SOURCE: "Everything That Rises Must Converge," in Flannery O'Connor, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1976, pp. 43-71.

In the following essay, Tuck McFarland analyzes the different instances of rising and convergence in the stories from O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge.

The stories in O'Connor's second collection reflect her concern with questions implicitly raised by the rather gnomic title "Everything That Rises Must Converge." The phrase comes from the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist-philosopher. Teilhard hypothesized that evolution, far from stopping with the emergence of homo sapiens, continues to progress toward higher levels of consciousness, and that its ultimate goal is pure consciousness, which is Being itself, or God.

Teilhard's concept of the progress of evolution, actual and predicted, can best be visualized as a globe. At the base of the globe—the beginning of the evolutionary process—lines radiate outward and upward, representing the diversification...