” The rationalist clings to non-contradiction because he clings to certitude: “the principle of non-contradiction is not to be questioned because, if it is, everything is open to question.  Man’s control of certainty is lost.”

The second abstract principle is that of necessity, which demands that if a proposition is logically and factually correct, it is also necessary. This singular focus on logic and facts relegates moral questions to irrelevance.  “The matter of goodness or badness does not enter. Thus the principle of necessity would free reason and truth from both the confines of ethics and the messiness of human suffering.”

For Skrade, the twin principles of non-contradiction and necessity, combined with technology, at their least harmful fuel human malaise and alienation.  At their most harmful, they result in the horrors of the 20^thCentury.  He decries a managerial elite that views humans as “mechanistically determined”, cogs in the machinery of production and consumption.  Unrestrained, this elite worships a reason that is “soulless and indifferent.”:

It is such soulless indifference that allowed the very correct choice of Zyklon B over Zyklon A without asking why Zyklon anyway – or final solutions or Lebensraum or anything of the kind. It is the same soulless indifference which allows the logic of paying millions to some people in this country for not growing food while permitting other people in this same country to die of starvation and malnutrition.

In this sense, then, pure reason of the type Skrade describes leads to a nihilistic impulse.  And if religion has any hope at all of counteracting that impulse, he argues, it must be non-rational, a faith where “God is not known via propositional statements and reasons; rather, God is known only in events – often strange and violent events at that.”

The non-rational is fearful and fascinating, dwelling in instinct and intuition.  It deviates from the conventional and the normal – in other words, from what is deemed “real” by the rationalists.  A non-rational theology operates beyond words and reasons; in its reliance on symbols and moods, it’s closer to poetry than philosophy.  What’s more, a non-rational theology is numinous: “felt, not understood . . .  expressed, not defined.”

It is grotesque.  And Skrade finds ample evidence of it in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.  In Exodus, for example, God introduces Himself to Moses with a name

. . . totally different from “Unmoved Mover” or the catechetical description of the Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent . . . The name is Yahweh, a form of the Hebrew “to be” verb which may be translated as a present (“I am who I am”), a future (“I will be what I will be”), or a causative (“I am the one who cases what happens to come to pass”).  It is obvious that none of these translations would allow man to pocket God within his reason, for this God is met and known only in events.

Events, certainly – and consuming, climactic ones at that.  It isn’t a calm, reasonable God who claims Abraham, but one signified by fire, a dangerous God who bursts into flames to demand total and immediate commitment.

Likewise, in Corinthians,

Paul also knows little of the God of reason: “For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent . . . For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom . . . But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” (I Cor. 1:19, 22, 27).  In weakness and foolishness this God is met, in the antithesis of reason and power.

Psychopaths, Fat Ladies . . . and Yet More Poop

The grotesque really found a foothold in 20^th century art, as rationalism and technology joined forces to wreak unspeakable havoc.  In terms of post-war literature, Flannery O’Connor was a master of the grotesque, if not the master. Her physically and spiritually disfigured characters are violent agents of change, revealing and introducing the mystery of God to the complacent and self-satisfied.

The most famous example of this is The Misfit of A Good Man Is Hard To Find, a deranged killer who happens upon a family of five – including children and grandmother – after their car overturns on a remote country road. As it becomes obvious The Misfit and his henchmen intend to shoot the family, the grandmother pleads and wheedles, falling back on her self-image as a “nice”, middle-class Christian: “You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” “I know you’re a good man.  You don’t look a bit like you have common blood.  I know you must come from nice people!” “Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady.  I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!”

Skrade’s summation is trenchant: “Grandma used up all the coins with which she had come to barter – the mask of the lady, the sympathetic understanding, prayer and money.” In the end, The Misfit orders her son and grandson marched off into the woods to be shot, then turns his gun towards her.  In this horrific moment, the grandmother is seized by an epiphany: the revelation that she and The Misfit are both children of God, their bonds transcending class, or “niceness”, or any indeed any rational categorization.

She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies.  You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.  The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest.  Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.

I always found this twist deeply troubling, especially as it suggests an evil actor, arguably in league with the devil, is key to bringing about confrontation with and knowledge of the divine.  But Skrade makes the convincing case that The Misfit is O’Connor’s stand-in for St. Cyril’s dragon.  In Mystery and Manners, O’Connor related:

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell . . .

In O’Connor’s grotesque, then, every one of us must encounter the violent, the terrifying, the dragons lying in wait, if we are to encounter the mystery of God. 

Brad Dourif as Haze Motes in John Huston’s 1979 film adaptation of Wise Blood. While the film didn’t quite do it for me, Dourif was great as always.

A less disturbing but no less strange example of the grotesque occurs in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey.  Zooey shakes his sister from her spiritual crisis by urging her to live for “The Fat Lady”, whom Zooey imagines as an unpleasant woman “sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer.” Living for The Fat Lady entails performing small acts of respect for others even when they go unseen and unappreciated, as when Zooey makes sure to shine his shoes for a television appearance, no matter that his feet are hidden from view.  More pertinent to the actress Franny, it means devoting oneself to the highest expression of art, even before audiences and critics who fail to recognize it as an act of love. Or as Zooey puts it:

I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t [The] Fat Lady . . . Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

I like the idea of directing love at the crabby, obese woman stewing on her porch, the one so busy swatting away flies she doesn’t even notice your little attempts at kindness.  She’s not exactly Tiny Tim, now, is she, with a pathetic little crutch and a dear little voice, blessing everyone in an adorable British accent? Rather, The Fat Lady’s very grotesqueness is what illuminates what God requires of us: to love, even when it’s hard.

But let’s return to the subject of poop.

In Godric, Frederick Buechner portrays the life of Godric of Finchale, a 12^th-Century English hermit and uncanonized saint.  Now, do a quick Google search of Godric of Finchale and you will learn that he wrote some of the earliest hymns in the English language. Several performances are available on Youtube, including Sainte Marie Viergene, translated from the Middle English as follows:

Saint, Mary, virgin dame.

Mother of Jesu Christ, of God his Lamb,

Take, shield, and do thy Godric bring

To thee where Christ is King.

Our Lady, maiden, springtime’s flower,

Deliver Godric from this hour.

It’s all very ethereal, full of such lovely, sad yearning for divine protection and deliverance.  Yet Buechner’s Godric? He’s anything but ethereal or lovely or even holy.  Instead, he’s earthy and raunchy and mired up to his eyeballs in all kinds of worldly sin. He’s a grotesque, and it’s through the grotesque that both Godric and the reader come to know God.

Buechner deploys the grotesque to illustrate Godric’s broken spiritual state, in a manner that’s sometimes deeply disturbing.  For instance, Godric kills a cat and uses its blood to fashion false relics which he then sells to clueless pilgrims (ewww).  And while Godric and his sister know their mutual attraction is sinful, at the novel’s end they succumb to it and commit incest (huge, resounding ewww).

More often, though, Buechner’s grotesqueries – and Godric’s sins – are funny and entertaining as hell.  In one of my favorite chapters, Godric and his equally shameless friend, Mouse, invest in a ship – the ironically named Saint Espirit – and transport pilgrims back and forth from England to continental Europe. Godric conceives of himself as a double whom he names Deric, and through Deric robs the pilgrims of cash by posing as a pirate:

Before the Saint Espirit put off, [Deric would] hide himself aboard so not a pilgrim ever saw his face.  Then when they were several days from shore and it was night, he’d grime his face and knot his hair and with a handful of the crew would man the cockboat that we towed astern.  Then he’d have them row around amidships where the pilgrims slept, throw up a ladder, and therewith lead his men aboard with daggers clenched between their teeth and howling like a pack of fiends from Hell.  “Help! Pirates! Help!” the pilgrims cried.

To dupe them further, Deric and his men would lash Mouse to the mast where he would feign to curse and threaten while they shook each pilgrim like a sack until the last few groats came tumbling out.  Then over the side into the cock again to split with Mouse some later time, nor any pilgrim ever saw the ruse . . .

Such was Godric’s roistering at sea.  His neck grew thick.  His chest grew deep. His beard bloomed like a wild black bush. His wealth piled up like dung.  He feared God little, men still less.  He wenched and broiled.  He peddled, gulled and stole . . . (emphasis added).

It’s important to note that Godric relates the foregoing from the standpoint of a decrepit old man, many years past his spiritual conversion.  The “Deric” he describes is a younger self who in no way considers wealth as “dung”, and in fact makes periodic trips to the holy Isle of Farne – not to pray, but to bury his stolen treasure. And yet Godric is gripped by a vague restlessness and unease, the cause of which is revealed to him, oddly enough, through dung.  Specifically, Godric accompanies his mother to Rome to pray for his dead father’s release from purgatory.  He finds the city filthy and fallen, with no God to be found: “If God was there, then like the Pope the eyes he cast on us were blind.”

On the trip home, he eats his fill from a grove of fig trees, then, as his mother sleeps, sits in limbo:

He’s empty as a drum inside his skin, but there’s a kind of peace in emptiness.  No fear or hope awakes in him.  He thinks no thoughts.  He hardly breathes.  His eyes alone are live.

Slowly then, before he knows a name for it or cares, a shape heaves into view among the farther trees.  It’s dark and shaggy with a clumsy gait.  It halts to sniff the air.  It turns and rolls its head about and gapes, then raises up and plants among the leaves its snout and two great paws.  And only then does Godric see it for a bear.

With snuffling greed it gobbles up the fruit, then claws another branch for more until the juice runs dripping from its chops.  The sod beneath is thick with fallen figs, and plumping down on all four pads again, it roots and wallows in them like a sot. At last, with swollen paunch, it lumbers off a pace or two, turns tail and there, in Godric’s view, voids all that sweetness out its hinder part.

At this point, Gillian, a beautiful maiden, appears and explains to Godric the meaning of his vision:

You are the bear, dear heart.  The figs are Christ’s sweet grace and charity.  You’ve supped on him for years and years, then spewed him out your nether end in lust and lies and thievery.  Thus by your sinning, like the loathly bear, you turn to dung the precious fruit that else would make you whole.  Repent and mend your ways, I pray, lest all be lost.

The vision of the defecating bear is repulsive and unsettling; it not only implicates Godric but any reader who has likewise squandered grace and charity (count me amongst them).  But what I find fascinating is what precedes the vision: a void.  Godric sits “empty as a drum”, without fear or hope or even thought.  The only active part of him are his eyes, and they’re only active as receptacles to receive God’s message. His encounter with the grotesque is the catalyst of his transformation, and while that change isn’t immediate (Godric takes his time repenting) it’s still dramatic and total, despite being incremental.

Skrade identifies this void in O’Connor’s fiction as well.  The violence her characters meet amounts to “grace that cuts like cold steel, grace which is met first of all in the wrath that tears man loose from his reasons.” In the words of Haze Motes, the protagonist of O’Connor’s Wise Blood, such grace annihilates the security found in money, class, and all the self-serving rationalizations around which we organize our lives: “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” What’s left, Skrade says, is a “holy Nothingness which alone can refine us.” Like fire or a sharp blade, the grotesque prepares the soul for its betterment.

Rumi predates all the writers I’ve mentioned and all the modern rationalism criticized by Skrade.  But I think he nails the purpose of the grotesque: to clear our selves and so make room for God. Or, as Rumi much more beautifully puts it,

[To] be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.

Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,

Where something might be planted,

A seed, possibly, from the Absolute.