Y’all know that I’m a Southerner, right? So, when I found an article titled “‘Watching, Listening and Waiting’: The Mode of the Seeker in Walker Percy’s Fiction” in The Southern Literary Journal, I thought it would be perfect for the Advent issue of Grace upon Grace. Unfortunately, I can’t share more than a few lines from the article with you, but if you are really interested — it’s a great article — you can purchase a copy of it here.
I love Walker Percy’s voice, having been introduced to him in a college Southern Literature course. At the time I didn’t appreciate his distinctive voice, but now I realize how literature can expose us to different voices and viewpoints that challenge us, help us know others better, and broaden our horizons. Here’s a little of what the article says about the kind of waiting that Walker Percy’s characters ultimately find themselves doing:
For Walker Percy, a mode of “waiting” characterizes the seeker, the man who is trying to live in faith one day at a time in a scientific world. The significant fact of Percy’s seeker is that he has not specified the goal of his patience. He is not trying to control the kind or quality of grace God offers by hoping for something he already has pictured in his imagination — he is merely waiting.
His posture is that of a supplicant, in much the same way a parent sits waiting with his child until a fever breaks. In such a posture of waiting, the seeker gives up his control to God; he does not make demands about the goal of his hope; and he risks chaos and disorder. Like a man who goes into the forest to see wildlife, the true seeker listens, watches, and waits. Then after a time, grace will reveal itself slowly to him as do the shy forest animals whose behavior he can control only by giving up control and sitting in serene expectation of seeing them and living with them for a few moments in their world. In this way, the seeker gives up control and waits in expectation that something better, though not even dreamed of earlier, will emerge.
(Hobson, Linda Whitney. “‘Watching, Listening and Waiting’: The Mode of the Seeker in Walker Percy’s Fiction.” The Southern Literary Journal 20, no. 2 (1988): 42-50. Accessed November 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20077927.)
Margo Walter with Pat Walsh, November 2020