What can a Baptist preacher learn from a female, Roman
Catholic, Southern fiction writer? A lot.
For several years now, I have
enjoyed the writings of Flannery O’Connor. She was born in Savannah, GA in
1925, and lived only 39 years. Her novels and short stories can be dark and
even shocking. Yet, through them all there are threads of truth that resonate
with me and reveal something of O’Connor’s faith, which she took very
seriously.
I recently found a prayer journal
of hers that was discovered after her death and published in 2013. The journal
was written during her time at the University of Iowa, where she studied
writing as a young woman. The handful of handwritten pages reveals a young
woman struggling with who she was and how she related to God. Glimpses of her
inimitable writing style bleed through the private prayers.
There was a particular line that
reminded me of what it is I love about her stories, and also pointed me to a
truth that I needed to hear. At the close of one of her journal entries, she
wrote:
“Give me the grace to be impatient
for the time when I shall see You face to face and need no stimulus than to
adore You. Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of
the places where You are not adored but desecrated.”
Read that paragraph again if you
didn’t quite get it. I read it a few times the first time I came across it.
Flannery knew that while she was in this world she was limited in her ability
to worship God the way she should. She longed for the day when “face to face”,
she would see Christ as He is and worship Him as she should.
She also realized that the world
she lived in was a broken, fallen, and often “barren” and “miserable” place.
What made it so was not simply that sin abounds, though it does. It was not so
much the presence of sin, but the absence of a recognition of God that can make the world such a malignant and miserable place.
That girl was on to something.
When you drive past a crime-ridden,
run-down, drug-infested neighborhood; when you see a horrifying news report
about some heinous crime; when you hear of some new atrocity committed by
terrorists in the Middle East; do you see the real problem with all of that
sin? It is not just that men are doing awful things to one another. Humanity at
its worst is doing something awful to God.
By not glorifying Him as God and “desecrating” Him, rather than “adoring” Him,
men commit the greatest sin.
If the “chief end of man” really is
to glorify God, the chief sin of man is to ignore Him and refuse Him what He is
rightfully due. Flannery O’Connor prayed for grace to see her world that way.
Lord, grant me the same grace.
