Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 30, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Words from Flannery O’Connor
I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall be ever in my mouth. Let my soul glory in the Lord.
March 25 was the 100th birthday of a writer who said that her subject was “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” That’s Flannery O’Connor, born in Savannah, Georgia. She was raised a devout Roman Catholic. She said: “I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”
Glorify the Lord with me. I sought the Lord and he answered me, he delivered me from all my fears.
While Flannery was a 20-year-old student at the University of Iowa writer’s workshop, she prayed and talked to God in her journal.
I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You.
She kept her prayer journal for two years. She wrote just 24 entries and filled less than 50 pages. Her first prayer began: “Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon.”
In another entry, she wrote: “Dear Lord, please make me want You. It would be the greatest bliss. Not just to want You when I think about You but to want You all the time, to have the want driving in me, to have it like a cancer in me.”
In the second-to-last entry, she wrote: Oh, Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. My soul, it’s a moth who would be king, a stupid slothful thing, a foolish thing, who wants God, who made the earth, to be its Lover. Immediately.”
But the next day, she wrote: “My thoughts are so far away from God. He might as well not have made me. And the feeling I egg up writing here lasts approximately a half hour and seems a sham. I don’t want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I ha”ve proved myself a glutton — for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.”
That was the end of the prayer journal.
When O’Connor was 26 she was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had killed her father. She went home to Milledgeville, Alabama to live with her mother at Andalusia, the family dairy farm. She wrote every morning at a desk that faced the back of a dresser so she would have no distractions. She went into Milledgeville for lunch, and for the rest of the day she wrote letters, painted, read, went to Mass, or cared for her peacocks, chickens, and ducks.
She wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and 32 unforgettable short stories. In bed at her local hospital, knowing she was dying, she finished her final story, “Revelation.” As the story concludes author and character merge to together face whatever comes next.
Mrs. Turpin stood there, her gaze fixed on the highway, all her muscles rigid, until in five or six minutes the truck reappeared, returning. She waited until it had had time to turn into their own road. Then like a monumental statue coming to life, she bent her head slowly and gazed, as if through the very heart of mystery, down into the pig parlor at the hogs. They had settled all in one corner around the old sow who was grunting softly. A red glow suffused them. They appeared to pant with a secret life.
Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. There was only a purple streak in the sky, cutting through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk.
She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.
She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead.
In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile. At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.
Miss O’Connor died soon after in 1964, at the age of 39.
O taste and see the goodness of the Lord, that your faces may not blush with shame. Whoever is in Christ is a new creation; the old things have passed away.
(Thanks to Garrison Keillor, from his Writer’ Almanac. Also Plough Magazine, “An Ugly Route to Goodness,” Wildcat, 2023, Ethan and Maya Hawke, and Flannery, PBS American Masters)
(Joshua 5, Psalm 34, 2 Corinthian 5, Luke 15)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
