Flannery O’Connor’s Dear God letter is truly moving and inspiring.
Trying to Write About Flannery O’Connor
When you sit down and begin to write without any knowledge of where you are going or how you are going to write it, you are doing something possibly very creative–or you could be just messing around, which can also lead to a creative end.
But then there’s the time you totally stall–for months.
You stall for months because you know that if you even try to write about this one thing, it’ll be so big it’ll threaten to literally suck you up and any words you might try to produce about it.
That’s how I feel about writing this post.
That’s how I feel about Flannery O’Connor.
I’ve wanted to write about Flannery O’Connor for months now since I started reading her short stories for the first time back in September. Of course I had heard about her in passing as an American writer.
But I didn’t know at first that she was Catholic.
And I didn’t know how devout a Catholic she was.
And I really didn’t know how much the Holy Eucharist meant to her becoming an artist, a writer.
And I really didn’t know how gruesome some of her stories really are, and how strikingly and glaringly and poignantly she cut into the human soul and pulled it open and made us all stare down into it. But what I love about her and am inspired by is that she truly saw herself as one who wrote for and to the glory of God (link). And that’s why her Prayer Journal is so beautiful and inspiring. For to write for God means you are seeking Him for guidance, inspiration, and even to become a writer, an artist.
Being a Catholic Writer
I started reading her short stories while on business travel to Brazil, and couldn’t put them down–even when a friend of mine gave me a copy of John Steinbeck’s short novels. When I arrived home from Brazil, I had picked up a flu bug and spent days at home from work with nothing else I wanted to but read Flannery O’Connor.
But then one afternoon while laying in bed, I got too tired of reading the short stories, and went looking for something–anything–on Flannery O’Connor’s life. And it was then that I came across Bishop Barron’s interview with Ethan and Maya Hawke (link) about the movie they had made about Flannery O’Connor titled Wildcat–I immediately rented the movie, and lay there in bed laughing my head off and at other times balling my eyes out, especially the vignette of her short story The Tattooist.
But it was during Bishop Barron’s interview with Ethan and Maya, and their movie, that I became captivated by Flannery’s A Prayer Journal.
Flannery wrote the Prayer Journal between 1946 and 1947 while a student at the University of Iowa. She began in journalism but ended up in writing workshops. And after some years of struggle and hard work and never giving up, she published her first novel Wise Blood.
The front flap of the jacket reads that,
A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O’Connor’s singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God.
Flannery was a Catholic through and through, which I love about her. She claimed that she was a Catholic writer, and that her life in the Church is what allowed her to write the way and the material she did.
In one of her letters on 6 November 1955, she writes …
[I] write the way I do because I am a Catholic. I feel that if I were not a Cathlic, I would have no reason to write, n o reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or even to enjoy anything. I am a born Catholic, went to Catholic schools in my early hyears, and have never left or wanted to leave the Church. I have never had the sense that being a Catholic is a limit to the freedom of the writer, but just the reverse. … I feel myself that being a Catholic has saved me a couple of thousand years in learning to write (The Habit of Being, 114).
Dear God, please help me be an artist
Here’s one of my favourite prayers from Flannery’s journal …
I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually–like this today. The word craftmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle. Angle. It will be a life struggle with no consummation. When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle. All our lives are consumed in possessing struggle but only when the struggle is cherished & directed to a final consummation outside of this life is it of any value. I want to be the best artist it is possible for me to be, under God.
Flannery in this prayer realizes her life of art, of aesthetics, of truth, of writing, will be one of struggle and divestiture. She didn’t yet know that five years later she would be diagnosed with Lupus, the very disease that had claimed her father’s life, and that her life would truly be one of perpetual suffering and physical decline. But somehow, in a seemingly prophetic way, she knew.
Here’s how she concludes her prayer …
Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to you.
I had never read a writer pray to God like that before.
I had never read such heartfelt faithful hopeful words uttered to God for one’s art before. To plead to become a writer, the “life struggle with no consummation.”
And I know she has not been beatified a saint; but I read her prayers as if they are my prayers.
And I read her letters, and her stories, and I ask her to pray for me as if she is a saint, because I believe she is.
And I ask her to pray for me
that God may, too, help me become a writer …
I will continue with more excerpts from Flannery O’Connors Prayer Journal and letters and stories. Her depth is such that to write a mere blog post about her is laughable; and yet, to avoid writing one is, I believe, an act of cowardice, and Flannery would not like that.
If you like this post, share it with someone who might be inspired by it.
And if you like this kind of writing about writers and Christian faith, check out my book Creativity and Becoming: On Art, Writing, and Orthodox Spiritual Life (link).
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