A Prayer Journal, by Flannery O’Connor

When Flannery O’Connor was 20, she was a graduate student at the Iowa School for Writers, almost a thousand miles from her home in Milledgeville, Georgia, and was on her own for the first time in her life. From January 1946 to September of the following year she kept a journal of prayers and musings in what was once a student’s familiar mainstay: a black-and-white composition book. (A facsimile of her handwritten journal is appended to the edited text in this volume.)

In an early entry in this journal O’Connor attempted to define exactly what she was writing. It was not really a prayer journal, she said, because it was too “premeditated.” Nevertheless, she did include God in her thoughts, and she offered frequent fervent prayers. At one point she prayed, “Please let Christian principles permeate my writing and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate.” It is clear from the beginning that this young woman was not writing just for herself, God, and an elite group of writing peers. Her stories were driven by her faith, and she was eager for publication and an audience with ears to hear her wild and violent stories about a world that requires “large and startling pictures” to shatter it into the recognition of God’s grace.

The introduction to this slim volume, written by W. A. Sessions, one of O’Connor’s friends, reveals the penchant of some scholars, and all of O’Connor’s biographers, to minimize the faith aspects of her work as an idiosyncrasy that readers must tolerate in order to get through to the artistry and the humor. For Sessions the experience of faith seems oddly distant. He writes of O’Connor’s early life in Savannah as being permeated by “a series of Catholic rituals and teachings.” One cannot argue with this conclusion, mechanistic as it is, but it omits entirely any place for devotion and “mystery,” which O’Connor vociferously claimed is essential for any Catholic artist. Later Sessions uses dismissive quotation marks as he comments, “She would have to wait patiently in a world of triviality . . . until ‘the Lord’s’ response came.’” For O’Connor the Lord was not a vague concept to be treated ironically with scare quotes. The Lord and his mother were lifeblood itself.