Tangibility and ghostliness

Two fascinating passages I recently came across in my readings. They're fascinating because they present two different views of the created world and God's relationship to it. Twain has trouble with the notion that God would associate with the "dusky" people of the Holy Land, while O'Connor places the sacraments within the context of place, in this case the South.

Twain in The Innocents Abroad:

It seems curious enough to us to be standing on ground that was once actually pressed by the feet of the Savior. The situation is suggestive of a reality and a tangibility that seems at variance with the vagueness and mystery and ghostliness that one naturally attaches to the character of a god. I can not comprehend yet that I am sitting where a god has stood, and looking upon the brook and the mountains which that god looked upon, and am surrounded by dusky men and women whose ancestors saw him, and even talked with him, face to face, and carelessly, just as they would have done with any other stranger. I can not comprehend this; the gods of my understanding have been always hidden in clouds and very far away.

Flannery O'Connor:

I feel that the grotesque quality of my own work is intensified by the fact that I am both a Southern and a Catholic writer. It's standard for the Catholic writer to say that he is not a Catholic writer, but a writer who happens to be a Catholic....I've always been more tempted to say that I'm not a Southern writer, but a writer who happens to be a Southerner. However I feel that both of these are evasions, and that they stop discussions that they ought to begin. The Southern writer can't escape the image of the South that has built up a life of its own in his senses any more than the Catholic can escape the indelible marks that the sacraments put on his soul.