You know these stories.
Asbury Fox returns home from the big city and hates everything around him. He does not have time for his mother’s embarrassing, antiquated dairy farm. He’s educated now. He’s an intellectual.
What is wrong with Asbury Fox?
The answer is as old as the West itself. It is in Flannery O’Connor but also in Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. It is an answer commented upon by Cicero and St. Thomas Aquinas.
Yet, modern man has lost this answer. He lives an atomized, detached life that sees an allegiance to place as abstract and alien.
Let’s recover this lost virtue.
Let’s see why loving your hometown is a step toward a new world of gratitude.
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Reclaiming the Spiritual Importance of Home
Is your hometown important? Does your hometown have a spiritual significance in your life? Do you owe any debt of gratitude toward the place that raised you, and, if so, does that set upon you any duties and obligations?
These questions are very foreign to our modern sensibilities.
Modern man is a deeply atomized creature, an individual of radical autonomy that is often untethered from any type of obligation. Modern man is only loosely associated with any place, regardless of friends or family, and economic gain is seen as a legitimate reason to move and completely sever local relations—a duty or obligation toward a place, like a hometown, seems radical and too abstract, as modern man often struggles with acknowledging he has any obligations toward even family or God.
But until recently, Western civilization was built upon a fundamental idea shared by both Christians and classical pagans that one had a proactive duty toward one’s place of birth. That being raised in a community should knead within your soul a deep appreciation for the community that nourished you—and that your thankfulness translated to a duty, an obligation to give back, once the soul reached adulthood.
But modern man is neither a creature of gratitude nor of obligation.
Yet, if you come to understand this ancient principle of gratitude, it reveals a hidden order to the cosmos, a structure by which the good and beautiful soul attempts to order its gratitude and duties—something that extends far beyond the hometown.
Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and many other classical pagans stand as teachers of this cosmic principle of gratitude.
And Christianity adopted it, seeing it as a beneficial, natural expression of mankind’s natural duties in life—one perfected by coming to know Jesus Christ.
But, before we turn to these fundamental teachers of Western civilization, let us turn to a less likely source: a woman writing about the post-war, rural American South.
It is in her violent and grotesque image of the South that Flannery O’Connor gives us a spiritual lesson as old as Homer.
