Can I Be Free From Fear?

2023 has been a good year for Flannery O’Connor fans; Ethan Hawke’s biopic about O’Connor’s early career, Wildcat, was released in September. I haven’t a clue, though, if it’s any good or not: I live in the UK; the film, as far as I’m aware, isn’t out in Britain; and I’m certainly no Captain Jack Sparrow!

Since I couldn’t see the film, I decided I’d reread the Flannery O’Connor short story from which director Hawke derives his movie’s title: “Wildcat.” An elderly man called Old Gabriel, to give a brief resumé, spends a night alone in his rural cabin. He fears that a predatory feline will attack him. It’s a simple premise.

Every piece of literature is open to multiple interpretations. I read “Wildcat” as a meditation on the subliminal paranoia which afflicts us moderns. Marilynne Robinson defines this mindset well in her essay collection, The Givenness of Things (2016): ‘we are less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind,’ she writes, ‘more engrossed in the drama of staying ahead of whatever it is we think is pursuing us.’

If a deep-seated paranoia was prevalent in the mid-Twentieth Century, when O’Connor’s career flourished – and best epitomised in the Cold War tensions between the United States, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other – then our paranoia has only been compounded since. The World Wide Web – and social media, particularly – has brought us into near-constant encounter with a cast of rogues who, to put it sensitively, don’t always act in our best interests.

Fear makes our imaginations work overtime; we take whatever provokes unease in us and inflate it out of all proportion. The psychological community refers to this as ‘catastrophising.’ Old Gabriel, in the story, does exactly this. He describes the monstrous image of a wildcat which lurks in his mind: ‘you felt big knife claws in a wildcat’s [feet],’ he frets, ‘an’ knife teeth, too; an’ it breathed heat an’ spit wet lime.’ The creature in Gabriel’s mind is almost mythological in its appearance – yet it bears little, if any, resemblance to the real thing!

For O’Connor the Roman Catholic, I would imagine that fear towards a thing of nature, like a wildcat, is fear misdirected: a symptom of our human fallenness. Christians are to fear the Creator, not his creatures: ‘Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God,’ Moses instructed the Children of Israel in Deuteronomy (6.13).

I have never made up my mind as to how the story’s ending is best interpreted. In search of an answer, I consulted a book of O’Connor’s collected writings, Mystery and Manners. ‘I have found,’ she writes in this book, ‘that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.’ On that basis, we might expect “Wildcat” to conclude its narrative in a certain way: that Old Gabriel is visited, in his distress, with a great salvation from the devil, personified in the monstrous wildcat.

Instead, we last encounter Old Gabriel in a state of extreme fear: struck with a terror as bad as, or possibly worse than, that in which we found him: ‘The darkness was hollow around him and through its depth, animal cries wailed and mingled with the beats pounding in his throat.’ O’Connor disallows any divine intervention into Gabriel’s consciousness, ‘territory largely held by the devil,’ that would have reclaimed that psychological ground for more benevolent forces.

Given that O’Connor defined her ‘subject in fiction’ some time after she completed “Wildcat,” and with a number of other works under her belt, it seems unwise to judge the story before us in the light of a statement she made in her later career. Perhaps O’Connor’s purpose in “Wildcat” is to diagnose one of our human frailties: intractable fear which, left unchecked, will deform a person’s character. The remedy, God’s grace, will manifest itself in the more mature stories.

O’Connor, then, leaves the reader with a question: how should we deal with our fears? “Wildcat,” for all its inconclusiveness, does provide us with a subtle hint in the part where Gabriel meditates on his death and afterlife: ‘Across on the river bank, the Lord was waiting on him with a troupe of angels and golden vestments for him to put on and when he came,’ writes O’Connor, ‘he’d put on the vestments and stand there with the Lord and the angels, judging life.’

In this passage, Old Gabriel all but denies what O’Connor called a ‘sacramental’ worldview: one that sees God as active in the physical world. ‘The Catholic sacramental view of life is one that sustains and supports at every turn the vision that the storyteller must have if he is going to write fiction of any depth,’ argued O’Connor. To the sacramental thinker, God is at work in Creation. In Gabriel’s imagination, by contrast, God and his angels are camped on the far side of a river: in a word, aloof.

Without an external saviour, Gabriel tries to save himself and goes to ridiculous lengths to do so; he climbs a rickety wall shelf, as if that would put him beyond the reach of a wildcat – and the shelf, predictably, collapses under his weight. O’Connor’s narrative detail has – not least, in that riverbank image of a deity who stands remote from human concern – built up a sense that, with a faraway God, there is no help on the way.

God, as O’Connor clearly believed, is operative in human lives, ‘for the good of those who love him’ (Romans 8.28). Anglicanism, the tradition I know best, echoes O’Connor’s faith in this interventionist God. Our liturgy, The Book of Common Prayer, solicits action from him; Anglican Orders for Evening Prayer, for instance, present us with a non-passive God who can, and will, deliver us from all evil with an outstretched arm. That last phrase, ‘an outstretched arm,’ is found in a great many books in the Hebrew Bible; think about how frequently, then, those writings depict an interventionist God!

With regards to the prayerbook, though, consider this Collect: ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ.’ Every Tuesday night, in our study group at Eglantine Parish, we pray this Collect: a luminous benediction before we part ways. Truly, the Lord is a strong tower (Proverbs 18.10), and so these are not empty words for those who believe.

There are a few things to note in the Collect above. The first is the phrase, ‘Lighten our darkness.’ Now, to lighten somebody’s darkness doesn’t mean that all their problems instantly vanish. It isn’t, ‘Eliminate our darkness.’ To tell the Muslim Palestinian or the Jewish Israeli that, if only they believed in the Christian God, then all their fears will evaporate instantly, would be fatuous. Besides, people of other faiths can turn to their own theologies for strength.

In Christianity, God’s deliverance of us from fear — in this life, anyway — seems more of a relative idea than an absolute one: that God would render the darkness less dark and make it somewhat easier to bear. In the midst of life in this imperfect world, we are in death; with God’s grace, however, we can still thrive.

Another point of interest is how specific its timeframe is: ‘by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night’ (italics mine). In other words, we pray for one specific night. Faith is not about a single moment in time, even baptism or conversion; we constantly must renew the trust we place in God.

These observations are, I think, a good starting point in the battle against fear, the fight which Old Gabriel, a man with poor theological resources, appears to lose in O’Connor’s “Wildcat”: firstly, know that religion offers no quick fixes or cheap solutions but, secondly, that we can learn habits of trust and reliance upon God, which make our load easier to bear, until Jesus comes in glory to relieve us. And so, may the Lord lighten your darkness; and by his great mercy defend you from all dangers, until the day when all danger is past. In Jesus’ name, amen.