The Mysticism of Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor once wrote to a friend that she hoped, if she lived long enough and developed properly as an artist, one day to write “a comic novel about a woman—and what could be more comical or more terrible than an angular intellectual proud woman approaching God inch by inch grinding her teeth?” O’Connor died of complications from lupus at the age of 39 before she was able to write this novel but not before she was able to write two searing novels of faith and dozens of short stories that truly exemplify Hortense Calisher’s definition of that form: “apocalypses, served in very small cups.”

A Prayer Journal includes both a transcription and a facsimile of the handwritten notebook O’Connor kept when she was a 20-year-old student at the University of Iowa beginning to pursue her vocation as a writer. In it, we find an intimate self-portrait of an angular intellectual proud woman approaching God, with humor, rare intelligence, and yes, occasionally even gritted teeth. It is so immediate that it feels for the most part as if it could have been written today. It was in fact written over 50 years ago by a lonely and ambitious young woman far from home, was not intended for any eyes other than her own, and has only just now been brought to light through the efforts of her official biographer, William A. Sessions.

The entries in this journal are her letters to God. O’Connor began writing letters as a young child to her father (whom she addressed as the King of Siam and who in turn addressed her as Lord Flannery) and then to dozens of correspondents until her death, enabling her to form and maintain the friendships for which she had always longed. Several times she warns her self against letting the writing in the journal become too clever and therefore insincere. Later, still struggling, she cries out, “Can’t anyone teach me how to pray?”

O’Connor confesses that she believes in hell but has a harder time envisioning heaven. She doesn’t want to believe in God because she’s afraid of hell; she wants instead to believe in heaven, she wants to love God. She writes, “Help me to feel that I will give up every earthly thing for this,” and then she squeezes this caveat onto the last line of that page: “I do not mean becoming a nun.”

O’Connor was coming of age in a world with a war just ending and in an America intent on training the appetites of its citizens for consumption of manufactured goods. The external structures that had created social order were crumbling—two world wars had undermined faith in politics and the Depression had undermined faith in the economic system. Increasingly, psychologists and philosophers were turning to the human self as the only valid center of authority. The self, a thing Simone Weil characterized as being as “ephemeral and automatic a product of external circumstances as a sea-wave,” was instead being posited as tangible, reliable, and in desperate need of improvement. The self was simultaneously being celebrated as the center of value and portrayed as a leaky bucket in constant need of filling, and this alarmed the young writer.

O’Connor saw her self not as a treasure but as an obstacle. “Dear God,” she wrote, “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.” If the self was empty, she believed that only God could fill it; if we sought after other things, we were bound, eventually, to be disappointed.

O’Connor seemed most unsettled by psychology. She wrote, “I am afraid of insidious hands Oh Lord which grope into the darkness of my soul.” She was newly exposed to the teachings of Freud...