Signs and Sacraments: Contrasting O'Connor and Robinson Julius Maingi Muthusi College

“For the creative artist possessed by Catholic imagination, God and grace lurk everywhere”, declares Andrew Greeley in The Catholic Imagination (10). His is a wide perspective of the sacramentality of things as opposed to the narrow Catholic usage of the term sacrament. In this paper I compare and contrast "signs" and "sacraments" from the wide perspective in O’Connor’s Revelation and Robinson’s Gilead.

Sherry Patrick employs the term “narrow” in reference to the church usage of the term “sacrament”, and “wider” in reference to an aesthetic/artistic definition. Sherry observes that critics of the narrow sacramentality in the church, like David Brown, Michael Mayne, David Jones and others, see the whole world as full of sacraments. Brown thinks that there may be “the symbolic mediation of the divine in and through the material” (586), meaning that God indeed reveals himself sacramentally in and through His world/creation, whether it be natural phenomena or human artifacts. Therefore I use Sherry’s wider definition of “sacrament” while encapsulating the term “sign” from both literary and religious senses to analyze religious imagery in the selected works of O’Connor and Robinson. In this comparative analysis, I will also be...