Know ye not?

     This story was so much easier to read and follow than I expected. The three themes I saw most consistently were the "stupid idiot" older sisters, the relatively wise but immature in her own rights "child," and the idea of the body being a temple. I feel like these are the keys to the story, as they were so recurrent. Everything else just built on and around these ideas.
     What does it mean, though? How do these themes interact? The Temples (older sisters) seem to have very little respect for the body as a temple of the Holy Ghost. They even mocked the hermaphrodite from the fair, even with the conviction to be respectful. The child doesn’t explicitly indicate any great deal of personal care for her own body, or respect for it as a temple, but does seem to be stricken with unusual levels of wrath at her sisters from time to time.
     Through out the story O’Connor does a fantastic job of describing the scenes, especially the people. This does make sense, as the story is heavily pointed at the human body as a temple. Her writing style kept me very focused, causing me periodically to pause and question the existence of a word or the use of punctuation, especially what I often thought was a lack of quotations. After I would reread these sentences and come to understand them, I would become rather delighted with many of them.
     So, all these things considered, what does this story matter? Well, my thoughts about the body as temple of the Holy Ghost are conflicted. The Holy Ghost is a spirit and has no necessity for a body, much the same as our own spirits. After all, we are not flesh: To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Those words to be indicate full conscious awareness and existence. We are not our bodies. So, how exactly is our body the temple of the Holy Ghost? Not to say that it isn’t. After all, we can check 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 for God’s opinion on the matter. But how exactly? And how exactly?
     The story ends with mention of preacher’s having the fair shut down. All we know of the fair that could be considered worthy of being shutdown is the awkward hermaphrodite, who still seemed to be God-fearing. Is this key to the story, I wonder? Is this a parallel to religious legalism with appearances? Hmm, on second thought, perhaps not. That was really quite inappropriate. Whether they spiritually accept or reject that person would be the issue, I suppose.
     I’m not sure what to think overall. I liked the story and I was drawn in, but what have I missed by reading without thought provoking dialogue?