God’s Grandeur: The Prayer Journal of Flannery O’Connor

In the more than 600 pages of The Habit of Being, Flannery O’Connor’s collected correspondence, there is not one love letter. This is no great tragedy for the reader. What O’Connor left us in these letters—a fierce and lucid faith that refused to sacrifice comedy to piety—is much more necessary than a record of who on this Earth she loved and why.

If you’re fond of O’Connor, however, you might wonder at the conspicuous lack of romantic desire both in her collected letters and fiction. You might happen to know that her friends Betty Hester and Maryat Lee declared their love for her, or that some think she was briefly infatuated with Robert Lowell. There’s also that Danish textbook salesman who might have broken her heart and set her to writing “Good Country People” because of it. With all of these occurrences combined, you still might wonder if they amounted to much of a tragedy for O’Connor. If she knew you were using the word tragedy in connection with her love life, she might accuse you of “stinking romanticism” and say to hell with you.

When Hester (known as “A.” in the collected letters) pointed out the lack of romantic desire evoked in her work, assuming that O’Connor did not address it out of a fear of muddying her hands with the impure, O’Connor acknowledged that, yes, what was missing from her stories was, paraphrasing Anton Chekhov, the “he-and-she” that “is the machine that makes fiction work.” But not, she replied, because she feared that writing of it would be a sin—on the contrary. “I associate it a good deal beyond the simply virtuous emotions; I identify it plainly with the sacred.”

You might also wonder at the conspicuous lack of professed spiritual desire. We know what O’Connor wanted for her fiction, but it is less clear what she wanted for her soul, because she does not confess to it other than obliquely. In the letters, when she advises Hester on prayer, she does admit to some extravagant petitioning. “It’s only trying to see straight and it’s the least you can set yourself to do, the least you can ask for,” she writes. “You ask God to let you see straight and write straight. I read somewhere that the more you asked God, the more impossible what you asked, the greater glory you were giving Him. This is something I don’t fail to practice, although not with the right motives.” But she does not tell Hester what impossible things she demands.

In the same way, she may intellectually assent to the necessity of suffering, but she is careful to never leave a trace of her own pain on the page. One never hears or sees her on her knees in agony before God—like the tormented young curate in Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, a favorite novel of hers. In prayer, she preferred to rely on the breviary so as to keep her mind from drifting off. “If I attempt to keep my mind on the mysteries of the rosary,” she wrote to a friend, “I am soon thinking about something else, entirely non-religious in nature. So I read my prayers out of the book, prime in the morning and compline at night.” But she would not swallow your prayer if she thought it was, as she told Hester, full of emotion she couldn’t live up to. Says O’Connor to Hester: “I hate to say most of these prayers written by saints-inan-emotional state. You feel you are wearing somebody else’s finery and I can never describe my heart as ‘burning’ to the Lord (who knows better) without snickering.”

How would O’Connor describe her heart to the Lord? It’s hard to imagine her ever wanting to take on that work as a spiritual or aesthetic challenge. But in a prayer journal O’Connor kept while she was a student...