One cannot get through a Flannery O\u2019Connor story without encountering the strangeness of God. As she said, the greatest dramas involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Her short story \u201cRevelation\u201d startles with its final vision of a field of living fire. The vast hordes of souls rumbling toward heaven, the battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs, are a queerly beautiful sight. And then the words, \u201cIn the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.\u201d Here is a spiritual reality, glorious and disturbing, which my comfortable Christian categories cannot contain.<\/p>\n
Flannery lamented that our secular society understands the religious mind less and less, that people who believe vigorously in Christ are wholly odd to most readers. It becomes more and more difficult in America to make belief believable, yet this is what she wanted to do.<\/p>\n
My husband, Charles, has always been a Flannery O\u2019Connor fan, and he introduced me to her personal correspondence. Flannery\u2019s letters reveal a warm, witty, probing woman\u2014nothing like the stern author I\u2019d imagined from her violent stories. She discusses manuscripts she\u2019s rewriting, the books she\u2019s reading, a funny encounter with the telephone repairman, a promise to send more peacock feathers, news of Cousin Katie, complaints about the \u201cidiot legislature,\u201d and an account of a funeral. Throughout the 596 pages, there is a great deal of theology. Flannery insists that she is not a mystic and does not lead a holy life, yet she unapologetically displays her faith: a life of continually turning away from egocentricity and toward God.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Demanding #Faith<\/a> of Flannery O\u2019Connor. In her writing, O\u2019Connor made belief believable. @CT_women<\/a> here: https:\/\/t.co\/hN7LrhmxLW<\/a>? pic.twitter.com\/udNMMGxwFd<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Melinda V Inman (@MelindaVInman) September 18, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n