This coming Aug. 3 will mark the golden anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s “Passover,” to adopt the biblical image John Paul II used to describe the Christian journey through death to eternal life. In the 50 years since lupus erythematosus claimed her at age 39, O’Connor’s literary genius has been widely celebrated. Then, with the 1979 publication of The Habit of Being, her collected letters, another facet of Miss O’Connor’s genius came into focus: Mary Flannery O’Connor was an exceptionally gifted apologist, an explicator of Catholic faith who combined remarkable insight into the mysteries of the Creed with deep and unsentimental piety, unblinking realism about the Church in its human aspect, puckish humor””and a mordant appreciation of the soul-withering acids of modern secularism.
Miss O’Connor’s sense that ours is an age of nihilism””an age suffering from by a crabbed sourness about the mystery of being itself””makes her an especially apt apologist for today…
[She believed the world’s]…darkness is rendered darker still by late modernity’s refusal to recognize its own deepest need. For as Miss O’Connor put it in a 1957 lecture, “Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.”
“Oh Lord, make me a mystic, immediately.”
–A Prayer Journal
[On the Eucharist] “If it’s a symbol, to hell with it.”
–The Habit of Being
“Naw, I don’t think life is a tragedy. Tragedy is something that can be explained by the professors. Life is the will of God and this cannot be defined by the professors, for which all thanksgiving.” –Letters of Flannery O’Connor
For my money, the greatest American writer since Mark Twain, and no one her equal since. She was an ardent Christian, a fierce defender of the faith who caricatured modern heresies with a shattering wit. If her cause for canonization is not underway, it should be. How would one go about starting such a cause?