{"id":2060,"date":"2014-10-12T17:14:37","date_gmt":"2014-10-12T21:14:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/?p=2060"},"modified":"2015-06-05T16:04:29","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T20:04:29","slug":"flannery-o%e2%80%99connor-a-prayer-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/?p=2060","title":{"rendered":"Flannery O\u2019Connor, A Prayer Journal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/flanneryprayerjournal.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-2061\" title=\"flanneryprayerjournal\" src=\"http:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/flanneryprayerjournal-144x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"144\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>When Flannery O\u2019Connor died from lupus at the age of thirty-nine, she had published a modest amount of work \u2014 two novels, 31 short stories, and some essays and reviews. That was more than enough to establish her reputation as one of America\u2019s greatest fiction writers. There have been 200 doctoral dissertations and 70 book length studies of her work, and a recent critical biography by Brad Gooch (2009).<\/p>\n<p>O\u2019Connor was also decidedly Christian. She attended daily mass most of her adult life, and described herself as \u201ca thirteenth century Christian\u201d and \u201chermit novelist.\u201d She read broadly and deeply in Aquinas and other theologians. For her, the craft of her art \u2014 good stories well told \u2014 was an end in itself and a sign of God\u2019s grace. The content of her fiction was her confession of faith: \u201cMy subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.\u201d To those who complained about her grotesque and deeply flawed characters, she insisted that \u201cthere is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/insidejournal.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-2062\" title=\"insidejournal\" src=\"http:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/insidejournal.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"237\" height=\"144\" \/><\/a>When O\u2019Connor was 20-years old, she left her home in the deep south to study at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. While there, she kept a prayer journal from January 1946 until September 1947. The journal demonstrates how early and how strongly she sensed God\u2019s call to a writerly vocation. She prays to be a good writer, and is self-conscious about her talent. Anything good that she writes, she says, comes directly from God as his gift. She confesses her ambition. She worries about mediocrity, as a believer and as a writer, and gets discouraged on both fronts. She frets about atheist hostility to her faith. And so she \u201cstaggers between Despair and Presumption.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>O\u2019Connor\u2019s friend and colleague W.A. Sessions of Georgia State University provides a short introduction. The journal itself is short (pp. 3\u201340), and is followed by a facsimile of the original Sterling Notebook in O\u2019Connor\u2019s own handwriting (pp. 43\u201396). These prayers of consecration and commitment found their fulfillment \u2014 while writing this prayer journal, O\u2019Connor was also working on her first novel, <em>Wise Blood<\/em> (1952).<\/p>\n<p>Reviewed by\u00a0<em>Dan Clendenin, by permission from\u00a0<\/em>Journey with Jesus<em>\u00a0webzine, July 2014<\/em><\/p>\n<div><em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For Flannery O\u2019Connor, the craft of her art \u2014 good stories well told \u2014 was an end in itself and a sign of God\u2019s grace [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2062,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110,13],"tags":[104,131,53,93,105],"class_list":["post-2060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-community","tag-book-review","tag-journal","tag-ministry-2","tag-prayer","tag-spirituality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2060"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2065,"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2060\/revisions\/2065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nationalaltarguildassociation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}