I Dont Know You God Because I Am in the Way
"Love 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 world's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all 1 like I am should or could run into; but what I am afraid of, love God, is that my self shadow volition grow so large that I block the whole moon, and that I will estimate myself past the shadow that is nothing. I exercise non know y'all God because I am in the mode. Please help me to button myself bated."
Flannery O'Connor wrote these words in January of 1946 when she was an MFA student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. They capture the spiritual agon that she was engaged in equally she struggled to discover the connexion between her vocation as a writer and her vocation as a Cosmic. Found among her papers by scholar William Sessions, a friend of hers, O'Connor's A Prayer Journal was published to keen acclamation in 2013 as it gave readers a glimpse into the baptism by fire she endured earlier emerging as America's finest Catholic writer of the 20th century. 5 years later, Prayer Journal continues to appeal to readers who value her work as it teaches united states of america not only about the writer, simply also about ourselves as people in pursuit of twin vocations, the professional and the spiritual, and the challenges of reconciling the 2.
I recently revisited the Prayer Journal and establish it to be as poignant and profound every bit when I first read it. What strikes me on this reading is the way writing the periodical helped O'Connor to grow non only in her faith but too in her art, enabling a fledgling writer to experiment with and detect her literary vocation and vocalism. Most of the entries in the Prayer Journal, offset in Jan. 1946 and last in Sept. 1947, have the course of letters. This is a genre O'Connor would primary later she was diagnosed with lupus and exiled to her mother's subcontract, Andalusia, in rural Georgia for the last xiii years of her life. During this period letters would become her chief ways of communication with the outside world. These mature letters, wherein the full range of O'Connor's literary gifts are on brandish, were eventually published as The Habit of Being, one of the finest collections of correspondence e'er produced by a writer.
Letter writing is a genre O'Connor would main afterwards she was diagnosed with lupus and exiled to her mother'south subcontract.
O'Connor enjoyed letter of the alphabet-writing from an early age and took some pride in her skill. In an before journal O'Connor kept in college, humorously (mis)titled Higher Mathematics and recently found among her papers, she writes: "My epistolary powers enthrall me. Information technology is a pity I can't receive my own letters. If they produce as much whole-hearted blessing at their destination equally they do at their source, they should indeed exist able to keep my memory alive—and healthy" (Jan. 22, 1944). These early letters are, in some ways, apprentice pieces, preparation for the mature letters she would write and also served equally practice for her fiction.
The epistolary element of the Prayer Journal, in particular, provided her with the opportunity to write letters of a unlike nature from any she had written before. For these are letters to God and, as such, opened upwards an avenue for advice about matters of the soul, making them more frank and intimate than any she might have penned to ordinary people. The letters functioned in a diverseness of means, simply for present purposes I would like to focus on three.
First, they gave her the chance to explore her nigh individual thoughts and feelings without exposing herself or her piece of work to judgment or censure—something she endured on a regular basis at the Iowa workshop. Different her fiction, which she hoped would be read by many people, her letters to God would, similar prayer, remain sealed and undercover. This gave O'Connor the liberty to accost her greatest spiritual challenges and her besetting sins. Amidst these are the twin torments of fear and desire. Every bit the opening excerpt suggests, one of her primary fears is that of the self and its relentless demands. She also fears the tyranny of her intellect, the loss of her faith and literary and spiritual mediocrity. But more than fear, these messages are the record of desire. O'Connor writes at one point that supplication is the merely kind of prayer she is adept at. She desires many things, but what she wants most of all is to be a good author:
Dear God, I am and then discouraged about my work. . . . Please help me love God to exist a proficient author and to get something else accustomed. That is and then far from what I deserve, of course, that I am naturally struck with the nerve of it.
Her want for literary accomplishment and fame exists in tension with her fear of her own pride and egotism. She knows she is smart and is very much taken with her ain intellect. In another letter to God, after making a joke in the midst of her prayer (her sense of humor forever getting the all-time of her, both in her stories and her letters), she confesses, "I do not mean to exist clever . . . although I do mean to exist clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever and want to be considered so." Though she knows the danger of intellectual pride—like the young girl in her story "The Temple of the Holy Ghost," whose character is essentially a self-portrait—she cannot help but indulge in it and worries about its spiritual consequences. Thus, desire and fear grapple with one some other as O'Connor'southward psychomachia rages on the page, and even every bit the contest takes place, she becomes a more practiced writer.
A second purpose served past the letters is that they filled a void at a time in O'Connor'south life when she found herself a stranger in a strange land, living and writing among people who did not share her faith. In her 2d entry in the Prayer Journal she writes: "I dread, oh Lord, losing my faith. My mind is non stiff. It is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery." When O'Connor went to Iowa, she was, for the first time in her life, surrounded virtually entirely by people who did non share her beliefs. Far from her devout mother and her big extended Catholic family unit, O'Connor struggled with uncertainty and feared she was not strong enough in her faith to withstand the assault fabricated on it past her writer colleagues and the secular university culture. Her messages to God provided her with a new avenue of prayer—something she badly needed considering, in her words, "I take been saying [the traditional prayers I have said all my life] just not feeling them." Engaging in this colloquy with God, however, she confided, "I can feel the warmth of beloved heating me when I think & write this to You." God became a familiar, friend and confidant, rather than a distant impersonal force approachable merely through sanctioned means. O'Connor was charting unknown territory in inventing these prayers—something Catholics of her era were non encouraged to do—and for a while, at least, she reveled in the feel.
A third opportunity the letters gave her was the rare take chances to write from the first-person perspective, something she did non practise in her fiction, and to observe how to create a persona. While it is truthful that O'Connor attempted to exist her unvarnished self in these letters, she was too creating a construct of herself. As Sessions notes in his introduction, these entries are spontaneous, only they are besides revised, betraying the element of witting craft in her writing. They are literary experiments—something O'Connor acknowledges at various times. Near halfway through the journal, she writes: "I take decided this is non much as a directly medium of prayer. Prayer is non even as premeditated as this—it is of the moment & this is besides slow for the moment." In the final entry, she admits that the experiment in communing with God has non worked: "My thoughts are and so far away from God. He might as well have not made me. And the feeling I egg up writing here lasts approximately a one-half 60 minutes and seems a sham." The very quality of this form of prayer she enjoyed so much at first—the feeling it engendered—she at present begins to distrust. In the battle between her intellect and her heart, her intellect gets the upper hand.
While O'Connor may have viewed the prayer experiment as a failure, it was in reality a great success. In creating and inhabiting the varying personae she created—Angry Flannery, Frustrated Flannery, Remorseful Flannery, Grateful Flannery—she was engaging in what Henry James once called "The Histrionic Imagination," effectively training herself for her work as a fiction writer. She was practicing empathy—a virtue that did not come easily to O'Connor. The cultivation of the capacity to see and describe the globe from these varying perspectives would enable her to create characters who were as different from herself as chickens from peacocks. It would enable her to become the racist Ruby-red Turpin she depicts in "Revelation"; the foul-mouthed, tattoo-obsessed O.East. Parker in "Parker's Back"; a selfish old grandmother and a sensitive serial killer in "A Skillful Human is Difficult to Find." These acts of imagination make O'Connor's writing essentially dramatic—in both A Prayer Periodical and her fiction. Thomas Merton, on hearing of her death, compared her to Sophocles—the smashing dramatist—rather than some other fiction author, as she depicted the elemental human struggle between characters who were grand and yet ordinary, true-to-life and somehow larger-than-life.
Writing the Prayer Journal helped O'Connor to abound not simply in her faith but also in her art.
The poet John Keats in one of his letters writes of the two bully models of the artistic imagination in comparing what he calls "The Chameleon Poet" (represented past Shakespeare) and "The Egotistical Sublime" (the kind of poetry pioneered by Wordsworth). Keats aspired to the condition of the Chameleon Poet, envying Shakespeare's ability to become his characters and so thoroughly that he himself disappeared, but he had difficulty accomplishing it. Keats's best poems are those that, like Wordsworth's, focus on himself. But O'Connor was able to imaginatively occupy the condition of the other. And, paradoxically, she achieved this, in part, through her letters to God, which might seem to be exercises in the Egotistical Sublime simply served, ultimately, to teach her how to transcend the self—or, alternately, to write about the self through her characters. "Is there no escape from ourselves? Into something bigger?" she asks in one of the journal entries. The answer provided by her fiction is yeah.
In 1 of her subsequently letters to a friend, O'Connor speaks near the first story she wrote at Iowa, "The Geranium," a tale about an old southerner who goes to live in the conflicting environment of New York City and finds himself miserably homesick for the world he left behind. O'Connor admits that at the time she knew goose egg most New York Urban center, but she did know something nearly homesickness—and since she could not write about herself, the erstwhile human being served as a kind of double for her. O'Connor wrote "The Geranium" around the aforementioned fourth dimension she was writing her letters to God, and the imaginative work she did in composing them helped her to accomplish this.
After nearly 2 years, O'Connor abruptly stopped writing her journal. 1 reason for this is that it had served its purpose. Information technology is instructive that the get-go words of the journal express her distrust of the self—"I do non know you, God, considering I am in the way"—and the last words are these: "At that place is nothing left to say of me." All that needed to be said of young Flannery O'Connor had been said—and it was fourth dimension to turn her total attention to her characters, to pour her self into them and make them come up alive.
The fact that O'Connor'south journal is a form of literary experimentation does not arrive any less genuine. This is, afterwards all, what writers do—find language that leads to a fuller apprehension of our inner and outer weather, as Robert Frost puts it, the ways in which the self is related to the physical world and spiritual creation we inhabit. She moves from the practice of praise, petition and thanksgiving to interrogation and self-castigation, employing a variety of voices and rhetorical modes to arrive at a better understanding of God, herself and her vocation every bit an artist.
Her letters to God led to self-revelation. O'Connor discovered aspects of herself she would rather not. This discovery gave her a sense of relief and permission to move on with her truthful piece of work, the business of writing fiction. Prayer is what Catholics do, and O'Connor prayed in every way she could detect—in church, by her bedside, in her journal and in her stories. All of these avenues gave her admission to the God she so fervently sought and, blessedly, plant.
I Dont Know You God Because I Am in the Way
Source: https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2018/08/08/how-flannery-oconnor-found-her-art-and-her-god-letters
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