What is O’Connor saying in her tragic story The Lame Shall Enter First? What am I saying through this adaptation?
It is easy to look at the surface level of this story and say that we are in a struggle between faith versus reason. Yes, these two characters, Rufus and Sheppard, are in conflict, but there is something greater going on here than whether or not one should believe in Christianity. A messure of a good story is that several people can read it and come out with different interpretations. Specifically in The Lame Shall Enter First, it is easy to be swayed in favour of one of these characters over the other, due to your own relgious background. But neither Sheppard or Rufus are good examples of their own world view. Sheppard is obsessed with “saving” Rufus from his troubled background. He makes him his pet project, and in doing so completley ignores his own son’s needs and emotional distress over the death of his mother. Sheppard’s mission in saving Rufus has blinded him from what is truley important, and it takes his mission to fail, and his own son to die, until he realizes what he’s done. Rufus believes in God and the Bible but would not call himself a Christian, for Rufus interprets the Bible to mean that he will go to hell beacuse of his bad behaviour. Rufus impresses his own faith onto Sheppard’s son Norton, whom he believes will go to heaven because he isn’t as bad as Rufus. Rufus is in clear conflict with Sheppard’s mission of salvation, because Rufus believes that only Jesus will save him, and this will only happen once Rufus repents. Both of these characters have got it wrong in the end. Their mission’s will fail, because neither of them have pure motives or hearts. Sheppard believes that Rufus can only be saved through reason, and in trying to prove this abandones his own son, while Rufus believes no one can be saved except through Jesus, but instead of asking for that salvation he continues to steal. The only character here who has a pure heart is Norton, and sadly he is caught in the middle of this feud. So yes, we have a story about faith versus reason, but it is not the answer to that timeless struggle that is the point, it is the motivation one has behind those two world views.