Make Me A Mystic: The Profound Honesty Of Flannery O’Connor

From On Being-

There’s a common emotional vocabulary in the writings of Catholic women, a fierce devotion strangely coupled with a startling humility. This is ever-so-present in Flannery O'Connor's A Prayer Journal, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

It's a wonderful book: unflinchingly honest, unfailingly wise, and immensely funny:

"What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that — make mystics out of cheeses."

Ms. O'Connor wrote this collection of prayers — letters really — to God as a student attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop in her twenties, around the time that her first short story was published in Accent magazine. She struggles with doubt and uncertainty, afraid that she will not produce another work worthy of publication, and asks God: "Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted."

More here-

http://www.onbeing.org/blog/make-me-a-mystic-the-profound-honesty-of-flannery-oconnor/6143v

17 JANUARY (1956): FLANNERY O’CONNOR TO BETTY HESTER

From The American Reader-

Following the publication of A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor received a note from a young woman named Betty Hester telling her that God was the book’s central subject. Amid the flurries of reviews calling O’Connor’s book cruel and sarcastic, Hester’s letter was welcome reading. It ignited a nine-year friendship and a prolific correspondence. Faith and religion was their dominant focus. A devout Catholic, O’Connor even persuaded Hester to join the church, acting as her confirmation sponsor. Below, O’Connor discusses the merits of late-in-life baptisms and her early fights with angels.

To Betty Hester

17 January 1956

I’m never prepared for anything. I felt sure you were 7ft. tall and ash blonde and you turn out to be dark and shaped like a ginger beer bottle and I have been equally positive that you were a Pantheist in good standing with whatever they’re in good standing with and now you allow you’re as orthodox as I am if not more. More, I suppose, as baptism is something you choose and I had it thrust upon me. To my credit it can be said anyway that I never considered you unbaptized. There are the three kinds, of water, blood, and desire, and with the last I thought you as baptized as I am. So that may be the reason I a have nothing to say about this when I ought to say something. All voluntary baptisms are a miracle to me and stop my mouth as much as if I had just seen Lazarus walk out of the tomb. I suppose it’s because I know that it had to be given me before the age of reason, or I wouldn’t have used any reason to find it.
More here-

http://theamericanreader.com/17-january-1956-flannery-oconnor-to-betty-hester/

The Believer Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Prayer Journal’

From The New York Times-

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.

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.

More here-

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/books/review/flannery-oconnors-prayer-journal.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0