The following comes from the Sept. 16 New Yorker magazine, in California mailboxes by the weekend of Sept. 14-15.
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. . . .
To read entire story, click here.
This person seems like a mature soul
One of our great Catholic writers. Then in the nonfiction department, we have Bill Donohue and so many more today, who are striving to stand up for our faith in the midst of a secular culture going mad and imploding on itself in so many ways.
Reading some of the great Catholic novelists of the past, even the recent past, always helps put things in a larger perspective, especially when issues of lasting concern to people of subsequent generations are addressed.
The heart of Flannery O’Conner shows through so well in her writing that she feels like a very good friend off on an extended visit somewhere. I’m betting it’s to heaven.