Flannery O’Connor – A Writer’s Prayer Journal

In September 2013, The New Yorker magazine published excerpts on-line from Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journal, entitled My Dear God, A Young Writer’s Prayers.

Here is how The New Yorker described these journal entries at that time:

In January, 1946, while studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flannery O’Connor began keeping a journal in a ruled Sterling notebook. O’Connor, who had left her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, for Iowa, turned twenty-one in March and had her first short story, “The Geranium,” accepted for publication that month. She was a devout Catholic, and over a year and a half she filled the notebook with a series of entries addressed to God. The following excerpts from her journal chart her thoughts on the subject of faith and prayer, and her hopes for her fiction.

I am only now beginning to discover the majesty of O’Connor’s works. I have a lot of catching up to do. But these short prayer excerpts really spoke to me this evening, particularly the one I share below.

While these prayers are directed at her writing, it seems to me that they have a much broader application.

We can observe an on-going, internal struggle as O’Connor tries to understand how she can best use her God-given talents without getting in her own way, or altogether self-absorbed. At the very least, they provide just a small glimpse into the mind of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers.

Now, few of us have even a small measure of O’Connor’s talent.

But as for me, I fully understand, and share in, her most ardent desire: to write, to sweat even, in furtherance His service – even if in just a small way. I, like O’Connor, am no less a presumptuous fool in that regard.

I hope that you’ll take the time to read them all.

Dear God,

About hope, I am somewhat at a loss.

It is so easy to say I hope to—the tongue slides over it. I think perhaps hope can only be realized by contrasting it with despair.

And I am too lazy to despair.

Please don’t visit me with it, dear Lord, I would be so miserable.

Hope, however, must be something distinct from faith. I unconsciously put it in the faith department. It must be something positive that I have never felt. It must be a positive force, else why the distinction between it and faith?

I would like to order things so that I can feel all of a piece spiritually. I don’t suppose I order things. But all my requests seem to melt down to one for grace—that supernatural grace that does what ever it does.

My mind is in a little box, dear God, down inside other boxes inside other boxes and on and on. There is very little air in my box.

Dear God, please give me as much air as it is not presumptuous to ask for. Please let some light shine out of all the things around me so that I can.

What it amounts to I suppose is be selfish. Is there no getting around that, dear God? No escape from ourselves? Into something bigger?

Oh dear God I want to write a novel, a good novel. I want to do this for a good feeling & for a bad one. The bad one is uppermost. The psychologists say it is the natural one. Let me get away dear God from all things thus “natural.”

Help me to get what is more than natural into my work—help me to love & bear with my work on that account.

If I have to sweat for it, dear God, let it be as in Your service. I would like to be intelligently holy.

I am a presumptuous fool, but maybe the vague thing in me that keeps me in is hope.

Peace

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons