A Temple of the Holy Ghost: Difference between revisions

| published_in = ''[[A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories|A Good Man Is Hard to Find]]''

| pub_date = 19541953

"'''A Temple of the Holy Ghost'''" is a [[short story]] by [[Flannery O'Connor]]. It was written in 19541953 and published in 1955 in her short story collection ''[[A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories|A Good Man Is Hard to Find]]'', and is one of O'Connor's onlyfew explicitly Catholic stories. A devout [[Roman Catholic]], O'Connor often used religious themes in her work, but more commonly described rural Southern [[Protestants]] as her main characters.

== Plot summary ==

The story is told from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl and involves a visit from a pair of her 14-year-old cousins, Roman Catholic convent school girls, who are mostly interested in clothes and boys. The cousins were recently lectured by the nuns about preserving their bodies as "temples of the holy ghost", ina accordancereference withto the [[Bible]] passage from {{bibleverse|1|Corinthians|6:19-20}}. The young girl's mother arranges for a pair of neighborhood boys who are training to be preachers to accompany the girl's two cousins to a fair but does not allow the 12-year-old to join them. While picking up the girls, the boys are mildly ridiculed by them for their seeminglyProtestant ignorant[[Church religiousof God (Cleveland, Tennessee)|Church of God]] views. At the fair, the girls see a [[hermaphrodite]] displayed as a [[freak]], which they later describe to their younger cousin, saying that the hermaphrodite "lifted his skirt to show what was underneath". The hermaphrodite explained that this was how God made him or her. The end of the story reflectsmay upondeal with the acceptance of [[Predestination|God's will]] as in the case of the hermaphrodite.<ref>Margaret Earley Whitt, [httphttps://books.google.com/books?id=z1bNLrMAbs4C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false Understanding Flannery O'Connor] (Univ of South Carolina Press, 1997)</ref>