EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE: Everything that follows in this post is from Flannery O’Connor’s letters (except where obviously indicated). In chronological order, and lightly edited to clarify something w/r/t Other People’s Churches.

Furthermore, almost any spiritual writer ought to wear thin for you. It’s like reading criticism of poetry all the time and not reading the poetry.

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The Communion of Saints has something to do with the fact that the burdens we bear because of someone else, we can also bear for someone else.

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What [Graham Greene] does, I think, is try to make religion respectable to the modern unbeliever by making it seedy. He succeeds so well in making it seedy that then he has to save it by miracle.

[Eve: Oh, I don’t think this is really right–but I think it’s one of those criticisms that, even when wrong because importantly incomplete, signal something real.]
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Crisis means something different of course for the Catholic than for the Protestant. For them it is the dissolution of their churches; for us it is losing the world.

[Eve: I don’t pretend to have views about Protestants (other than not being one), because I don’t get it. I didn’t grow up among Protestants, I don’t know any intensely (although I admire many), I can’t write Protestant characters. I’m not proud of this–and it isn’t a moral claim, as there are many terrible things I understand and many good ones I don’t–but the opacity is there and I haven’t gotten past it thus far. So this is a quote I find deeply suggestive, but, you know, I don’t really do the Cath-v-Prot questions very well, because I don’t get why you’d want to be something else when the Church is right there. …And actually I think this reaction might be what O’Connor is talking about. Eh, at least I’m an object lesson.]
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