Praying with Flannery

Bishop Robert Barron created Word on Fire’s Pivotal Players film series to highlight men and women who have had a profound impact on the culture and the faith. Amongst doctors of the Church like St. Augustine and St. Catherine of Sienna, Bishop Barron included the 20th century American writer Flannery O’Connor. 

O’Connor’s 100th birthday will be celebrated this year on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25. My family and I made a pilgrimage of sorts in February to her farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Georgia, listening to her stories of grotesque characters and violent grace on the 3-hour drive from Atlanta. I am not qualified to analyze her tales or assess her complicated legacy. Instead, I tried to get close to this enigmatic figure by reading her prayer journal while rocking in a white wicker chair on the front porch of the main house where Flannery spent most of her life. Not far from where I sat were two peacocks who still reside there. O’Connor loved birds. She taught a chicken to walk backwards as a child, and she made Andalusia a home for 40 peacocks at one point.

O’Connor would likely be horrified to know I was reading her prayer journal, and even more horrified to know I was using it as a way to rejuvenate my prayer life, but that’s what it did. 

​O’Connor took Jesus’ words seriously and knocked loudly, asking God to “make me a mystic, immediately!” O’Connor wanted to be recognized as a great Christian writer. “Let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate.” My prayers are timid in comparison. I do not often pray, “Lord, make me a powerful (and famous) preacher of the Gospel” because it smacks of selfish ambition.

 O’Connor wanted to be a fine writer, which she achieved, but she tempered her ambition with genuine humility. “If I ever do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.” O’Connor’s prayer journal includes a line that has become a constant refrain in my own prayers so I remember who I am working for: “Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story.” O’Connor’s sincere humility reshapes her personal ambition into divine service, and this humility is derived from an awareness of sin.

For O’Connor, sin is an enemy that can be conquered but never vanquished; fought and maimed but never killed. She admits that “thoughts awful in their pettiness and selfishness come into my mind even with the Host on my tongue.” Admitting sinful thoughts when receiving Jesus in Communion illuminates her metaphor that “sin is large and stale. You can never finish eating it nor ever digest it.” Sin never satisfies our appetite, and it does not nourish us unless we fast from it. Sin “leads a good many people to God who wouldn’t get there otherwise,” as long as it’s acknowledged. My sins can get me closer to God only when I see and confess them, hence the need to go to Reconciliation frequently.
 
O’Connor prayed for the grace to adore God “with the excitement of the old priests when they sacrificed a lamb to You.” In domesticating Jesus and making him a caricature, we now revere a bloodless crucifixion. Our hygienic and sanitized worship has severed the connection with the life-and-death nature of prayer. When praying, I need to get blood on my hands. I am not advocating a return to hairshirts and self-flagellation, but prayer should not always be a calm and genteel activity for the culturally refined. I’ve got to be deadly serious about prayer. I must stare at the crucifixion long enough to hear Jesus gasping for his last breath.
 
Even though prayer is deadly serious, we must not be afraid to approach God with a sense of humour. ”When I think of all I have to be thankful for I wonder that You don’t just kill me now because You’ve done so much for me already and I haven’t been particularly grateful.” O’Connor’s salty gratitude comes from someone who lost her father to lupus when he was 45, the same painful autoimmune disease that would end her life at the age of 39. Despite these sufferings, O’Connor kept her playful, gallows-like humour, exemplified in her observation that “If we could accurately map heaven, some of our up and coming scientists would begin drawing blueprints for its improvement.” For God’s sake (and my own), I need to lighten up a little.
 
Perhaps the greatest inspiration I take away from Flannery O’Connor in this season of Renewal is committing to a prayer journal for a year where I pour my heart out to God with the same kind of honesty she demonstrated. My new prayer journal begins with her words: ”Help me get down under things and find where You are.” 

To learn more about Flannery O’Connor: 

• Watch “Revelation” from Word on Fire’s Pivotal Players documentary on Flannery O’Connor
  
• Watch Bishop Barron Presents Ethan & Maya Hawke on the making of the biopic “Wildcat.”
  

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Written by Jason Openo for Faithfully. Jason is a permanent diaconate candidate who attends St. Patrick's Parish with his family in Medicine Hat. ​

​Photos credit: Jason Openo.