I say all this to establish that prayer is not some namby-pamby exercise to show ourselves how “good” we are. Prayer is not for the faint of heart. Prayer is meant to rip us apart and (eventually) put us together again as something strange, unexpected, and new. O’Connor knew that Motes’ desperate quest for meaning, his searing existential loneliness, his violent impatience with all that is false and shallow and corrupt, are precisely what make us human.
“If you live today, you breathe in nihilism,” O’Connor observed. “In or out of the Church, it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.” That was in 1955. (Read more.)
A place for friends to meet... with reflections on politics, history, art, music, books, morals, manners, and matters of faith. A blog by Elena Maria Vidal.
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Sunday, March 23, 2014
Flannery O'Connor and the Interior LIfe
From author Heather King:
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