A Prayer Journal Author: Flannery O'Connor | Language: English | ISBN:
B00DA79Y98 | Format: EPUB
A Prayer Journal Description
“I would like to write a beautiful prayer,” writes the young Flannery O’Connor in this deeply spiritual journal, recently discovered among her papers in Georgia. “There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise.” Written between 1946 and 1947 while O’Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O’Connor’s singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God. “I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You.”
O’Connor could not be more plain about her literary ambition: “Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted,” she writes. Yet she struggles with any trace of self-regard: “Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story.”
As W. A. Sessions, who knew O’Connor, writes in his introduction, it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel, Wise Blood, during the years when she wrote these singularly imaginative meditations. Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O’Connor’s own hand, A PrayerJournal is the record of a brilliant young woman’s coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.
- File Size: 11724 KB
- Print Length: 112 pages
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 12, 2013)
- Sold by: Macmillan
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00DA79Y98
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #38,699 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #18
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Literature & Art - #59
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Christian Living > Prayer - #85
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Leaders & Notable People > Religious
- #18
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Literature & Art - #59
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Christian Living > Prayer - #85
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Leaders & Notable People > Religious
What the prayer journal did for me was to drive me back to my Flannery library and start all over again. I now can read her with a new insight. In Brad Gooch's marvelous biography, I had learned how much her Catholic faith meant to her in that far off place in Iowa, where she was homesick and far from her Savannah roots, where she had, in the words of William Sessions, received from her southern and Catholic world, the view of a coherent universe. Gooch tells us that Flannery told a friend that she was able to go to Mass every single morning while at the Iowa Writers workshop. She went there to Mass for three years and never met a soul, she said, nor any of the priests, but it was not necessary. "As soon as I went in the door I was at home." What I didn't know was how willing she was to take a deep plunge into the depths of Catholicism. It is fitting that William Sessions was the one who brought this hidden journal to us. In the index of "The Habit of Being," the collected letters of Flannery O'Connor, Sessions turns up 28 times. He was a trusted friend and has turned out to be O'Connor's leading expert, among hundreds of scholarly admirers. I will bet you anything Flannery never thought her personal, private journal would see the light of day. I don't think she wore her religion on her sleeve and said one time she didn't even want to be known as a Catholic writer but hoped that she would just be known as a good writer, an honest writer and a real artist. I will bet you also that she would not like to be known as a mystic but she darned sure was. Like Dorothy Day (and they were very much aware of each other), she would have scoffed at the idea of being canonized a saint.
A Prayer Journal Preview
Link
Please Wait...