Biscuits and Religious Sensibility

The Moosehead Cafe serves up homemade biscuits in the tradition of chips at a Mexican restaurant--they bring you a basket, you eat them. Then they bring your order, including biscuits. Then they refill the basket with...more biscuits. They were delicious and overwhelming. You may not recognize me when I return. I'll be the one rolling off the plane.

In workshop, faculty member David Shields commented on a fundamentalist Christian character in the story (not mine). He said that religous leaders, therapists and others who deal, in their own way, with life's big questions, are often portrayed negatively in literature. Such people are didactic in nature--they have answers--so if their voice is too strong, it tends to elbow out how the story itself is trying to deal with the very same issues: life, death, love, hope, loss.

After class, we had a short but interesting discussion about my experience looking at these questions via a faith-based lens (theology) and (now) a literary one. In a nutshell, I observed, religion is concerned with the answers to the human condition. Literature is more interested in exploring (filling out, nuancing, renaming) life's problems and questions.

Many writers are mystics in their own way. But they are vehmently opposed to organized religion. For them, art is faith. It occurrs to me that just as fundamentalist religious sentiment clamps down on ambiguity and questioning, modern day literati have nearly an equal, corresponding dislike of writing that presents too many answers. David Shields said that he even found some of Flannery O'Connor's stories too didactic. O'Connor would probably say, if you don't have a worldview--an opinion about good and evil, God and the fallenness of man--what the heck are you writing about???