Everything That Rises Must Converge

I’ve just finished the eponymous short story from O’Conner’s collection of the same name. I found it to be shockingly prescient still, and with some truly beautiful lines (eg: “The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike.” and “Your punishment exactly fits your pettiness.”), a bit of a gift to read with only an hour or so to spare today.

Question for anyone else who has read it: what are your thoughts on the ending? For me, both Julian and his mother enter their own kind of abyss, with his mother literally pining for the past to engulf her in what she believes is goodness but is really a dark and sinister time filled with brutality and injustice, whereas Julian, with his intellectual pretense and sense of superiority shattered (falling to his knees and crying “Mamma, Mamma!”), sprints “…toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him.” that “drift … farther away the faster he ran…” until a “…tide of darkness seemed to sweet him back to her,” seemingly indicating that, through this darkest hour of both their lives, they shall meet (or converge) on the other side both having learned a valuable lesson. Or at least, that’s how I read it.