Official stamp of history for Flannery O'Connor

By Terry Mattingly

http://www.tmatt.net/

July 20, 2015

left to right: Daniel Piazza, Chief Curator of Philately, Smithsonian National Postal Museum; Ralph C. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature, Baylor University; Daniel D. Grant, Postmaster, McLean, VA; and Bruce Gentry, Professor of English and Editor, Flannery O’Connor Review, Georgia College

Famous authors are often invited to elite dinner parties in New York City, a setting in which the rich Georgia drawl of Flannery O'Connor stood out like a dish of cheese grits next to the caviar.

At one such event, O'Connor ended up talking to author Mary McCarthy, who opined that her childhood Catholicism had faded, but she still appreciated the Eucharist as a religious symbol. The reply of the fervently Catholic O'Connor became one of the most famous one-liners in a life packed with them.

"Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it," replied O'Connor, as reported in a volume of her letters. "That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me."

The fact that this literary legend now graces a U.S. postage stamp – more than 50 years after her death – is a testimony both to the greatness of O'Connor and to the fact that her radical, even shocking, vision of life has always been impossible to pigeonhole, said scholar Ralph C. Wood of Baylor University.

In particular, O'Connor refused to bow to man-made idols – including the U.S. government and the civil religion many attach to it, said Wood, speaking at a National Philatelic Exhibition rite in McLean, Va., marking the release of the author's commemorative stamp. She refused to make her faith private and polite.

"We honor Flannery O’Connor today because she resisted such idolatry," he said. "She set her loves in order by giving her first and final loyalty, not to the nation-state, but to the incarnate and living God. ... She became the most important Christian author this nation has yet produced ... by becoming a radically Catholic writer.

"This meant that she was critical of her country, therefore, because she loved it. She also loved and criticized her native South in much the same way. Precisely because she discerned the transcendent virtues of her region could she lament its temporal evils."

O'Connor also lanced the soft underbelly of church culture in her short stories. For Wood, the author's description of the smug Mrs. May in "Greenleaf" was crucial: "She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true."

The new stamp, which costs 93 cents, has raised some eyebrows because it shows a young, glamorous O'Connor, smiling and wearing pearls. She is not wearing her trademark cats-eye glasses. As a New York Times essay noted, "What's Betty Crocker doing on Flannery's stamp?"

Wood said it's interesting to ponder a different question: How did O'Connor receive this salute from America's cultural powers that be in the first place? Surely the desire to honor a female writer was pivotal.

"If that is the question you are asking you can hardly get around Flannery O'Connor. Who outranks her? She is a giant in American culture," said Wood, author of "Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South."

"It's safe to say this was not an attempt to honor all that O'Connor stood for. The American cultural elites have never known what to do with her faith. ... People keep trying to tame this lady, to make her nice. But you cannot make her nice because she wasn't nice. You cannot defang her."

But if the convictions in her stories unnerved some secularists, the bizarre and violent plot twists left many conservative believers shaking their heads, as well. In his lecture marking the stamp's release, Wood noted that her work is full of grotesque characters that walk with "a divinely inflicted limp" caused by their wrestling matches with real sins and with God. These flawed believers "both believe and behave strangely."

O'Connor heard all these muttering voices.

"When asked why her fiction, like that of so many other Southern writers, is rife with freaks, O'Connor famously replied that Southerners 'are still able to recognize one,' " said Wood. "They take the measure of themselves and others by the biblical plumb line that exposes all deviations from the true Vertical."

Tagged: U.S POSTAL SERVICE, FLANNERY O'CONNOR, RALPH WOOD, NEW YORK CITY, EUCHARIST, BIBLE BELT

Flannery O'Connor: Stamped but not Cancelled

By Ralph C. Wood

http://www.firstthings.com/

June 16, 2015

On June 5, 2015, the U.S. Postal Service published a commemorative stamp in honor of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor is an anomalous candidate for such acclaim, since her work stands at a critical distance from the American project, both in its older and more recent iterations. Precisely in her refusal to assimilate her fiction to the national consensus, she made her most valuable gift to it.

The chief evidence for this claim is to be found in two 1963 issues of the Jesuit journal America that O’Connor read and marked only a few months before her all too early death at age thirty-nine in 1964. In one essay, John Courtney Murray, the leading Catholic theologian on matters of church and state at the time, expressed his hope that the Second Vatican Council’s forthcoming treatment of religious freedom would be in full accord with what he called “the true political tradition of the Christian West.” The American constitutional system, in Murray’s view, has served to recover the Catholic rejection of all absolutisms, both ecclesial and governmental. It does so by insisting that “political authority has no part whatsoever in the care of souls (cura animarum) or in the control of the minds of men (regimen animorum).” Hence Murray’s confidence that Dignitatis humanae (the declaration on human freedom) would call for governments to remain secular and neutral by not granting special privileges to any of the various religious traditions, granting them all freedom of both worship and belief.

Yet at the very end of his essay, Murray expressed a certain worry about this pristine separation of spheres, whereby church and state attend to their complementary and rarely contradictory affairs: “The question today is, whether the Church should extend her pastoral solicitude beyond her own boundaries and assume an active patronage of the freedom of the human person . . . who stands today under a massive threat to everything that human dignity and personal freedom mean.” Unlike Flannery O’Connor, Fr. Murray seemed impervious to the notion that such threats might come from the American system itself.

Read the rest of the article by clicking on the link below:

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/06/flannery-oconnor-stamped-but-not-cancelled

Flannery O'Connor and the Violence of Grace

By Rachel Watson
http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/
April 17, 2015

To Flannery O’Connor, grace was a violent thing. Not a solemn walk down a church aisle or a hushed prayer, but a bullet. A bull’s horn. A suicide.
You won’t find her in Christian book stores, though you may have read one of her stories in college. Her goal in writing fiction was clear: “My audience are the people who think God is dead. . . . To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
Her characters are grotesque. Her religious voice is unconventional. She’s kind of my hero.

Shocking Grace

When I first hand my students an O’Connor story, their typical response is to cringe or ask incredulously: What did I just read?
I understand this reaction. It’s what good ‘ole Flannery would have wanted. Shock. But she wanted that shock to lead to understanding. So before helping my students unpack the story, I ask them a question: What must come before grace? I ask because the answer is what every Flannery O’Connor story is about: the moment when characters realize they need grace.  
In A Good Man Is Hard to Find that moment arrives when a notorious convict points his gun at a grandma. Though she’s spent the majority of the story picking at others while basking in her own goodness, she has a moment of clarity. She looks at the criminal and is reminded of her own son. She realizes that the two men aren’t so different. She stops talking. Her fancy hat falls to the ground. And she sees that she isn’t so different from the murderer, either. Her epiphany ends abruptly, with three bullets to the chest:
“She would have been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
With this morbid line, O’Connor reminds her audience that grace is a wake-up call. It carries a dramatic message: You are not ok. You never will be. You need something outside of yourself.

Grace for the Guilty

When I think about the grandmother’s epiphany, I think about a song by indie artist, Sufjan Stevens. It’s about John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer known for dressing up as a clown and murdering more than 30 teenage boys in the 1970s. The last lines of the song are striking:
And in my best behavior/I am really just like him.
Before we can accept grace, we must admit that we are filthy, rotten sinners who need grace. It’s what the Pharisees of Jesus’s day couldn’t understand. In Luke 18, Jesus tells a parable aimed directly at their stubborn hearts: “He told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous” (v. 9).
You know the story. Two men enter the temple to worship. The Pharisee stands tall and proud saying, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men” while the other man can hardly lift his face (v. 11). Instead, he stays low to the ground and cries out: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (v. 13).
Until we see ourselves as sinners, we won’t recognize Christ as Savior (Luke 5:31). I remember interviewing a prostitute in Los Angeles years ago. She said that one night she saw a man murdered. Somebody threw him out a window. Everyone knew who did it, but no one told. I asked her why not, and she said that the murdered man had molested a child. “Anyone who would do something like that deserves to die,” she said.
She’s right. Anyone who would do that deserves to die. Anyone who sins against God in any way deserves death. James 2:10 puts me in the same camp as pedophiles and serial killers: “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.”
I have failed. I’m accountable for all of it. I need grace.

Offensive Grace

In another O’Connor story, The Lame Shall Enter First, a confident atheist, Shepherd, realizes that his good deeds have missed the mark. After the loss of his wife, he reaches out to a bitter, delinquent, teenage boy with a club foot. The boy, Rufus, wants nothing to do with him, but Shepherd insists. He takes him into his home, buys him a new boot, and tells him how much potential he has. He spends all his time playing savior to someone who doesn’t want his help. All the while, his son grieves alone. By the time Shepherd realizes his mistake, it’s too late. His son is gone.  
Throughout this story, grace continually offends. It offends Shepherd’s pride and superior intellect. “That book is something for you to hide behind,” he says when he sees Rufus reading the Bible. “It’s for cowards, people who are afraid to stand on their own feet and figure things out for themselves.”
He assures Rufus: “You don’t believe it. You’re too intelligent.” But Rufus angrily replies, “You don’t know nothing about me. Even if I didn’t believe it, it would still be true.” Grace is what we need, whether we accept it or not. And though Shepherd dismisses the gospel at every turn, he is given insight into the depths of his own failure. He failed to save Rufus. He failed his own son. He is the one in need of a shepherd.
Grace is offensive because it points to the deficiency in each of us.

Costly Grace

Even more offensive than our need for grace is how much it costs. Too often I forget that because God is just, my sins couldn’t just disappear. They had to be punished. And Jesus walked toward that punishment. He walked toward the hill where pain was a promise.
His death wasn’t merely symbolic. When we read about the countless slaughtered animals in the Old Testament, we must make the connection: Jesus’s body was the ultimate bloody sacrifice. It was real nails ripping through skin and muscle. His emotional agony was so intense that, before his death, he asked God if there were any other way (Matt. 26:39). None of us could die as Jesus died. Sinless. The perfect substitute. His death was gory because that is what our sins deserve.

God’s Desire

The Pharisees wanted to know why Jesus spent so much time with unworthy people. Jesus told them it was because they were sick and needed a doctor. He saw the Pharisees’ disease as well. He knew that it ran deep but that they were unwilling to cry out for help. Witnessing people reject the medicine of grace grieved Jesus: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing” (Luke 13:34). 
Flannery O’Connor may have written violent stories about strange characters from the South, but she understood grace. She knew that no man is righteous until he is clothed in Christ. This requires that we see our nakedness and recognize our need. Grace is costly. It is necessary. And God desires that we admit our problem and embrace his solution.
Rachel Watson is a full-time high school English teacher who lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with her husband, Dan. Her goal in the classroom is to show her students how to think, build discernment, and enjoy great literature. Rachel received her BA in writing and Bible at The Master's College in Southern California.

On Flannery O’Connor, Brittany Maynard & the Eclipsing of God

November 7, 2014 by Tod Worner
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/acatholicthinker/

It was 1951 and she was much too young to be so sick. Much too young. And she had her suspicions about what it was. The fevers. The drenching sweats. The profound fatigue and the joint pains – oh, the joint pains. She had her suspicions. After all, Flannery O’Connor had seen her father endure something like it before her…and he died one month into his forty-fifth year. Years later when she fully grasped that she too had the mysterious yet ravaging rheumatologic disease, systemic lupus erythematosis (commonly known as “lupus”), she wryly recalled the treatment – or rather, the lack thereof – available to her father during his final years.

“At that time, there was nothing for it but the undertaker.”

Flannery loved her father. Deeply. And though she spoke little of him, a private reflection scribbled in her college notebook revealed the pain that endured years after his death,

“The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder. Our plans were so beautifully laid out, ready to be carried to action, but with magnificent certainty God laid them aside and said, ‘You have forgotten – mine?’”

She was much too young to be sick. Convinced she had rheumatoid arthritis, her physician knew otherwise. So did her mother. But they concealed the true diagnosis from her fearing it would devastate her. The truth would come to her from a friend, Sally Fitzgerald, on a car ride running errands in the summer of 1952.

“On the way back, on a lovely summer’s afternoon, [Sally] glanced over at her passenger, wondering how she could disturb such peace; but she had made up her mind, following much inner struggle, that Flannery should finally know the true nature of her illness. At that instant, Flannery happened to mention her arthritis. ‘Flannery, you don’t have arthritis,’ Sally said quickly. ‘You have lupus.’ Reacting to the sudden revelation, Flannery slowly moved her arm from the car door down into her lap, her hand visibly trembling. Sally felt her own knee shaking against the clutch, too, as she continued driving along Seventy Acre Road.
‘Well, that’s not good news,’ Flannery said, after a few silent, charged moments. ‘But I can’t thank you enough for telling me…I thought I had lupus, and I thought I was going crazy. I’d a lot rather be sick than crazy.’”

- Excerpted from Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch

She was much too young to be sick. Flannery O’Connor would struggle through steroids and antibiotics, transfusions and infusions, hospitalizations and bedrest. Biting pain, oppressive fatigue and distracting fogginess would be her constant companions. The vision of her father was always before her. And yet from 1952 until 1964, Flannery wrote her novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away. She compiled a series of short stories collected in A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge and others. She wrote dozens and dozens of book reviews for her Catholic diocesan newspapers.

Even more, Flannery wrote letters. To friends. To family. To mentors. To aspiring writers. These letters were collected posthumously and edited by her friend, Sally Fitzgerald. The Habit of Being is an extraordinary testimony to the brilliant, witty, confident yet self-effacing, loyal, struggling yet surviving beauty that is Mary Flannery O’Connor. And in those letters she guided Alfred Corn (see my previous post, Dear Ms. Connor:On Writing Letters to Flannery), she sparred with Cecil Dawkins, and she confided in her friend, “A”. And she touched me and thousands more readers to this day. What is more is that during those letters and between those letters, Flannery O’Connor, in her suffering, in her uncertainty and in her fear…was simply there. She was there to feed the peafowl at her Andalusia Farm. She was there to pick up the mail and eat breakfast. And Flannery was there for her aging mother to come late at night into her room to look upon her beautiful, yet dying child. She was there when many in our modern world might argue she didn’t have to be. Her suffering, some would argue, justified her to leave it all behind. Just leave it all behind.

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/acatholicthinker/2014/11/on-flannery-oconnor-brittany-maynard-the-eclipsing-of-god/#ixzz3IgY72tXK

Sacred and Satanic Violence: The Place of the Demonic in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor

By Ralph C. Wood

http://www.abc.net.au/

August 15, 2014

On 3 August 1964, Flannery O'Connor, one of America's greatest fiction writers, died. To mark fifty years since her premature death, we are pleased to publish this article by Ralph C. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University and author of Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.

The title of Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away contains both a conundrum and the key for unlocking it. The novel's name is taken from the Douay-Rheims translation of Matthew 11:12: "And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away."

Many recent biblical scholars interpret this passage as a reference to those who would impatiently seize the divine kingdom by force, brutally laying hold of it as if it were a means of destruction rather than redemption. The phrase may in fact refer to Jewish Zealots who wanted to rout the Romans, or else to Jewish religious authorities who bullied their way into control of the synagogues or, even more particularly, to arrogant leaders of the Jewish temple with its wealth, prestige and political power. In every case, it seems that the biblical claim about seizing the Kingdom is negative in its import, referring to evil (perhaps even satanic) attacks on the radically alternative community established by Jesus.

Yet this is only a single way of reading Matthew's strange saying about the violence that besets the Reign of God. Flannery O'Connor praised medieval exegetes for discerning not merely one, but at least three other means of interpreting biblical texts.

Beyond the literal reading of Scripture (in this case, seeking the historical meaning cited above), there is also the allegorical(linking a person or event with an analogous one - for instance, Moses's deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage with Jesus's redemption of humanity from slavery to sin), the tropological (gleaning moral implications for the Christian life) and theanagogical (discerning the spiritual and eschatological significance of the text).

Such theologically rich readings of Scripture insure its living, full-bodied appropriation by and for the Church. Hence the gloss on Matthew 11:12 found in the 1899 Challoner version of the Douay-Rheims Bible that O'Connor herself used: "[The Kingdom] is not to be obtained but by main force, by using violence upon ourselves, by mortification and penance, and resisting our perverse inclinations." The violence that makes raids on the Rule of God is here regarded not as satanic and inimical but as salutary, indeed as necessary. It is not a call for Christians to attack others, so much as to practice spiritual and moral violence against their own sinfulness.

The burden of this article is to demonstrate that both interpretations of the violence done to the Kingdom of God - both the satanic and the holy - are at work in The Violent Bear It Away, and that their difference is obscured by demonic guile, especially concerning the nature of evil. The task of undeceiving the Deceiver thus becomes a crucial act of moral and religious, no less than literary, discernment.

The place of the Devil in American culture

In The Death of Satan, Andrew Delbanco traces the waning American regard for the demonic, as our churches and our culture have come to grant the Devil ever lessening importance.

Already in the Puritans, Delbanco discerns a profound ambiguity about the Evil One. On the one hand, their radical consciousness of sin made them ascribe acute reality to satanic temptations. Yet, on the other hand, Lucifer ceases to be the macabre monstrosity of both ancient and medieval Christian tradition. The Puritans worried that such personifications would miss the ubiquity and subtlety of demonic temptation. They also feared that Christians and others might find a convenient means for transferring their own culpability for evil to the Prince of Darkness.

Much against the intentions of the Puritans, however, the Devil was rapidly reduced to a subjective construction of the imagination not to be credited by our most eminent writers. It is obvious that such Transcendentalists as Emerson and Thoreau, with their belief in the latent perfectibility of humanity, would slight Satan. Yet neither could Hawthorne or Melville, despite their riveted attention to human maleficence, envision Satan as its real source.

It seems at first astonishing that such an astute reader of American literature as Delbanco would make no mention of Flannery O'Connor, since the Devil figures so prominently in her fiction. Yet Delbanco gradually reveals the reason for his silence: he fears that any attribution of evil to a satanic "other" leaves our own cruel perfidy and malignant complicity unimpeached. The horrors of the deadliest of all centuries are, for him, the work of invisible but still explicable forces - namely, human irresponsibility and wrongdoing in all of their manifold expressions of self-hatred and self-deception. Delbanco thus finds the most adequate explanation of evil in such Protestant theologians as Reinhold Niebuhr.

In his most celebrated paradox, Niebuhr claims that, while the fall is inevitable, it is not necessary. Always and everywhere, human beings have sinned and will continue to sin, even as they remain responsible for their willing embrace of their Adamic predisposition. Yet this is as much an anthropological as a theological claim, since the Devil nowhere figures in Niebuhr's work. Delbanco's own conclusion thus remains thoroughly Niebuhrian: Satan is "a symbol of our own deficient love, our potential for envy and rancor toward creation." Evil abides as nothing other than a permanent privation that "offers something that the Devil himself could never have intended: the miraculous paradox of demanding the best of ourselves."

Read the rest of the article by clicking on the link below:

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/08/15/4067907.htm

Writing for the Godless: Flannery O’Connor on Dogma, Belief, and the Difference Between Religion and Faith

by Maria Popovahttp://www.brainpickings.org/May 15, 2014

“For me a dogma is only a gateway to contemplation and is an instrument of freedom and not of restriction.”

As humans, we are wired to cling tightly to our beliefs, even the most delusional, and toautomatically dismiss conflicting evidence. This is especially true in areas where our beliefs are particularly charged, such as politics and religion. For those of us skeptical of organized religion, who find transcendence in nature andspirituality in science, who fall closer to the atheism end of the belief spectrum, it’s especially challenging to consider perspectives on faith that come from the other end. But something magical happens when we allow the walls of the psyche to soften and become permeable, if only for a moment, to another’s experience of the world — little compares to the self-transcendence that such receptivity invites.

One of the most extraordinary meditations on religion and the role of spirituality in society comes from beloved author Flannery O’Connor, whose writing blended her Catholic faith with strong secular themes of ethics and moral philosophy, and nowhere does her singular spirit shine more luminously than in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (public library).

In July of 1955, when she was thirty, O’Connor received a letter from a young woman, initially unknown to her, who later chose to remain anonymous upon the publication of the letters. Both hungry for conversation and intrigued by the woman’s intensity of conviction, the author felt compelled to reply, and so began a nine-year epistolary friendship that continued until O’Connor’s death in 1964 from complications due to lupus. The letters to “A.” are among the most extraordinary in the collection, exploring with remarkable dignity and dimensionality matters of faith and religion, the difference between the two, and the role of spirituality in O’Connor’s writing and her personhood.

Read the rest of the article:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/05/15/flannery-o-connor-letters-religion-faith/

Easter With Flannery O'Connor

By George Weigel

http://www.firstthings.com/

April 16, 2014

This coming August 3 will mark the golden anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s “Passover,” to adopt the biblical image John Paul II used to describe the Christian journey through death to eternal life. In the fifty years since lupus erythematosus claimed her at age thirty-nine, O’Connor’s literary genius has been widely celebrated. Then, with the 1979 publication of The Habit of Being, her collected letters, another facet of O’Connor’s genius came into focus: Mary Flannery O’Connor was an exceptionally gifted apologist, an explicator of Catholic faith who combined remarkable insight into the mysteries of the Creed with deep and unsentimental piety, unblinking realism about the Church in its human aspect, puckish humor—and a mordant appreciation of the soul-withering acids of modern secularism.

Insofar as I’m aware, there’s never been an effort to initiate a beatification cause for Flannery O’Connor. If such a cause should ever be introduced, The Habit of Being (and the lectures found in the Library of America edition of her collected works) should be the principal documentary evidence for considering her an exemplar of heroic virtue, worthy to be commended to the whole Church.

O’Connor’s sense that ours is an age of nihilism—an age suffering from by a crabbed sourness about the mystery of being itself—makes her an especially apt apologist for today: not least because she also understood the evangelical sterility of the smiley-face, cheap-grace, balloons-and-banners Catholicism that would become rampant shortly after her death. In a 1955 letter to her friend Betty Hester, Flannery O’Connor looked straight into the dark mystery of Good Friday and, in four sentences explained why the late modern world often finds it hard to believe:

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

Read the rest of the article:
 http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2014/04/easter-with-flannery-oconnor

Why Christians need Flannery O'Connor

Opinion by Russell D. Moore, special to CNN

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com

December 15, 2013

(CNN) – On my Christmas list of gifts to buy my evangelical friends, there's a little book of prayers.

This is less predictable than it may seem, since the prayers aren't from a celebrity evangelical preacher, but from a morbid, quirky Catholic who spent her short life with pet peacocks and wooden-leg-stealing Bible salesman stories.

But I think Flannery O'Connor's newly published "Prayer Journal" is exactly what Christians need, maybe especially at Christmas.

The book, recently discovered in the writer's papers in Georgia and now published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, reproduces the handwritten notebook prayers scribbled down by O'Connor during her years as a student at the University of Iowa.

The prayers are jarring because they are so personal and raw, clearly not written to "edify the saints" in a published manuscript. They are, well, just prayers.

Part of the rawness and authenticity of the prayers come with the way O'Connor refuses to sentimentalize her personal relationship with Jesus (thought it's clear she has one). She is here constantly aware of her own fallenness and of the seeming silence of the God to whom she pours out these little notes.

O'Connor notes that her attention is "fugitive" in prayer. She confesses that hell seems more "feasible" in her mind than heaven because, "I can fancy the tortures of the damned but I cannot imagine the disembodied souls hanging in a crystal for all eternity praising God."

She is constantly second-guessing whether her prayers for success as a writer are egocentric, or a genuine striving to use the gifts God has given her.

Moreover, O'Connor is constantly aware that she is a sinner, and she can't get around that. Perhaps the most widely publicized sentence in the book is her confession that she "proved myself a glutton, for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There's nothing left to say of me."

Even when she's confessing sin, she seems aware of her sinfulness in doing that. She says of sin, "You can never finish eating it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited," but, she immediately concludes, "perhaps that is too literary a statement; this mustn't get insincere."

O'Connor's prayers are hardly "inspirational," in the sense that many American Christians want: a model of the "victorious Christian life" where "prayer changes things" and we've got "joy, joy, joy, down in our hearts, to stay." That's why we need them.

American evangelicalism, my own tradition, rightly emphasizes the biblical truth that the gospel is good news, that our sins are forgiven in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We rightly emphasize that the believer now has a personal connection to God, accessible in prayer through the priesthood of Jesus himself.

But sometimes we forget how hard that is in this time between the times.

Some of our worship services are so clean and antiseptic, led by grinning preachers and praise bands, talking about how happy Jesus makes us, that we forget that the Spirit prompts us to "groan" at our sin and the suffering all around us (Romans 8:22-23). This is especially true at Christmas, with so many evangelicals forgoing the dark longing of Advent to go straight to the tinsel-decked rejoicing of Christmas.

Some Christians, then, can wonder if something's wrong with them when they feel as though God seems distant, or when, despite all the smiles at church, they still feel guilty for the way their hearts don't seem to match up with their hymns.

But the good news isn't that we are all put together. The good news is that though we're wrecked and fallen and freakish, Jesus loves us anyway and has made peace for us with God and with each other. That's not something we always feel. We see it by faith.

O'Connor, elsewhere in her letters, writes of what it means to agonize over one's sin, to wonder "if your confessions have been adequate and if you are compounding sin on sin." She concludes that this agony "drives some folks nuts and some folks to the Baptists," while noting, "I feel sure that it will drive me nuts and not to the Baptists."

Those of us who were "driven to the Baptists" can benefit from a book of prayers that remind us that the Christian life is exactly what Jesus promised it would be - the carrying of a cross.

We can be reminded in prayers such as these to remind ourselves that between now and resurrection we will never be, in ourselves, anything other than sinners. That's why we need a Christ.

It's only when we grapple with the darkness of a fallen cosmos, only when we're honest about the fact that all our efforts look more like Herod's throne than Bethlehem's stable, that we can sing "Joy to the World." Flannery O'Connor wasn't an evangelical Protestant, but we need her.

We need her, especially perhaps, as we pray for peace on earth, goodwill to men, for Christmas in a Christ-haunted world.

Russell D. Moore is President of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention’s official entity assigned to address social, moral, and ethical concerns. The views expressed in this column belong to Moore alone. 

Book Review: Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Prayer Journal’

The Believer

By MARILYNNE ROBINSON

http://www.nytimes.com

Published: November 15, 2013

This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the Sterling notebook in which Flannery O’Connor, just 20 years old, began a journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are “there is nothing left to say of me”) and not omitting a bit of musical notation floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and 1947, while O’Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them.

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Martha Sprieser (Georgia College Library, Milledgeville)

Flannery O'Connor

A PRAYER JOURNAL

By Flannery O’Connor

96 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $18.

The complexity of O’Connor’s thinking, together with the largely flawless pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier drafts. Clearly O’Connor’s virtuosity makes her self-­conscious. Young as she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the writer’s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of honesty. After a little joke about the pedestrian uses we would make of a knowledge of heaven if we had been given one, she says, remembering her intended Hearer, “But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.” Her mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as they might not have been under the eye of any human observer. Youth and loneliness and the unspent energies of a singular mind are testing the possible and must be allowed free play.

It is the religious sensibility reflected in this journal that makes it as eloquent on the subject of creativity as it is on the subject of prayer. O’Connor’s awareness of her gifts gives her a special kind of interest in them. Having concluded one early entry by asking the Lord to help her “with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing,” she begins the next entry: “Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story — just like the typewriter was mine.”

Every writer wonders where fictional ideas come from. The best of them often appear very abruptly after a period of imaginative drought. And, mysteriously, they really are good ideas, much superior to the contrivances of conscious invention. Such experiences are by no means exclusive to writers with religious worldviews. But believing them to be literal gifts grants them an objective existence they seem actually to deserve. This entails problems, of course. Fiction rarely shows a divine imprimatur, as its mortal creators are well aware. I would be curious to know what story or part of a story by O’Connor should be attributed to the Lord. It can seem self-aggrandizing or simply bizarre to ascribe any thought or work to a seemingly external source, named or unnamed. Nevertheless, ­Hesiod, Pindar and any number of poets and prophets before and after them have declared indebtedness of this kind. If they, and O’Connor, were naïve, sophistication has made language poorer. There is no way now to describe an experience many a writer can attest to, having been surprised by it, and having enjoyed it as a particular pleasure and reward of the art. Religion is by its nature more accommodating to the unaccountable than rationalism ever can be.

While O’Connor was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop she was also a daily communicant at St. Mary’s Catholic Church at the edge of campus. Her journal reflects a conflict, in her mind at least, between a skeptical intellectual environment and the faith she sometimes anxiously sustains. She says: “I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is not strong. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery. I do not want it to be fear which keeps me in the church.” She knows all the arguments against religion. They seem to have changed little over the last 70 years, so there is no need to rehearse them here. Considering the threat she feels them to be, it is striking that atheism, in an apparently Southern, vernacular incarnation with nothing intellectual about it, is at the center of “Wise Blood,” the novel she had already begun to write and submit to be read in workshop. This is a tale in which pathos tips into pathology and violence, answered by a penance of self-mutilation and suffering. Yet the prose is absolutely brilliant, sentence by sentence, simile by simile, and so relentlessly inventive it feels comic.

The young writer prays, “Please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate.” At prayer she is scrupulous in her candor, and a little wry therefore. She seems already to be making important decisions about the means by which she will carry forward her intention to write as a Christian, influenced by her reaction to the assertive skepticism and the fashionable theism she senses around her. She says, “Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of the places where You are not adored but desecrated.” This might serve as a gloss on the fiction she was writing at the time, which conjures such a world. She asks: “Am I trying to shock with God? Am I trying to push Him in there violently, feet foremost? Maybe that’s all right. Maybe if I’m doing it it’s all right?” Certainly by the standards of the most tentative or perfunctory reverence her language can seem transgressive. Her religious sincerity is beyond question, but the forms of its expression raise many questions. This is no criticism. It is the honorable work of any writer who touches on great matters to provoke. And it is a discipline of writing well to allow the fiction to discover itself, however it may startle its writer’s intentions as it does so. She says of the story for which she has thanked God: “I am not trying to disparage anybody’s religion although when it was coming out, I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. . . . Please don’t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right — or any wrong.”

The particular pleasure of life in Iowa City rests not so much in the fact that the girl beside you on the bus or behind you in line might well be pondering a great and turbulent tradition of thought and belief, and finding new language to explore it. This could be true anywhere. It is that here the privilege of hearing or seeing her thoughts as fiction or poetry, even seeing them emerge and develop, is widely shared. This little journal puts its reader a step closer to one touching and remarkable young mind.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of three novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gilead,” and four books of nonfiction. Her essay collection “When I Was a Child I Read Books” was published last year.

A version of this review appears in print on November 17, 2013, on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Believer.

The Mean Grace of Flannery O'Connor

http://acatholicthinker.wordpress.com

October 17, 2013

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

- Flannery O’Connor

     I didn’t care for it the first time I read it. No – let me rephrase that. The first time I read it, I was repulsed by it. Flannery O’Connor’s writing had been recommended to me from a close friend. A southern Catholic fiction writer, Mary Flannery O’Connor lived with her mother, raised peacocks while writing two novels and just over two dozen short stories.   It would be forty-five years after her death that I found myself reading her iconic and harrowing short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”.

     But don’t let the title of her stories, the bespectacled innocence of her photograph, or the reclusive, respectable life she led in the home with her mother fool you. Flannery O’Connor’s writing could be downright vicious and raw. Her characters are often crude, unkempt and ill-educated. Bereft of redeeming qualities and brimming with flaws, it is easy to repelled by them and the path their lives are taking. And yet, with writing that is so vivid, so animated, so…real, it is difficult to release yourself from its grip. So it is at this time, with her reader duly ensnared, that Flannery unleashes her power. In the case of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (spoiler alert…), Flannery stuns with the slaughter of a thoughtlessly chattering grandmother and her family by a fugitive killer known as the Misfit. It hit me right between the eyes – and, frankly, I didn’t like it. Gratuitous violence. Irredeemable characters. Pointless plot. I was not impressed.

     That said, it was in 2008 that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was interviewed by Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes. Justice Scalia relayed a high school anecdote that has stuck with me since I first heard it.

“I have – one teacher I remember was an elderly Jesuit at Xavier (high school in New York City) from Boston. He had a Boston accent. Father Tom Matthews, and he taught me a lesson that I’ve recounted in some of my speeches. He taught me what I refer to as the Shakespeare principle.

The class was reading one of the Shakespeare plays, ‘Hamlet’ or whatever, and one of my classmates or whatever, sort of smart aleck kid, John Antonelli, as I recall. It’s ridiculous I would remember his name. But [John] made some really smart aleck sophomoric criticism of the play, and Father Matthews looked down at him and he said, with his Boston accent, ‘Mister, when you read Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s not on trial. You are.’”

     And so it was for me and Flannery O’Connor. As I read her work, Flannery O’Connor was not on trial. I was. Sheepishly, I have to admit that I had similarly grossly misjudged the great G.K. Chesterton in the past (see my previous post “Finding My Way to Orthodoxy” http://acatholicthinker.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/finding-my-way-to-orthodoxy/). The work of Flannery O’Connor could be harsh, violent and discomfiting. And yet it is also thick with truth, grace and redemption. To the superficial reader, a yarn filled with unattractive figures on ill-fated endeavors may be all that is perceived. But to those willing to consider her work more deeply, powerful themes of deeply religious truths become apparent. Perhaps the greatest and most pervasive of these truths in Flannery’s stories is the pain, suffering and “meanness” that often accompanies the beautiful grace of God.

     But how is it that I came to the realization of the depth and quality of this once-scorned (by me) writer? First, conversations with my good friend kindly encouraged me that I may be wrong in my initial dislike of Flannery. Effectively, he reminded me that Flannery is not on trial – I am. Second, reading the writings of Flannery in the form of a posthumously published collection of correspondence titled “The Habit of Being” captivated me. These letters to friends and associates, never intended by the author to be released, are a masterpiece of deep thinking, religious conviction and endearing wit. Without pretense or puffery, Flannery shows a clarity of thought on the most human of concerns that is gripping in its sage-like quality. Particularly impressive to me is her insight on suffering and grace – not only how it figured into “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, but how it figures into our every day life. When Flannery O’Connor explains her novel, I am interested. When she explains her faith, I am entranced. On suffering and grace, she writes,

“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do. What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.”

“This notion that grace is healing omits the fact that before it heals, it cuts with the sword Christ said He came to bring.”

  “[The trendy "beat" writers] call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing. It’s true that grace is the free gift of God but in order to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.”

And when explaining (what I considered incomprehensible) “A Good Man is Hard to Find” to a friend,

“There is a moment of grace in most of the stories, or a moment where it is offered, and usually rejected. Like when the Grandmother recognizes the Misfit as one of her children (a child of God) and reaches out to touch him. It’s the moment of grace for her anyway – a silly old woman – but it leads him to shoot her. This moment of grace excites the devil to frenzy.”

     The frequent pairing of suffering and grace was captured in a moment between a violent Misfit and a cackling old woman. Suddenly, what I failed to understand became clear and the story had a significant impact on me. After all, aren’t the greatest stories we encounter in our Faith ones riddled with suffering (the taunting of Noah, the slavery of Moses, the guilty infidelity and murder perpetrated by David, the lonely pregnancy of Mary and the Passion of the Christ) and subsequent grace (the deliverance of the Ark, the arrival at the Promised Land, the redemption of David, the Assumption of Mary and the Resurrection and Reign of Christ)? And yet, so often while the suffering is painfully apparent, we often are blind to moments of extreme and beautiful grace in our faith and in our lives. These are moments which Flannery O’Connor shares with us again and again.

     One last question may be posed before a person would embark upon reading the raw and challenging works of Flannery O’Connor. What did she know about suffering and grace? At the age of twenty-six, Flannery would be diagnosed (like her father before her) with systemic lupus erythematosus (“lupus”), a disabling rheumatologic condition. Through chronic pain, recurrent illnesses and medication side effects, Flannery would write with keen insight, acerbic wit and devout Catholic faith. Thirteen years later, she would die. She was only thirty-nine years old. Flannery O’Connor knew suffering and she knew grace – a mean grace.