A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you
think you are?”
– "Revelation," by
Flannery O’Connor
David became angry because of the Lord’s outburst against Uzzah.
–
1
Samuel 6.8
Flannery
O’Connor’s Mrs. Turpin is a fat farm wife. The biblical David is a lithe young
warrior. But they share two important traits: They both get angry at the
inexplicable outbursts of God, and they both see the dance.
The
lectionary skips the story of Uzzah, who grabs the un-insulated live-wire of
God’s glory only to fry and die. This is a mistake, because only in light of
Uzzah’s death can we understand David’s dance. If Michal disapproved when her
husband went all Magic Mike on the main street of Jerusalem, it may have been
because she skipped Uzzah’s funeral. Only a deadly God can truly move us to
dance.
Nobody
knows for sure why Uzzah died; he was only trying to help. The whole thing left
David puzzled. “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?”
Mrs.
Turpin receives her own version of a divine thunderbolt that leaves her
comfortable theology similarly devastated. She reads God her religious resume
and demands to know, “What do you send me a message like
that for?”
David
is the right guy to make his demand. “David,” explains Eugene Peterson, “wasn’t
careful with God.” O’Connor says the same about her heroine. “She appeared,”
the author explains, “to be the right size woman to command the arena before
her.”
She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward
from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls
were tumbling toward heaven.
– "Revelation," by Flannery O’Connor
And David was dancing before the Lord with all his might.
– 1 Samuel 6.14
David hardly makes it halfway down
the aisle before he busts a move. “Hey, everybody! God’s here and no one’s dead
yet!” As Peterson observes, “All religious sites should be posted with signs
reading, ‘Beware the God.’” Michal didn’t see Uzzah die and so she wonders what
all the fuss is about. She cannot comprehend the conquest of dignity by the
sheer good luck of not getting fried.
Mrs. Turpin finally figures it out.
In a moment of clarity she beholds a crazy concatenation of misfits who boogie
over the bridge into glory.
And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of
people whom she recognized at once as those who , like herself. . .had always
had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned
forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great
dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense
and respectable behavior. They, alone were on key. Yet she could see by their
shocked and altered faces even their virtues were being burned away.
“Beware
the God.” The untamed Lion of Judah will incinerate the last shred of Uzzah and
leaves only David stripped to his drawers, dancing utterly without dignity in
the incomprehensible fact of going to church and walking out alive.
We Can Dance If We Want To,
Doug
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