Alien grace: The tortured faith of Flannery O’Connor

The God she longed for could only be found in suffering and death

The Book:

A Prayer Journal
By Flannery O’Connor
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
2013

The Talk:

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.

Between 1946 and 1947 the emerging writer Flannery O’Connor kept a prayer journal while attending the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City. Only published in recent years, it records her most intimate spiritual thoughts as she wrestled with being a writer, being a Catholic, and being a Catholic writer in an intellectual and literary milieu where she felt like an outsider.

All the hallmarks of O’Connor’s fiction are present here. O’Connor’s imagination inverts everything. Black is white, white is black; to the modern world, God is something dark, haunting, ugly. To a perverse generation holiness appears as a perversion. God’s grace breaks through modern smug intellectualism and rationalism by violent divine action, a kind of shock cure for the Freudian intelligentsia.

But this darkly comic absurdity was also clearly part of O’Connor’s own personality, not simply a missionary strategy. In one entry she writes:

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 think about You all the time, to have the want driving in me, to have it like a cancer in me. It would kill me like a cancer and that would be the Fulfillment.

The idea of grace like a cancer foreshadows many of O’Connor’s short stories, in which the physical suffering (or often death) of the main character is the means of their redemption. But the above passage is not about modernity, but her own devotion to God—a desire for grace in which death is a reasonable, even preferable, outcome.

It is rarely noted how sometimes the pursuit of holiness can lead to a kind of death wish among the most devout. To measure one’s self against the rubric of God’s commands, to want to offer one’s self as a perfect sacrifice, is to be in a state of perpetual failure. Only in the briefest moments can you achieve equanimity. Only rarely can you be the person you earnestly wish to be. You never get to be the gift you wish to offer.

Cicero once wrote, “Unless a good thing is durable and stable and lasting it is quite impossible for its possessor to be happy.” But in this life, when it comes to spiritual things, nothing is ever durable, stable, or lasting. And, thus, there is no true happiness. Only fleeting moments of joy (which are God’s inscrutable gift) and long stretches of fog and blindness (which are likely your fault).

The only way to stop life from changing is to stop life. For the ardent devotee, earth is the closest thing to hell—the farthest a Christian can ever be from God and a daily mockery of everything you wish for. And it’s not just the world but your own body and mind that are the limit, the cage, the enemy holding you back. The promised Good News is only fully delivered at death; this—this life—is something far less than that.

It is remarkable to me how closely O’Connor’s prayers match the private writings of my youth, even as early as nine years old. On almost every page there’s a sentence I could’ve written myself—a tender conscience flagellated by an obsessively analytic mind.

O’Connor notes her selfishness, her laziness, her pride, her inability to keep her thoughts on God at all times. She is perpetually starting over, starting afresh, recommitting herself, and pleading to be holy for more than a moment.

In her introspection, she is skeptical of all her good deeds and good thoughts. These are just guises for selfish ends. Her desire to be a writer is selfish. Her desire to be funny, clever, and smart is sinful. She begs God to help her be a published author—and yet in the same breath realizes that God has not promised such a thing and could surely withhold it for her own good.

Every good thing must be questioned because it may just be evil in disguise. The unconscious and the subconscious are, for O’Connor, the place to which the devil has fallen. The “id” is the depths of hell, from which all perversity and selfishness emerges. So even if you feel righteous, it may just be the devil in sheep’s clothing. For O’Connor, the modern world, in the works of Freud et al, have embraced the id, desiring to unleash it, and in so doing, they call evil good.

From this perspective, God’s grace strikes as an alien force that shatters the darkness of the soul. Grace can only be perceived as violence—not something we could ever ask for on our own but something God gives us in spite of our resistance to it. The ideal Christian life is a perpetual act of surrender to the work of God, but one that is never truly consummated or completed until death.

The cutting awareness of one’s imperfection, the inability to maintain any kind of constancy, the shifting mirrors of illusion, the distrust one’s own thoughts, the self-loathing, the hatred of ordinary human life—all these things I have felt so deeply out of zeal. My journals are crammed with such dark and lonely streets.

The end of O’Connor’s journal combines all these ideas together into one sad final entry:

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 have proved myself a glutton—for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.

As a literary and rhetorical strategy, I think O’Connor’s ironic inversion of light and dark is fascinating. But as a way to live a life, I can’t help but feel heartache. This idea of an alien, absurd, irrational grace is a form of dark Christianity that you find in Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Barth, Ellul. In all these cases, it’s faith’s escape hatch from reason and the natural world.

It’s no obscure tradition. Call it antimodernist Christianity, a particularly pessimistic view of the world—but also of the self. In order to make the light shine brighter, it makes the darkness darker. It’s meant as a corrective, a way of cutting down an optimistic rational humanism (sometimes religious, sometimes atheist), a shock therapy for human pride and ego run amok. But for me, in the end, it leaves no world worth living in and no human life worth having.

I laugh when Aristotle writes “no one desires impossible things.” I did. Haven’t we all? And when I read my own childhood journals, I wish very much to comfort the boy that thought he was bad when he was good. I wish Flannery O’Connor had known that she was good enough, too.

Would she have written such powerful stories if she had not felt so inadequate? Possibly. I admit the bus of inadequacy will take you far and fast. But it’s better for your health to eventually get off that bus and walk. The journey takes longer, but you enjoy it more.