St. Luke's Attic

Flannery O’Connor is a wonderful writer and I heartily recommend that you read everything the woman ever wrote. One story, in particular, had me thinking a few weeks back: A Temple of the Holy Ghost. In it she describes the paintings seen at the fair where one could see “faded looking pictures on the canvas of people in tights, with stiff stretched composed faces like the faces of martyrs waiting to have their tongues cut out by the Roman soldier.” What I was thinking about was the classic circus freaks and how she was right, they are a kind of martyr. 

I mean martyr in the sense of witness. Hear what God tells Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 4, “And the LORD said unto him, Who hath made man’s mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD?”

It occurs to me that these people are witnesses to God simply by being. I don’t know that I’ve worked it out much further than that, but God tells us many times in Scripture that his strength is made perfect in weakness and that his glory bursts through by means of very small things.