Reality Sets In

[wlotus]

Janie stood where [Jody] left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered.

~Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston


As I walked through Maple Grove Cemetery today, I saw this broken headstone and photographed it while thinking about this quote. Both the image and the quote remind me of how Christianity fell off the pedestal it had occupied in my heart a few years ago.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie was a faithful, loving wife to Jody. He came by when she was a young girl and swept her off her feet with his high talk and big dreams. She ran away from her first husband--what a horrid mismatch THAT was!--to marry herself to him. But he was a mean person under the flowery talk, and after a few years his meanness started to show. Nothing she did was good enough, and he magnified her mistakes into mountains. He became more and more critical of her and projected his own weaknesses onto her. One day her dinner was not up to snuff, and he slapped her. The above quote is from just after that slap.

How familiar, from a spiritual standpoint.

The good news is that after Jody died some time later, Janie regained her freedom and rediscovered her joy.

That's familiar, too.

Comments

[audrabaudra.livejournal.com]

Their Eyes Were Watching God. Read it about 6 months ago, for the first time since university about 20 years ago.

It is the best novel ever written about women's experience of love, life and men. It made me cry with its excellence. Incredible story, and the quotation that you pulled is one of the best.

[wlotus.livejournal.com]

Even when I could not stomach romances, I could handle that book, because it is so well-written. That quote in particular, though, resonates very deeply with me because of my many hurtful experiences with people I used to deeply admire. (Rather than losing all faith in people, I have simply concluded I used to admire the wrong people. *smiles*)