Literary / Arts
Flannery O’Connor: The Writer’s Early Letters to God
Volume 28 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: June 30, 2014
In January, 1946, while studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flannery O'Connor began keeping a journal in a ruled Sterling notebook. O'Connor, who had left her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, for Iowa, turned twenty-one in March and had her first short story, “The Geranium,” accepted for publication that month. She was a devout Catholic, and over a year and a half she filled the notebook with a series of entries addressed to God. The following excerpts from her journal chart her thoughts on the subject of faith and prayer, and her hopes for her fiction.
In January, 1946, while studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flannery O'Connor began keeping a journal in a ruled Sterling notebook. O'Connor, who had left her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, for Iowa, turned twenty-one in March and had her first short story, “The Geranium,” accepted for publication that month. She was a devout Catholic, and over a year and a half she filled the notebook with a series of entries addressed to God. The following excerpts from her journal chart her thoughts on the subject of faith and prayer, and her hopes for her fiction.
Dear 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 earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.
I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
I want very much to succeed in the world with what I want to do. I have prayed to You about this with my mind and my nerves on it and strung my nerves into a tension over it and said, “oh God, please,” and “I must, and “please, please.” I have not asked You, I feel, in the right way. Let me henceforth ask You with resignation that not being or meant to be a slacking up in prayer but a less frenzied kind, realizing that the frenzy is caused by an eagerness for what I want and not a spiritual trust. I do not wish to presume. I want to love.
O God please make my mind clear.
Please make it clean.
I ask You for a greater love for my holy Mother and I ask her for a greater love for You.
Please help me to get down under things and find where You are.
I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life, but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You. Please do not let the explanations of the psychologists about this make it turn suddenly cold. My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be.