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Marcia Kravis will read “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” by Flannery O’Connor, a short story written during the final decade of O’Connor’s life and published posthumously in a collection of the same name in 1965.

The collection's eponymous story derives its name from the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.” But as we know from our previous O’Connor reading, we must fasten our seatbelts for ironic twists and turns!

This story is told from the close third-person point of view of Julian, a recent college graduate and self-styled intellectual who lives in the South with his mother because he cannot afford his own lodgings with what he earns as a typewriter salesman. Julian’s confrontational bitterness and his mother’s thoughtless prejudice bring circumstances to a boil when they step onto the bus and join a widely disparate cast of characters, among them three African American citizens who inhabit vastly different regions of the social spectrum.