Ruby Turpin

The story's protagonist, Mrs. Ruby Turpin, is a "fat", "stout" forty-seven-year-old woman with "massive shoulders" and considers herself overweight at 180 pounds and thinks her ideal weight is 125. "Massive shoulders", "stout", and high weight are used by farmers to characterize a big hog raised for the livestock market, and she has other hog-like characteristics: small black eyes and smooth skin except for wrinkles around her eyes. Mrs. Turpin has an unquestionable faith in God. She also believes that she has received God's grace for salvation prior to the start of "Revelation" as her singing to a gospel hymn line, "And wona these days I know I’ll we-ear a crown" reflects her unquestioned confidence in her election for an eternal life with God and is proud of it. (The line is from the gospel song "When I Looked Up And He Looked Down"^[15] with lyrics for a singer who is certain she will be saved and go to Heaven.) With her belief in predestination, she has been indoctrinated by a church tied to Reformed Protestantism and has been saved because she has been baptized. (In accordance with Reformed baptismal theology, the baptized have been made one with Christ's person.) Mrs. Turpin's belief in her salvation has made her righteous, which expresses itself as malignant actions and beliefs that the Roman Catholic church would declare to be sins. While Mrs. Turpin believes she has been cleansed of sin, she is crushed by the message, received as a revelation of divine judgment, that she is an old wart hog from Hell by Mary Grace. Since Mrs. Turpin judges people based on their piggishness – her perception of physical or moral filth, the revelation was consistent with Jesus' warning about hyprocrisy in Matthew 7:1–2: "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you."

Using Mrs. Turpin as an example, Matthew Day characterizes the author's portrayal of conformity with Southern manners as a contributor to her moral corruption:

"For the White women who populate this fictional landscape the Southern code of manners reserves a kind of pre-articulate, vernacular model of feminine virtue that might be called 'gracious living.' ... Gracious living is a particular kind of moral sensibility, an ethos that is expressed by the "habits of choice" that her characters manifest in every domain of their lives. Manners are, in other words, the embodiment of the Southern woman's moral life."

"Painted in broad strokes the story ['Revelation'] explores how Mrs. Turpin, a woman who embodies what I’ve been calling the Southern virtue of gracious living, is slowly unhinged after being told to 'Go back to hell where you come from, you old wart hog'. ...through her doggedly Christian narrative voice, O’Connor suggests again and again that the Southern ideal of a graceful woman is morally suspect, a tradition which ultimately depends on repugnant distinctions based on race and class."^[16]

In a doctor's waiting room, gospel songs ironically trigger Mrs. Turpin's especially harsh damning judgments, as one song triggers her habit for judging people based on their shoes, and after another song, she blames a poor white mother's laziness as the cause for her sick boy's inability to eat. She disparges all of the people she perceives to have lower social status than herself, as she considers their souls predetermined for damnation, so she has no interest in the troubles of sick people in the waiting room, let alone having any compassion for them. Within the vision from the hogpen, the protagonist sees the corrupt Southern virtues of feminine gracious living (that are practiced in lieu of Christian virtues) being burned away.

Characterization of Mrs. Turpin in the role of the Pharisee in the "Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican" was formally identified by scholars in the early 1970s.^[17] In the parable, Jesus tells of a Pharisee in a temple, used as an example of a person confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, who prays to thank God he is not like thieves, rogues, adulterers, or the tax collector present a distance away, and further testifies in the prayer that he exceeds the requirements of performing some customs required by Jewish Law. Mrs. Turpin thanks Jesus in the waiting room for "making everything the way it is" including not being "made" a poor white or black person. In the parable, the Publican declares himself a sinner and asks Jesus for forgiveness. Jesus says that the Publican returned home justified before God while the Pharisee did not, and concluded, "For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted." The allusion foreshadows the protagonist's experience in the story, and also highlights the divine disapproval of inappropriate use of prayer, affirms doubt about the prospect for Ruby Turpin's salvation, and the waiting room's likeness as a temple. Pharisees, like Mrs. Turpin, believed in the after-life and predestination.

Claud Turpin

The injury of Claud, Mrs. Turpin's husband, from being kicked in the leg by a cow, is the reason for the couple's appearance at a doctor's waiting room, that serves as a place where characters of the story examine and judge each other. Claud is "florid and bald and sturdy, somewhat shorter than Mrs. Turpin" and seems to be "accustomed to doing what she [Ruby] told him to do" and most of his actions in the story are directed by his wife. He never hears his wife being told "Go back to hell where you come from, you old wart hog" since he was writhing in pain from his injury being kicked by his wife's assailant, and Mrs. Turpin never tells him full details of the attack. In the doctor's waiting room he is mostly quiet except to crack an extremely wicked racist joke.

The Turpins' workers

The Turpins employ black workers to pick cotton, and she speaks to them about Mary Grace's attack as they prepare for Mr. Turpin to drive them a short distance to their homes. Mrs. Turpin's general views about her black workers are equivocal. To her, like for her own kind, some black people are more agreeable to her than others, and the narration suggests Mrs. Turpin considers some black people her friends. In particular, the toothless old black woman who wears an old worn hat of Claud's seems to be someone Ruby Turpin respects as the protagonist confides with her Mary Grace's attack and the details of Mary Grace's curse. However, in the waiting room, Mrs. Turpin also considers black people as dehumanized economic objects as she complained to Mary Grace's mother that she can't get anyone, black nor white, to pick cotton anymore, and, in particular, she says black people won't pick cotton because "they got to be right up there with the white folks". The complaint reflects her racist view that blacks ought to be cotton-pickers and her resentment about the dissipation of white farmers' power to exploit black workers who, in the 1960s, have expanded opportunities to seek higher wages performing other labor.

Mrs. Turpin's implicit request for advice from her cotton-pickers yielded no useful insights and increased her frustration. Hilton Als observed: "O’Connor allows us to see what Mrs. Turpin's pride hides from her: how the Blacks who work for her condescend to her, how they hide their intelligence so that she won't be tempted to interfere in their lives."^[21] The women sarcastically regard Mrs. Turpin as a privileged white woman living a charmed life "protected in some special way by Divine Providence" and are so confident of it that the old black woman, on seeing Mrs. Turpin's injury, can insult her boss by saying, "You just had you a little fall.", meaning a fall from divine grace. The successful tactic by the workers to protect themselves from Mrs. Turpin's intrusion involved the toothless woman leading the conversation to present concern (as a good manner) for her boss' welfare and the younger workers outrageously saying that they would kill Mary Grace in order to be disregarded by Mrs. Turpin to not get involved. The old woman's regard for Mary Grace as a lunatic is also a way to avoid getting involved, as it is a matter of treating the mentally ill by professionals — O'Connor's hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia is the location of a state-run mental hospital.

The delivery boy

The single paragraph involving a delivery boy in "Revelation" presents the intracacy and intimacy of Southern manners aimed to preserve the privacy and safety of black males. The black delivery boy, who appears to be employed by the doctor's office to bring drugs from a pharmacy to the office on a fee-for-service basis, understands that his presence in the office is objectionable to some of the office's clients, so he tries to transact his business as unobtrusively as possible in cooperation with the office staff, who also understand some of the clients find it objectionable for a black boy to summon white professionals. He keeps his mind busy to calm his fears by playing music in his head by memory but his body betrays what is going on in his mind just as his "grotesque" shadow and bicycle betray the arrival of a young tall black man often perceived as ominous by any room full of white Southerners. When the office secretary is not at her desk to take a delivery, he waits quietly for her. However, Mrs. Turpin, relying on her experience with her black workers and her prejudice that black people are lazy and ignorant, does her "a-rootin" by interfering in a private transaction. She breaks the code of silence by suggesting he ring the service bell that gives him a way for calling the secretary. Soon after his departure, which sucks air out of the room (de-pressurizing it from the tension caused by his presence), the poor "white-trashy" mother complains that all black people should be sent back to Africa "wher they come from in the first place" — a response that would not surprise the delivery boy though his tactic was successful by avoiding any current or future direct confrontation, though at the cost of appearing lazy and unintelligent.

Pride as sin and a source of moral and spiritual blindness

For the Roman Catholic Church, pride is considered the "queen of all vices" and is defined as "the excessive love of one's own excellence", and for a character like Ruby Turpin, "regards himself as the source of such advantages as he may discern in himself, or because, whilst admitted that God has bestowed them, he reputes this to have been in response to his own merits, or because he attributes to himself gifts which he has not; or, finally, because even when these are real he unreasonably looks to be put ahead of others." Pride is considered particularly serious because it can lead to more serious sins: "Vainglory, ambition, and presumption [the desire to essay what exceeds one's capacity] are commonly enumerated as the offspring vices of pride, because they are well adapted to serve its inordinate aims."^[33] In "Revelation" the protagonist demonstrates disobedience to the principles of Christianity by putting herself ahead of others (as in the box car social hierarchy), and attributing her wealth to her own efforts (and not those of her workers or advantages from her race and social status). She is uncharitable in that she has become blind to the needs of the sick that surrounded her in the waiting room and the disadvantaged and oppressed people that surround her at large.

Purgation

In the vision, Mrs. Turpin sees the souls of people crossing a purple bridge to Heaven through a field of fire being purified. Some are cleansed; however she sees the souls of people like herself being punished for committing venial sins. Ralph Wood's characterization of O'Connor's view on judgment at the time of death is consistent with the Catholic Church doctrine: "For unrepented venial faults for the payment of temporal punishment due to sin at time of death, the Church has always taught the doctrine of purgatory."^[34]

The protagonist learns by witnessing a vision of Particular Judgment that her righteousness about race and class are wrong and that her satisfaction with the Southern social order that she thanked Jesus for not changing provides a rationale for purgation. For O'Connor, consistent with Catholic doctrine, that alone will not save her – Mrs. Turpin's vision implies that the protagonist must initiate a life-changing transformation (for example, to comply with Jesus' commandment, "Love thy neighbor as thyself"), that will involve difficult choices that will entail accepting or rejecting God's grace.

Parallel plot events and O'Connor's anagogical vision

As a story about salvation, "Revelation" is also a story about divine judgment in the form of Mary Grace's attack and delivery of a revelatory message that Mrs. Turpin is "going to hell". The story includes a scene in the protagonist's bedroom where "Occasionally she [Ruby Turpin] raised her fist and made small stabbing motions over her chest as if she were defending her innocence to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job, reasonable-seeming but wrong." Scholars have identified parallels in plot and themes between the work and the Book of Job since the 1970s,^[36] and Jordan Cofer, in particular, concluded Mrs. Turpin starts to "equate herself to Job" after Mary Grace's attack.^[37] With respect to plot events, the parallels appear to cover the entire breath of the Book of Job with many of them occurring in the same order they appear in the Bible. However, the actual plot lines are different, since the protagonist has been taught the story of Job earlier in life and, unlike Job, Ruby Turpin is a sinner. Furthermore, "Revelation" is written with both Old and New Testament perspectives, while the Book of Job is an Old Testament story. Within the story, the parallels are also discovered by the protagonist through her memory and imagination that causes her to recall the multiple lessons from the Bible story each at different moments to dramatic and comedic effect.

The very close parallels between "Revelation" and the Book of Job invites anagogical interpretation of the story by identifying narratives similar to both stories so that in an anagogical sense with respect to the divine judgment of Ruby Turpin's soul, the mysteries of "Revelation" are the same as those posed as the theological questions and theme from the Book of Job: "Why do the righteous suffer?" and "Why are the righteous pious?".^[38]

The protagonist as Job

Like Job, Mrs. Turpin views herself as charitable and good, superior to the morally flawed people around her, and believes she suffers from divine punishment.^[39] However, the two are also much different. Job is a man described by God as a person "none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil."(Job 1:1) In the Bible story, God allows Satan to torment Job in horrific ways to test Satan's claim that Job is good only because God blessed the man with wealth and prosperity, but neither God nor Satan ever tells Job that he is the subject of the test. In contrast, O'Connor's Ruby Turpin institutes her own measure of justice,^[40] believing in her own Christian perfection in that she outrageously considers herself a modern-day Job (after failing to find any fault in herself while laying-down in bed) and is blind to the grotesque conformity and self-righteousness expressed as racism and class prejudice that are part of the foundation of an oppressive society. Mrs. Turpin does not physically suffer the torments Satan casts onto Job, though her husband's wound is worsened and Mary Grace's message that the she is a wart hog from Hell torments her with the thought of eternal damnation until she witnesses the vision near the end of the story.

Mary Grace as Satan

On receiving feedback on a draft of "Revelation" from a friend, O'Connor said, "I wasn't thinking of Mary Grace as the Devil but then the whole story sort of happened".^[41] In the Book of Job, Satan is one of the "sons of God" (Job 1:6) who accuses Job of being pious only because God has materially blessed him, and God lets Satan torment and torture Job to see if Job remains pious. Mary Grace with her demon-like appearance and facial expressions is a physical caricature of what most Christians associate with Satan as the Devil. However, in the Book of Job, Satan is not characterized as evil. In "Revelation", Mary Grace is only accused of being ill-mannered and ungrateful. The similarities are more than skin-deep, as Michael L. Schroeder pointed to key similarities between Mary Grace and Satan in their roles as antagonists in their respective stories:^[42]

• Mary Grace, like Satan, is not anchored to a single home. God asks Satan, "From where have you come?", and Satan responds, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it."(Job 1:7) Mary Grace goes to college in Massachusetts, seems to strongly dislike her Southern hometown, and the breath of her intellectual interests are universal rather than parochial as indicated in her reading the book Human Development and Wellesley coursework.
• The two definitions of "satan" in Hebrew are "accuser" and "adversary" (see the article "Satan"). Mary Grace is satan in both ways: she accuses Mrs. Turpin of being a wart hog from Hell, and she physically assaults Mrs. Turpin. In addition, Mrs. Turpin believes that Mary Grace is an adversary given her facial expression communications, that she had known her for all her life, and that Mary Grace specifically selected her for the "wart hog from hell" message.
• The actions of Mary Grace, like Satan in the Book of Job, start the chain of events that reveal essential spiritual principles the protagonist is to follow.

Conversations with friends

After Mary Grace's attack, Ruby Turpin lies in bed at home "defending her innocence to invisible guests who were like the comforters of Job". She calls her workers "Idiots!" in a rage that recalls Job's anger with his sympathizers in the Book of Job chapter 30.^[43] In the Bible (Job chapters 2 – 27), Job is comforted by three friends — Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, and later they are joined by young Elihu. Job believes neither of the first three men have explained his suffering. (The older men accuse Job of sins for which he is being punished for. Their views about God and Job are so incorrect that God rebukes them after God reconciles with Job in chapter 42.) In the Bible, Elihu speaks but neither God nor Job recognizes or responds to him. At this point in "Revelation", the protagonist contemplates Mary Grace's attack as a punishment in the form of retributive justice for sin resulting from a divine judgment. However, Job does not know what sin he is being punished for. After contemplating her predicament in bed and her effort to consult her three women workers whose views she considers as useless "Negro flattery", she remains clueless about her faults. (A boy with the women sitting in Claud Turpin's truck and says nothing is in the role of Elihu.)

The wicked prosper or go unpunished

The question of "Why do the righteous suffer?" is exposed in the Bible and "Revelation" as allegations about the unfairness of divine justice when the protagonists observe that the wicked prosper or go unpunished. Job refutes his friends, who insist that God always punishes the wicked by saying in Job chapter 21, "Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power? Their offspring are established in their presence, and their descendants before their eyes. ...How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood."(Job 21:7–8, Job 21:34) Ruby Turpin's complaint is articulated in contemplation while she lies on her bed: "She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hardworking, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath."

Final appeals

In Job chapter 31, Job refutes his three friends' accusations that he is being punished for his sins. Job appeals by listing numerous sins and one-by-one says if he committed the sin, then he should be punished for committing it. He remains confused and frustrated because he believes has not committed any of the sins, yet he continues to believe he is being punished.

In "Revelation", Mrs. Turpin does not disavow sins, but rather insists that she is virtuous. Her first appeal is that she is charitable to black and white trash and to her church. For her second appeal, she argues that she is not trash, as she continues to believe only white trash and black people have not been elected for salvation, admitting to sin for which she firmly believes is a virtue: "There was plenty of trash there [in the waiting room]. It didn't have to be me. If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash then." She remains confused and frustrated because she feels surrounded by trash.

Ruby Turpin laments being born and conjures Leviathan

The parallels between "Revelation" and the Book of Job extend to the appearance of Leviathan. The entire chapter 41 of Job describes Leviathan as a powerful, fearsome serpent-like monster that dwells in the sea. God says Leviathan "sees everything that is high" and declares it "king over all the sons of pride" in Job 41:34. The image is that the proud are ruled by a monster that dwells in the ocean.

In Job chapter 3, Job is so tormented by Satan that he laments his birth. Job asks for help to rouse the monster Leviathan so it can "perish" the day he was born: "Let those curse it [my birth] who curse the day, who are ready to rouse up Leviathan."(Job 3:8)

In "Revelation", Ruby Turpin considers the proposition that if she cannot be saved then poor white and black people must have been chosen for salvation and aims her anger at God to lament being born as Ruby Turpin to comical effect: "You could have made me trash. Or a nigger. If trash is what you wanted why didn't you make me trash?" In her frustration she conjures Leviathan with her water hose: "She shook her fist with the hose in it and a watery snake appeared momentarily in the air."

Ruby Turpin contends with the Almighty and fails as a "Job"

Mrs. Turpin directs her wrath at God for not making her the filthy kind of person she suspects God has chosen for salvation. Her frustration culminates by challenging God with the question, "Who do you think you are?", after which she belatedly recalls the basic Sunday school Bible lessons on Job (on the virtues of piety, humility, the fear of God, pride as a sin, and that man does not have sufficient knowledge or understanding of God or God's work to question divine judgment), placing herself in Job's exact position before God in Job 40:1–5:

"And the Lord said to Job: 'Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.'

"Then Job answered the Lord and said: 'Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but I will proceed no further.'"

O'Connor realizes the five verses in "Revelation" in the context of Mrs. Turpin's negligence as an echo of her question that demolishes her self-image as a Job:

"The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer beyond the wood."

Imitating the Book of Job, "She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it." Immediately, the woman's thoughts turn to the possibility of punishment, as she watches Claud's truck filled with their black workers and thinks of them all being killed in a collision with a bigger truck. There are minutes of silence with "all her muscles rigid" until Claud returns home safely.

Leviathan liberates Ruby Turpin after she ends her faith in predestination

"Revelation" has been characterized as one of Flannery O'Connor's "Protestant conversion tales" where a "pre-conversion state" is "succeeded by an instantaneous conversion [to Catholicism] affected by grace alone at the conclusion".^[44] To fulfill O'Connor's notion of Catholic fiction, she has Ruby Turpin reject her faith in predestination.

Immediately prior to the start of her vision (and after Claud safely returns home), in her apparent relief and humbled by the realization she is imperfect, Ruby Turpin contemplates with her pigs while standing over them (the same perspective as God's) and "with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge". The knowledge is an understanding of the Bible story, Job, she had just recalled. After Job learns that it was wrong to question God in Job chapter 40, in chapter 41 God tells Job of the beast Leviathan. The "abysmal life-giving knowledge" is that Mary Grace was right – Ruby Turpin is sinfully proud and she is from Hell because "all the sons of pride" are ruled by Leviathan, a creature from the abyss that is the sea. She realizes she can cease to be wicked through her own actions rather than being "made" wicked by the hands of Jesus. (The notion came to her earlier in her rage when she believed God has selected black people for salvation rather than her own kind: "'Or you could have made me a nigger. It's too late for me to be a nigger,' she said with deep sarcasm, 'but I could act like one.'") The protagonist's belief that she is responsible for her own fate represents a rejection of predestination and allows Leviathan to "perish" the day Mrs. Turpin was born. She is reborn as a woman who understands she can make choices that can lead to or deny her salvation. She still is misguided about who God has chosen for salvation. Her vision is presented to guide her toward redemption.

Ruby Turpin is abased for her wicked pride

The imagery O'Connor uses for Ruby Turpin's vision from the pig parlor starts as a result of the awesome magical power of Leviathan. Leviathan is still on the loose because the water hose she uses to clean the pig parlor is still running. The vision reflects Job 40:31–32:

• For the pig parlor that still has water running through it: "He [Leviathan] makes the deep boil like a pot; he makes the sea like a pot of ointment." (Job 41:31). The ointment is what causes them to "pant with a secret life".
• For the sky above Ruby Turpin: "Behind him [Leviathan] he leaves a shining wake; one would think the deep to be white-haired." (Job 41:32)

The vision in the sky provides Ruby Turpin lessons about pride she will never forget. O'Connor quite plainly realized lessons are to be taught from Job chapter 40 where God speaks as a whirlwind and directs Job to:

"Adorn yourself with majesty and dignity; clothe yourself with glory and splendor. Pour the overflowings of your anger, and look on everyone who is proud and abase him. Look on everyone who is proud and bring him low and tread down the wicked where they stand. Hide them all in the dust together; bind their faces in the world below. Then will I also acknowledge to you that your own right hand can save you." (Job 40:10–14)

Ruby Turpin's vision abases her as she sees people like herself set on fire as they ascend to Heaven while the "trash" she detests ascends first with their souls cleansed yet still intact. With respect the judgments on ascent with or without purgation, O'Connor famously wrote in a 1958 letter in defense of an "irreligious" friend: "We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord, nor gracefullness."^[45] This narrative is essentially written into the 1964 story as part of Mrs. Turpin's vision that goes beyond instilling the virtues of piety, humility, and fear of God. By the end of "Revelation", the vision is an epiphany as Ruby Turpin admits to a grave spiritual error that social status, physical appearances, and wealth have nothing to do with the prospect for salvation. As the protagonist returns to her house from the pig parlor in the growing darkness, she recognizes her shameful misguided righteousness and oppressive beliefs as she is stranded on Earth while she hears others ascend to Heaven. In the context of O'Connor's notion of Catholic fiction, "Revelation" only concludes with the hope that Ruby Turpin will use her free will to receive grace for the rest of her life.

Ruby Turpin's vision includes reminders of Jesus' teachings

The vision Mrs. Turpin views from her pig parlor allude to Bible parables familiar to faithful Christians that can strike-down and replace faulty spiritual beliefs and aim her away from further sin toward redemption. The vision is also a moral lesson for the protagonist in that the scene reveals an eschatological order that is the opposite of what she expects,^[46] totally undermining her sense of position in Southern society.

Mrs. Turpin is further abased in that the people she regards as the bottom of the Southern social classes ascend to Heaven first and hers ascends last. The poor white people, black people, freaks and lunatics who ascend first are portrayed as Christian soldiers that appear in disorderly "companies", "bands", and "battalions". The abasement directly addresses the protagonist's obsession with race and social status. The biblical references that include "first will be last" are all from the New Testament: "The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard" (Matthew 20:1–16); "Jesus and the rich young man" (Mark 10:17–31, Matthew 19:16–30, and Luke 18:18–30); and "The Narrow Door" (Luke 13:22–30).^[47] As a committed Christian and church-goer, Mrs. Turpin is supposed to know all three stories, though she may have forgotten or ignored the lessons, or was taught that one or more is supererogatory, particularly "Jesus and the Rich Young Man".

• In "The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard", Jesus compares "the kingdom of Heaven" to the landowner of a vineyard who promises to pay his workers the same wages for a day's labor no matter what time during the day the worker was hired. One lesson of the parable is that all workers are considered equally worthy (measured by their earnings) to enter Heaven no matter how long they have labored. The lesson contrasts with Mrs. Turpin's belief that some people are always more worthy than others (i.e., there always will be a top and bottom rail).
• In "Jesus and the Rich Young Man", a wealthy young man asks Jesus what he must do to attain eternal life and Jesus tells the young man to follow God's commandments, sell all his possessions and give to the poor to have treasure in heaven, and to follow him. The young man leaves Jesus "sorrowful, for he had great possessions" (Matthew 19:22). The parable is especially memorable for Matthew 19:24: "... it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God." At the pig parlor, Ruby Turpin stands on a knoll amid her and Claud's wealth – house, land, a cotton field, and livestock – that sustains their social status and economic security but fails to address the spiritual requirement to help others that Jesus asked of the rich young man.
• In "The Narrow Door", the door representing the gateway to Heaven, Jesus is asked, "Lord, will those who are saved be few?" and he responds: "Strive to enter through the narrow door. For many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able." Jesus goes on to say that even some people who "ate and drank" in his presence and others whom he taught in the streets will be refused entry. Jesus also says, "And people will come from east and west, and from north and south, and recline at table in the kingdom of God."(Luke 13:29) The meaning of "narrow door" with respect to the criteria used to judge who and who will not be allowed into Heaven is one of the most controversial in Christianity.^[48] However, it is quite clear that all people, not just Jews, will be allowed to pass through the narrow door. The parable is consistent with Mrs. Turpin's vision in that it warns that she should not be so confident about being saved since faith in Jesus alone may not be sufficient striving for redemption, and that people of all races and classes will enter Heaven while she may not be allowed in.

The first two parables point to Ruby Turpin's lack of concern for others, or, equivalently, her extreme vanity – a focus on self-love.^[49] Her consciously blocking-out of her own religion's spiritual calls to love and help others is portrayed by the "blanks" in the gospel song that precedes Mary Grace's attack. The lyrics are derived from "You Go to Your Church and I'll Go to Mine" published just after the start of the Great Depression in 1930 by radio personality Phillips Haynes Lord^[50] for his fictional character, clergyman and backwoods philosopher Seth Parker, that emanate from the waiting room radio:,^[51][52] here with the lyrics that have been "blanked-out":

You go to blank blank (your church)
And I'll go to mine
But we'll all blank (walk) along
To-gether-ther,
And all along the blank (road)
We'll hep each other out
Smile-ling in any kind of
Weath-ther!

The pig parlor setting for Mrs. Turpin's tirades at God allude to the "Parable of the Prodigal Son" that appears in Luke 15:11–32. The parable is the story of a father and his two sons. The younger son squanders his father's gift of the inheritance he would have received upon the father's death. The younger son is so destitute that he takes employment as a swineherd though he still starves as he craves for the food fed to the pigs. He returns to his father to work as a servant but before he can explain that he is not worthy of being his son, his father welcomes his return by giving him expensive gifts and a celebratory welcome. The older son, who was at work in the fields, is told of the celebration for the return of his younger brother and is angered by the idea of celebrating a corrupt man and the lack of fatherly attention for himself. The father explains to his older son,: "‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.’"Luke 15:31–32 The parable for Mrs. Turpin, in which God is represented by the father, is about the God's unending love for all his children (represented by his sons), and forgiveness for those who acknowledge their lack of worthiness that is the essence of the sacramental grace of reconciliation for Roman Catholics. As instruction, the parable reminds Mrs. Turpin that she must confess her sins and ask for forgiveness.

The doctor's waiting room

The doctor's waiting room is the setting for exhibiting the interactions between a cross section of early 1960s white Southern society that is implicitly being forced to experience the struggles by and for black Americans to attain social, economic, and political equality. The "crumbling social order" referred to by Hilton Als is realized in "Revelation" as the exhibition for the maladies of Southern society. As summarized by Gilbert H. Muller the scene is a "cultural grotesque" of deformities:

"Assembled in this almost claustrophic office are representative diseases of the body, the mind, and the spirit: the crippled bodies of the aged, the maimed intelligences of the poor and the neuroses of the intellectually gifted, and the defective souls of the self-righteous. Their illnesses represent the maladies of society, and the traits of this society are progressively revealed to the point where the absurdity implicit in the characters' behavior must explode."^[55]

The waiting room with its radio permeating the space with gospel songs that could make it a place for both physical and spiritual healing is defiled by overt hate, resentment, and the lack of compassion for the infirm. Ironically, Ruby Turpin's neck in the hands of Mary Grace in the waiting room makes spiritual healing possible after the woman accepts Mary Grace's judgment on her soul. However, as a place for the protagonist's damning and condescending judgments, the congested, unadorned, box-like waiting room becomes a realization of the box car in her dreams that is crammed with damned people being delivered to a gas oven, which is the undoing of the status quo.

The Holocaust

As part of the examination of Ruby Turpin in the waiting room, her inner thoughts "at night naming classes people" within her social universe and subsequently dreaming the classes "all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven" is a vision of the Holocaust that is grotesque and horrifying in its composition. Mrs. Turpin's process to order her society by race and class starts to breakdown when she considers black land owners or "common" white people wealthier than her family, and then it collapses when she has to consider "a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincolns and a swimming pool and a farm with registered white-face cattle on it". The effort ends so Ruby Turpin can maintain her "peace of mind"^[56] to secure in her own mind her high social status and worthiness for salvation that is reflected later in the story by her gratitude to Jesus for "making everything the way it is", her in inability to find any fault in herself that would justify condemnation to Purgatory, and her confidence that she's "a rail on top". As a vision of the Holocaust, the protagonist's peace of mind is secured by the belief that she is one of the few selected by God for eternal life, and that most other people, consequently, will be judged by God for delivery to Hell.

A hog as a human condition

Hogs are used throughout "Revelation" as a metaphor for piggish aspects of the human condition represented by the repetitive appearance of the sentence "A-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin." The sentence is first used by a poor white woman in waiting room as name-calling Ruby Turpin a pig as a sign of resentment from the protagonist's condescending brag about her wealth and superiority as demonstrated by her clean hog livestock and Mrs. Turpin's expectation that her sick boy should make room for her on the waiting room's couch. However, its use in name-calling reflects a darker condition – the animal and its piggishness is a metaphor for the oppressive forces that are used to deny the humanity of poor whites, black people, freaks, and lunatics. Ruby Turpin's understanding of poor whites and people as pigs is comically black – pigs are as intelligent as people, even performing as astronauts, but they will die of a heart attack if they are put upright like real people since they have to be on all fours to survive stupidly doing their "a-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin".

The protagonist considers cleanliness as a virtue, and its opposite, filth, as evil. She uses her perception of cleanliness to judge a person's social position as well as their prospects for salvation. In particular, she applies "cleanliness next to Godliness" to black and poor white people, whom she categorically detests because she considers them filthy. However, neither cleanliness nor purity is a Christian virtue, and New Testament stories such as Jesus cleansing a leper and Jesus healing the bleeding woman tell of divine love for the unclean. As a story of divine judgment, O'Connor mocks and abases her protagonist by using her fake Christian virtue against the character, using Jesus' criterion in Matthew 7:1–2: "Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you." Mary Grace reveals the judgment against Mrs. Turpin using the measure of cleanliness – the woman is an "old wart hog".

The pig has two roles during the protagonist's darkest moments. The first role appears when Ruby Turpin's confidence in her own salvation is completely undermined. Her mind concludes that poor white and black people have been elected for salvation instead of her, so, in a desperate attempt to recover her redemption, she tells God that she could act like the people she detests by emulating the filthy, stupid pigs they are: "Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer. Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my face."; and, "Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic. Roll on the ground". O'Connor uses the pregnant sow with her offspring in her pig parlor to explain how Mrs. Turpin got these hateful and oppressive ideas — they were passed down from generations before her, taught to her by her parents' generation. The second role is in the pig parlor when Ruby Turpin realizes Mary Grace was right in that she is a "wart hog from hell", a wild demon "a-gruntin and a-rootin and a-groanin" through life, comically standing amid her own kind that "pant with a secret life" in Leviathan's kingdom as the "sons of pride" bathed in Leviathan's ointment that the Turpins apply daily to, ironically, remove filth.

"When I looked up and He looked down"

"When I Looked Up and He Looked Down" is the title of a gospel song composed by Albert E. Brumley^[57] that refers to the singer as a repented sinner who looks up to God with God looking down on her. The singer is confident that her changed behavior will achieve redemption and so she sings the line "And one these days I know I’ll wear a crown" — the line Mrs. Turpin sings in her mind just before she looks down at the shoes of everyone in the waiting room, a metaphor for her condescending and disparaging judgements for everyone in the room except for Mary Grace's mother. The protagonist singing the song with sincerity makes a mockery of its meaning because Ruby Turpin, prior to her pig parlor visit, doesn't look up to anyone or anything, including God. As a baptized Reformed Protestant, she is in union with God, and she feels sufficiently righteous to give God advise and make a prayer to God thanking him for not making her like the people that surround her in the waiting room.

The highway and bridge in the sky

As "Revelation" alludes to the Bible story of Jacob, the protagonist's vision from her pig parlor recalls Jacob's Ladder.^[64][62] The author, who at the time "Revelation" was being drafted was disabled by lupus and required crutches to walk, has her characters ascend skyward on a bridge. The purple bridge on which the souls of the dead traverse to Heaven through a field of fire is an extension of the lavender-colored highway that carries the souls of the living (for example, Claud and his workers in his truck). The junction of the highway and bridge is a metaphor for the moment of death. The bridge is a realization of Particular Judgment that Catholics believe occurs immediately after death that involves the cleansing and purification of souls. The colors of the highway and bridge likely reflect the liturgical colors assigned by the Second Vatican Council which was proceeding at the time of O'Connor's death, violet or purple is for the Sacrament of Reconciliation for the living, and is allowed for the Requiem Mass for the dead.

Hope and grace

The protagonist's tribe ascent skyward in Ruby Turpin's vision is a message of hope for her salvation because she has not committed what a Catholic would consider mortal sin. In Catholic theology, justification is a life-long process of advancing toward salvation, i.e., "rising", where all souls converge to face God's judgment after death, where "O'Connor believes that only in death is our life weighed in the balances and our destiny eternally fixed."^[28] The progress of Ruby Turpin's soul for achieving salvation to be with God is consistent with the title of the book Everything That Rises Must Converge, which coincides with the what Ralph Wood emphasized as the "central premise of her work" – "the conviction that the ultimate issue of our lives depends on our own reception or rejection of grace".^[28]

Revelation

"Revelation" is a product of Flannery O'Conner's anagogical vision. The medieval anagoge interpretive process is "reasoning upwards" (sursum ductio), when, from the visible, the invisible action is disclosed or revealed, such as the message delivered by Mary Grace as divine grace instead of a curse, and Ruby Turpin's acceptance of the message as divine grace through realizations of the Book of Job. In addition, each anagogical method of interpretation points in a different direction – the literal/historical backward to the past, the allegoric forward to the future, the tropological downward to the moral/human, and the anagogic upwards to the spiritual/heavenly.^[65]