Tuesday, May 27, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Writers
Because of your kindness and truth, you have made great above all things your name and your promise.
Writing to a college student questioning his faith in the new surroundings of a university, Flannery O’Connor wrote to Alfred Corn in 1962 of “an intellectual life which is already running ahead of your lived experience.” Both grew up in small Georgia towns. Both felt overwhelmed by university life made even larger by cities: O’Connor in Iowa City and Corn in Atlanta.
You are just beginning to realize how difficult it is to have faith … about the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do.
Faith is what we have in the absence of knowledge. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories; how incomprehensible must God necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. What kept me a skeptic in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read. If you want your faith, you have to work for it.
By 1962 O’Connor had written and published a novel and many short stories, while at the same time suffering from lupus, which killed her father in 1941, but now kept under control by repeated injections of cortisone. Her bones gradually weakened and she had to get around on crutches. She lived with her mother on the family farm north of Milledgeville and tended to her favorite peacocks, who wandered around among the chickens, geese, and occasional swan. Her mother was in charge of the dairy and the crops.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.
Flannery’s life was simple. Every day she and her mother rose at 6, drove to mass at Milledgeville’s tiny Catholic church at 7, and then upon returning home, after breakfast she climbed the stairs to her study, where she wrote using a manual typewriter for two hours. She worked on her stories. She wrote reviews of religious books (Aquinas, de Chardin, Etienne Gilson, Terèse of Liseaux, Cardinal Newman, Thomas Merton …) for the local church newsletter. And she wrote letters, many many letters, published in two books available today.
When I called you answered me; you built up strength within me. Your right hand saves me, O Lord.
She continued writing to Alfred Corn, who was 19 at the time:
To find out about faith, you have to go to the people who have it and have to go to the more intelligent ones if you are going to stand up intellectually to agnostics and the general run of pagans that you are going to find in the majority of people around you.
I wish I had written to Flannery, and that she had written back to me. In college I had no idea I needed direction, but I certainly did. If I’d known to ask, I had more questions about faith than I had certainty, that’s for sure. She reassured Alfred:
Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism. It will keep you free – not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you.
Miss O’Connor’s first name was Mary. I think that not only for those with whom she corresponded, but also many like me who read those letters now, Mary Flannery O’Connor lit a beacon on the shore, and aimed us toward the lighthouse we were looking for.
The Lord will compete what he has done for me; your kindness, O Lord, endures forever; forsake not the work of your hands.
Try a bit of Flannery today if you have a mind. Here’s a story. And here are a variety of excerpts from essays and book reviews which I found searching on the internet that I compiled in 2012. Amazing.
Be blessed. Again and again.
Your right hand saves me, O Lord.
 (Acts 16, Psalm 138, John 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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