"Large and Startling Figures"?

Flannery O'Connor, the great southern fiction writer, in discussing how American culture has become numb to true religious faith, wrote, "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures" (Mystery and Manners). After an evening watching "Spiderman 3" at the local $1.50 theater, I wonder if the cultural tide has shifted rather too much in the large-and-startling direction. Rather than subtlety and indirectness, we now rely on the shock-and-awe method of storytelling--e.g., our Superhero's enemies pray to crucifixes in church even as our Superhero attempts to rid himself of evil up in the belltower. (Afterwards, Spidey even takes a shower, prompting my husband to whisper sarcastically "baptism?") I'm guessing O'Connor would be appalled.

Fifty years after her generation, I wonder if we've become much too attached to our large and startling figures. Perhaps we should retract a bit, look into the microscope rather than the telescope, take a step back from the grotesque and become wise as serpents, innocent as doves again. Postmoderns have become numb to whatever appears on a two-story-high screen, to the goosebump method of capturing the imagination. What if the church went for the gospel writ small? And what does that look like anyway? Stories of everyday people taking out recyclables, welcoming the stranger, tutoring a child--life in miniature, in all its iconographic details...Life as icon, as worship.