RAFAEL PI ROMAN, correspondent: Even at the end of her short life, when it became harder and harder for her to walk, Flannery O’Connor went to Mass nearly every day at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Milledgeville, in central Georgia. She lived with her mother in an old plantation house surrounded by 1500 acres of pasture and woods. In her room after church she would write all morning, facing the back of a tall chest so that she would see no distractions. Her output was not massive—two short novels, two collections of short stories, a number of essays, and a lot of letters. But today many consider her one of America’s greatest writers. Since O’Connor’s death, more than 50 books have been written about her, one of them by Ralph Wood of Baylor University.

PROFESSOR RALPH WOOD (Author of Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South): Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced.  That is an astonishing fact. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickenson, Frost, Stevens: not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. She is a Southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer.

Prof. Ralph Wood

ROMAN: What makes her increasing popularity even more surprising in these secular times is the fact that O’Connor was a self-proclaimed orthodox Catholic whose subject, in her words, was “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”

O’Connor was the only child in a respected and well-off family. She was fascinated by birds of all kinds, and when she was a little girl a newsreel cameraman came down to film a chicken Flannery claimed could walk backwards. Later on, her hobby centered on peacocks, a bird she saw as her personal symbol, according to her biographer, Brad Gooch.

BRAD GOOCH (Author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor): I think she liked it because it was a comic and gawky bird, like herself. It ate her mother’s flowers and kept everyone awake all night, and then at a certain transfigurative moment tails would open, and here was all this beauty which she saw as a symbol of the way her fiction worked, and also in the Middle Ages the peacock was the symbol of Christ and the church so, you know, it all lined up for her and the peacocks.

ROMAN: As a young woman, O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, to the exclusive Yaddo artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, and then to New York City and Connecticut, writing all the way. Then, at the age of 25, she was forced to return home because, like her father before her, she was dying of lupus. It was back in Georgia in the 1950s that she discovered the characters for her stories.

WOOD: Not the cotton belt, not the tobacco belt, but the ugly word the Bible belt, and for O’Connor that was the glory of her region. These were the emarginated people on the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places.

ROMAN: She wrote that her Christ-haunted characters are so cut off from orthodox Catholicism that they don’t have a guide and that they are actually involved in a do-it-yourself religion that is kind of comical, sadly comical.

WOOD: She said, look, these are my brothers and sisters. They are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated gospel, a gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them.  I cannot dismiss them, saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically.

ROMAN: Father Thomas Joseph White is a Dominican priest whose conversion to Catholicism was influenced by O’Conner’s fiction.

FATHER THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, OP (Theology Instructor, Dominican House of Studies): You don’t have baptism, confession, and the Mass, which she says are, you know, the center of her life. You have instead odd and grotesque, historically surprising events where people encounter the grace of God.

ROMAN: From these people her stories emerged. In “Wise Blood” and “The Violent Bear It Away,” and in twenty short stories, she told dark tales of murder and bigotry and madness, of a preacher of the Church without Christ who puts out his own eyes. Some have asked, is this Christian?

WOOD: She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess, but she says there is one and only one quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that is the love of God, and she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

ROMAN: Talk about the importance of grace and mystery in her work.

WOOD: Mystery does not mean for her a kind of a fuzzy, foggy, gooey something or other. It’s a very specific term for her. For her the word mystery means that which is inexhaustible in our knowledge of God, that the deeper we go in understanding who the self-declared, self-revealed God is, the more there is yet to understand, so that the greater our knowledge of God also the greater our ignorance of God, so that we know only a thumbnail of what and who God is.

Brad Gooch

ROMAN: As the civil rights movement changed attitudes and language, O’Connor was sharply criticized for using the N word in her writing.

GOOCH: She couldn’t change that word because that’s the way those people speak.

WOOD: For Flannery O’Connor, race was indeed the curse of the south in the sense that it was the single-most important test which we as white Christians failed. For O’Connor, the mistreatment of black people is a violation of their being creatures made in the image of God.

ROMAN: In recent years, O’Connor has become a favorite not only of writers and scholars but of artists and entertainers of all stripes, including Bruce Springsteen, Bono, the Coen brothers, and even Conan O’Brien and the creators of the hit TV series “Lost.”

Professor Bruce Gentry teaches at O’Conner’s alma mater, Georgia College and State University, and edits the Flannery O’Conner Review.

PROFESSOR BRUCE GENTRY (Editor, Flannery O’Connor Review): She always talks about waking people up to the mystery of the world, and I think that puts her in a position that is similar to a lot of people in popular culture. You know, they want to create something substantial, but they also want to do it for a popular audience.

ROMAN: In the process of writing his biography of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch says he came to admire her discipline and determination, particularly during the final months of her life.

GOOCH: She was staying alive through writing, and you see it at the end of her life, where it becomes a real race with death. She’s working on stories which she keeps under her pillow in the hospital so the doctor won’t take them away from her. She’s editing one story after she’s had last rites. So all of this seems to me a very clear kind of sense that this is what’s keeping her alive, or why she’s alive.

ROMAN: O’Connor’s admirers wonder what her legacy will be in years to come. Some say that will depend on whether future readers will understand a writer who saw “the action of grace in territory held by the devil.”

I’m Rafael Pi Roman for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

Readers coming upon the work of Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) for the first time in this first decade of the 21st century can be forgiven for not immediately recognizing her as a “Catholic novelist.” Many of her original readers in the 1950s and early 1960s did not, on first reading, or even second and third readings, know of O’Connor’s personal Catholic commitment nor read her novels and stories of so-called “backwoods prophets”’ and grotesque Southern Protestant and Pentecostal fundamentalists as exemplifying a particular Catholic sensibility.

Still, readers found O’Connor brutal, broadly brushed stories compelling, and she is well embedded in the canon of both Southern fiction and most “religion and literature’’ reading lists.

But how has she fared over the past half-century?

Revisiting O’Connor after five decades, it still remains difficult to find that Catholic sensibility she and many of her admiring critics insist permeates her work, and other shortcomings—in particular the almost complete absence of attention to race and the civil rights movement that was convulsing her beloved South as she wrote some of her most powerful works—become increasingly apparent with distance. It can even be argued that the signature elements of her style—character as grotesque, gratuitous violence as the bearer of meaning—no longer shock, no longer convince.

O’Connor made her mark as one of the most original and boldest story-tellers of the mid-century South, writing two novels, two major collections of short stories, and a number of other miscellaneous stories and occasional prose. She was also a prolific letter writer and wrote numerous books reviews, principally for Roman Catholic diocesan newspapers. While mining some of the same social milieu as Faulkner—the poverty-stricken, illiterate backwoods and the small town lower-middle-class gentility—O’Connor imbued her stories and novels with religious imagery and themes drawn primarily from a corner of Protestant and Pentecostal fundamentalism, as well as pre-Vatican II Catholicism.

She had a certain contempt for both her time and her audience, believing her present was not only secular but also mired in nihilism, and considering her principal audience to be unbelievers who needed the shock of her paradigmatic and emblematic violence in order to be brought to belief. “My audience is the people who think God is dead,’’ O’Connor wrote in one letter. In her influential essay “The Fiction Writer and His Country,’’ she argued: “The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

O’Connor defended her approach in a 1955 letter complaining about readers who found her powerful and jarring story “A Good Man is Hard to Find’’ brutal and sarcastic for its depiction of the killing of an entire family, including a sleeping baby, by escaped convicts: “The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism.’’

But what she calls “Christian realism” seems more like the judgment of a wrathful God. It is a notion of the human situation so distorted by sin that all understanding of the orthodox Christian conception of humanity created in and retaining the image of God is absent. It was hard then and is equally difficult now for some readers to see grace announced with the point of a gun and a mass murderer as a prophet of God in waiting, or to “be on the lookout,” as O’Connor once told students before reading “A Good Man,” “for such things as the action of grace in the grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies.’’

In any version of Christian realism, dead bodies count; they are not soulless plot appendages. As Joanne Halleran McMullen, in her book “Writing against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O’Connor,’’ has noted, both the central characters in this story are nameless. Neither the grandmother nor the pathological murderer is given a name. The latter, McMullen notes, is called by what he is—The Misfit—not who he is. “He has no Christian name; it is his depravity that has become specifically ‘incarnate’ in O’Connor’s world.” Grace may somehow be operating in the final gestures between the grandmother and The Misfit when she reaches out to touch him but he recoils as if bitten by a snake—a biblical symbol that is the antithesis of grace. But this seems more apparent in O’Connor’s intention than the story’s realization. In her lecture on the story, O’Connor describes The Misfit as a “prophet gone wrong” who, because of the grandmother’s touch, would become “the prophet he was meant to be.’’ But, again, the story as written provides the reader with no clue for understanding The Misfit as a prophet either gone wrong or yet-to-be. Throughout her fiction, O’Connor’s characters seem only faintly realized as human, as people with individualized souls and personalities meriting the author’s or the reader’s sympathy, compassion, or even revulsion.

O’Connor wrote before Vatican II threw open the windows of reform in Catholicism, and it would be understandable if Catholics, or other readers familiar with some of the new, more pastoral accents created by the Second Vatican Council, had difficulty recognizing O’Connor’s Catholicism. But even in the pre-conciliar church, some critics within the faith were quick to denounce O’Connor’s work. Essayist Robert O. Bowen, reviewing “The Violent Bear It Away” in 1961, was fierce: “Neither its content nor its significance is Catholic,’’ he wrote. “Beyond not being Catholic, the novel is distinctly anti-Catholic in being a thorough, point-by-point dramatic argument against Free Will, Redemption, and Divine Justice, among other aspects of Catholic thought.’’ Yet O’Connor read widely in contemporaneous Catholic thought, and much of her book reviewing, albeit mostly brief notices, concerned Catholic theology and doctrine.

To the contemporary reader, O’Connor’s fiction does, indeed, seem to eschew the notion of free will for her characters; they seem to be playing out preordained roles in a cosmic drama of divine anger and judgment. And while there are sacramental elements in her work—at least one story centers on baptism—they appear mostly as ornament, like the comparison of the sun to an elevated host during the Eucharist in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” In part that may be because O’Connor was concerned that her message and meaning not be transparent. While her Catholicism can be veiled, it can also leave her readers confused. In her nonfiction, O’Connor stressed the role of mystery in Catholic doctrine. “The fiction writer presents mystery through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be accounted for by any human formula,’’ she wrote in “The Church and the Fiction Writer.’’ Too often, however, the Mystery became mystification for the reader.

Perhaps O’Connor greatest lapse, and the element that makes her fiction more of a footnote in the history of American literature than work of enduring value, is her total exclusion of the civil rights movement and the religious elements—black Protestants especially, but also white mainline Protestants and Catholics—that fueled it and that were so much a part of the texture of everyday Southern life in the period in which she was writing. It seems a curious omission for a writer of O’Connor’s sensibility, who sought to be attuned to the action of “grace through nature’’ and who boasted of being a Southern writer, a regional writer, to ignore that drama of biblical proportions being played out in her own front yard. It was a drama with many of the same elements—violence, lynching, castration, rape—that she rooted her fiction in. The critic Ralph Wood is most probably correct when he says O’Connor was no racist, but he fails to explain away her ambiguous attitudes toward African Americans and her contemptuous dismissal of efforts, especially by Northern sympathizers and others, to heed the call of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to join in the struggle to dismantle segregation, in some instances by giving up their lives.

“The South is traditionally hostile to outsiders, except on her own terms,’’ O’Connor wrote in “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.’’ “She is traditionally against intruders, foreigners from Chicago or New Jersey, all those who come from afar with moral energy that increases in direct proportion to the distance from home.’’ Apparently O’Connor feared that “moral energy’’ might dilute or undo the racial status quo on which Southern identity depended, believing that only time and history would resolve the race issue. In Wood’s view, racism and segregation were, for O’Connor, “a species belonging to a much deeper and more pernicious genus of evil.’’ If so, it is nowhere evident in her work.

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on John Updike, Walt Whitman, and American religious poems.

One thing that [Flannery O’Connor] always does is seems to cross two wires that don’t usually belong together. There’s a story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” about a character called The Misfit, an escaped con who murders an entire family in the woods in Georgia. But this family is a very funny almost kind of ’50s Disney family, so everyone is laughing through the story. At a certain point two people have now been shot, and The Misfit is spouting nihilist existentialist philosophy, and you start thinking, well, this isn’t funny. I can’t laugh at this. So that kind of queasy moment where you’re not sure, when you have two reactions at once, seems very Flannery O’Connor. She’s done a lot with extreme religious figures and backwoods prophets, and there’s almost an apocalyptic mood and violence to these stories mixed with comedy, and I think that this seems very current, like out of the 24/7 news cycles.

Usually people don’t realize that she’s Catholic. That’s the first reaction. Conan O’Brien wrote his senior essay at Harvard on Flannery O’Connor, and he was being interviewed about it once, and he mentioned that you read these stories and you think they’re by this bitter, drunken old alcoholic guy in Georgia, and then it turns out they’re actually written by this pious woman living with her mother. One way to read these stories is to not get the Catholicism at all. There are only two walk-ons by Catholic priests in these stories. Her real subjects are these kind of Protestant backwoods characters that she saw around her, although she also wanted to then explain that part of her work a lot, so when she started giving lectures and started writing essays, she set out to emphasize or try to frame her own work that way.

I think that she purposefully, almost cannily found a way to make stories that were about God in some way. She started a correspondence with a woman named Betty Hester just because Betty Hester wrote her letters saying these stories were really about God. No one had said that before. But she—unlike, say, a Catholic writer who’s writing about parish life—found a way to make these stories that were entertaining to everyone and yet almost writing on different levels, and if you put it on the stained-glass glasses you could see the whole Catholicism in them.

Her father died of lupus, which she developed later in life herself when she was 15 years old, and there’s one kind of unpublished journal that she kept where you see it’s this teenage Mary Flannery O’Connor writing about the death of her father, and she said that the consciousness of God came upon us like a bullet in the side. It’s very interesting. So she already, as a teenager, made a connection between grace and violence, really, so in a sense, it’s this kind of rattling experience that always brings out the grace in her stories, and I think she had these kind of rattling experiences in being faced with death in her own life that made her connect these two.

Her whole view was almost satiric of modern secular culture, and that basically people weren’t at all tuned in to these issues of grace and the meaning of life, and so she felt that her explanation of these extreme, violent characters was that they would shock people and that you needed to shock people at this point to get their attention.

In some ways O’Connor’s also making fun of herself often. The character Joy-Hulga in the story “Good Country People,” who’s this 30–year-old lady with a PhD or something who’s reading Heidegger on this farm with her mother and has a wooden leg, so in many ways a mirror image of herself, and of course she’s always making fun of that kind of intellectual pretension and the college girl and the over-intellectual woman, and there’s some of O’Connor always in that, so she’s making fun of people and she’s puncturing everyone, but finally you feel, thankfully, that it’s also herself that she’s making fun of.

She grew up in Savannah’s Irish Catholic community, but this was very much a subset of a subset in the South. Especially at a certain point, when they moved to Milledgeville in the middle of Georgia, Catholics were very rare. It was the Protestant South. And so early on she was almost figuring she was an outsider, figuring out how to get over to people, and certainly humor worked for her. She taught a chicken to walk backwards when she was a little girl. She walked chickens dressed in bowties down the streets in Milledgeville on a leash. So early on she was trying to bridge this, in a way, and I think that in her work there she went for very startling and extreme kinds of characters to get across in that way.

Incomprehension was this joke to her. She almost took pleasure in it. In a certain sense she needed to be misunderstood by this culture for all of her arguments and criticisms to make sense. She also said at a certain point that she would give up 100 readers in the present for one reader in 100 years. So this is also someone who is trying to get across to the ages and to posterity, so she had a very weirdly confident sense of her own talent and genius, too.

She used [the word “mystery”] sometimes when talking about her lupus, and I think that this kind of autoimmune disease that would come and rise and fall and no one ever understood exactly what it was, meant that she was living with a kind of mystery about her own mortality. But she also came then to see religion as mystery. Her understanding of God and the world had to do with mystery, and then fiction was a way of delving into mystery. So instead of trying to explain things she would write a story, and so she sort of felt that fiction, because it was capturing this world that she was so good at recording almost by the way that things looked and the comedy of people’s speech patterns, somehow that full view of the world gave people more of a sense of recognition, I think.

The way mystery practically worked out in her stories was that she wrote every morning for three hours, invariably seven days a week, and that she never knew where a story was going. A friend of hers, Robie Macauley, said that she was a demon rewriter, and this was because she kept sort of working through material and then she would hit a dead end and then she would go in another direction or she would reuse something in a novel later. I think that’s a very particular way of working, almost poetic way of working on a story. She even said in “Good Country People” that the reason the reader gets a shock at the end when the Bible salesman steals the wooden leg of Joy-Hulga in the hayloft is because she didn’t know that that was going to happen until about five lines before she wrote it. Because the writer got a shock the reader gets a shock, and I think that becomes part of her way of exploring mystery through the imagination.

What she meant by manners was just the way people behave. I mean she spent most of her time observing, so she was extremely quiet. She had lunch every day with her mother in a restaurant in Milledgeville, and her mother would sit out and talk to people. Flannery would say nothing, but she would listen. She would sometimes get her mother to start conversations at the gas station with the attendant, so she had a great ear for the way people spoke. She was also a painter. Everyone doesn’t realize that, and she would spend time painting the farm also as a way to learn to look. So I think in that way she was recording what people do in this kind of manners and etiquette of life, and somehow the more she did these kind of caricatures the more it also points to what’s behind them.

I think she was very true to her material in having these highly functioning eyes and ears, and at the same time always would give a sense of something breaking through, and it always does. This annoying grandmother character who says she wanted to wear a hat and white gloves on the family vacation so if there was an accident and anyone found her on the road they would know that she was a lady, so that’s the ultimate send-up of manners in a way. And yet the grandmother at a certain point, when faced with the rifle, finally sees The Misfit is her own son and sort of breaks through that, so I think that kind of tension is key to O’Connor’s work.

She got in trouble early on at the Iowa writer’s school for the use of the N word in stories, and this has kind of shadowed her career always in a sense. But her point at that time was that she couldn’t change that word because that’s the way those people speak. So partly it’s staying true. In a way, what we would almost call unpolitically correct at the moment is where she would almost put on blinders and just went for what was really there and worried about reaction later.

There’s some “South Park” in Flannery O’Connor, but she made fun of everything. She was an equal-opportunity satirist in that way, but I do think satirists are often utopian in a way, like Waugh and Swift, and she had some of that, that Catholic sensibility of a perfect world and a heaven and things only made the comedy and the violence and the grotesque more obvious.

She was very aware of Southern issues. In another way she would also say, when people tried to label her as a Southern writer, well, the South is really just an accent, and I think that’s true. She’s obviously a universal writer. You don’t say that Chekhov is only for Russians—and O’Connor has that, but you know it’s definitely set in a place and she was a great proponent of that, the local, the regional, that a writer works from the world that’s around them. Partly, I think, again, it was her making the best of her situation. I mean, she did seem to be planning on a life in the north. She’d gone to Yaddo, she lived a little bit in Manhattan, she was at the Iowa writer’s school. She was really forced home because of her disease, but there she found her material, really, so it was this kind of prodigal daughter story. She found this great gift by coming home, and she certainly became its great hero and proponent from that point on.

My intuition is that she found her material by being forced home, and when she went to live on the dairy farm with her mother in the middle of Georgia, in those first six months she wrote three stories—“The River,” “The Life You Save May be Your Own,” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” that are the three kind of classic, trademark, signature Flannery O’Connor stories, so she obviously looked around her and suddenly found all these people no one was writing about, and that she had a great talent to write about them and realized that, and so that would not have happened, and so the idea of her being another southern writer living in New York City—I don’t know what she would have done, but certainly none of these great stories that we think of as O’Connor would be possible.

Surprisingly, O’Connor was writing about black characters in high school in stories and fiction, which no young southern lady did. She said that she became an integrationist when she was taking the bus to Atlanta to go to the Iowa writer’s school in 1946. She then had a black woman friend in graduate school, and her mother told her that wasn’t appropriate, and she refused to go along for that. She voted for Adlai Stevenson and for John F Kennedy, who in the south then were very much associated with integration. But what happened then in the late ’50s and the early ’60s when the civil rights movement became politically correct in a sense and you had people coming from the north to the south, then she sort of went in reverse and at first she didn’t like the idea of people from the north coming and preaching to the people of the south about what to do. Now obviously these are all excuses—Faulkner said the same thing—to slow things down, in retrospect, but she didn’t like a kind of sanctimony about the movement, and so she started making fun of it, and there are unpublished letters to a friend where she then became a connoisseur of these race jokes which sound horrible when you read them now, and she’s like challenging her own redneck characters sometimes, and you can’t tell like where’s the real Flannery O’Connor, and certainly there’s not great empathy there. But it’s complex.

I think the person who described her as a cultural racist was a Trappist monk who’s still in a monastery in Georgia that she used to visit, and he said there was no doubt that—I mean O’Connor never questioned that all, even black people and all races, had shared the blood of Christ in that way, he said. But she could also channel this southern attitude, half herself, half in making fun of it, and so that’s, I think, what he meant by cultural racism. Robert Giroux, her publisher, said to me that Flannery was too intelligent to be racist, and there is an aspect to that. I mean it wasn’t pure prejudice, but in another way she was a little too finely protective of her material and her culture.

She was a great reader of theology. One of the surprises to me was when I went to Milledgeville and saw her library was vast. It’s probably one of the more important collections of 20th-century theology in America, so she loved reading theology. She used to read Thomas Aquinas for 15 minutes before she went to bed. She ssaid reading theology made her fiction bolder. She also became the reviewer for the Atlanta diocese magazine, and she would review a lot of works of theology. I think it was partly to get free copies of all the books. But she was annoyed that the Protestant theologians were a lot more interesting. She had to go back to Aquinas and she wanted a Catholic theologian. I think part of Teilhard to her—and she said literally he was the new Thomas Aquinas for the 20th century, so she was almost looking for him, and she was attracted to this cosmic vision that he had. She was attracted to his language. It was very poetic and almost an unlikely pairing, because Teilhard was then accused of heresy because there was no place for sin in his work, but O’Connor’s stories are all about sin.

Since he was a paleontologist and he worked with discovering the Peking Man in China, basically Darwinian evolution was also spiritual and that the people are moving eventually towards creating the body of Christ through television and media and all of these ways that they are becoming connected, so a very visionary, poetic view, and that had some kind of appeal for her. Finally, of course, all of this became practical in the craft of fiction for O’Connor. She wrote a story, “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” which is a phrase taken out of Teilhard, so there were certain ways in which it comes into her work in that sense, I think.

She’s always trying to say four things in one sentence. When O’Connor went to Iowa City she was actually disturbed at first, she was writing these early stories of “Wise Blood,” the beginning of the novel “Wise Blood,” which opens with Hazel Motes seeing the number for a house of prostitution on the men’s room wall and going off and spending a night with the madam while leaving his tall preacher’s hat on the bed, this kind of comic scene. But she was worried a little how this Catholic girl could be writing such fiction, and she went to see the local priest, and the local priest said to her you don’t need to write for 15-year-old girls. So we can be thankful for that, but then she developed and needed even more of a kind of theological underpinning for this, and she found it in Jacques Maritain, who was doing translations of Thomas Aquinas at the time. These translations were very important for a lot of intellectual conversions at that moment in the late ’40s of people who were friends or acquaintances of hers, Thomas Merton, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Carolyn Gordon. O’Connor herself, though, was a cradle Catholic. Aquinas had this idea that an artist wasn’t a moral function like being a priest, that it was a creative function or a craft function, so for the artist, the way in which they showed devotion was by writing the best possible story, and this kind of freed her up. She said good news, you don’t have to be a good person to be a good writer, and in a way that’s what she’s saying, that she has this gift and that therefore following through on this gift becomes an act of devotion. These kinds of comments get people to laugh and are pretty folksy, but O’Connor has another reverberation going on in her own head, and writing her biography you start getting more aware of those reverberations.

[O’Connor and Merton] knew each other by proxy. They were both published by Robert Giroux. O’Connor was first brought into Giroux’s office by Robert Lowell, and Giroux told me, actually, that he knew right then he wanted to sign her up, and he knew that she would be a great writer. I said, well, did you read anything that she had written? And he said no, I could just tell from her demeanor that she would do whatever it took—interesting publishing intuition, but he just published “The Seven Storey Mountain,” and this was a big bestselling book at the time, so O’Connor asked for a copy of “The Seven Storey Mountain,” and then Giroux would go visit his writers at certain times, and he went first to see Thomas Merton who was in Gethsemani, and then Merton, who was an admirer of O’Connor’s, gave a book to go to her, and then she, I think, sent him a peacock feather at a certain point, so they had that sort of back and forth. They were very interested in each other. When O’Connor died, Merton wrote very high praise about how when you think of O’Connor you don’t think of Faulkner or Katherine Ann Porter, you think of Sophocles. I don’t know how much it was in reverse, with O’Connor’s enthusiasm for Teilhard. She never quite went around recommending Thomas Merton to people. I mentioned that to Robert Giroux ,and he thought that was interesting and hadn’t thought of it, but there is some truth there. Merton was an early kind of political left sort of thinker and definitely ahead of her curve on some of that, although she also at the same time he was starting to translate the desert fathers, she was working on a third novel that is unfinished, which relied a lot on the desert fathers, so she seemed to be like Merton, moving towards a kind of more global Vatican II view of Catholicism.

She really liked European Catholic writers, like Francois Mauriac or Waugh or James Joyce. She liked Gogol a lot, which you can see, this sort of exaggerated, grotesque characters. I think she was actually much more influenced by Faulkner than she liked to let on. She had a kind of anxiety of influence going on there with him, so she would say, well, her one-cylinder syntax could never have matched Faulkner, or that when the Dixie Limited is roaring down the track you get your little buggy out of the way, with the Dixie Limited being Faulkner. But, actually, in her library you find that she had every book by him and had read them earlier on than she claimed that she had, so I think he is a kind of big influence.

Francois Mauriac

Actually, one of the few writers that she mentioned was Nathanael West, who wrote “Miss Lonely Hearts,” which is funny, again, offbeat dark humor about an advice columnist who becomes a kind of Christ figure in a certain way. Edgar Allen Poe was a big influence on her, especially early on. She read Edgar Allen Poe when she was 12 and 15 and 17 and you can see later she especially liked the humorous tales of Edgar Allen Poe. There’s one story called “The Man Who Was Used Up,” where a kind of fashionable socialite goes home to his apartment. Someone trails him and looks through the window, and he comes home and sort of takes out his teeth, which are fake, and his eyes, which are fake, and he has a fake arm on and things, and you can see that in “Good Country People” with the unscrewing of the wooden leg, so she liked that kind of grotesque character. More serious later was Nathaniel Hawthorne. She said that she was of the lineage of Nathaniel Hawthorne, you know, the way that he had a kind of dark grotesque that could also have a moral quality to it, so I think “Young Goodman Brown” is an influence on “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” In fact, you can hear Goodman and good man in those titles, and that story about going into the woods and meeting the devil is really what happens in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” going into the woods and meeting The Misfit. So she had those models. At the same time, she didn’t really like to be called gothic or southern gothic, and she didn’t really like labels at all, so in that way if you called her gothic she’d say she was grotesque; if you said she was grotesque then she’d say she’s gothic. But I think that kind of lineage, this dark comic sensibility she really liked. She was interested in not just Poe but the humorous tales of Poe, so when you get those together you get more of O’Connor than you might get elsewhere.

I think Robert Lowell’s influence on O’Connor is huge, and he became the surprise to me in the book, and a secret hero of it. I actually have my own private theory that I presented lightly in the biography that he was the model for Hazel Motes, because Lowell was going through his conversion, he’d been converted to Catholicism, he was lapsed, and now was on his way back into the church. He was kind of canonizing her, so she became Saint Flannery to him, so he was putting those categories onto her, but at the same time you had someone who was struggling like Hazel Motes, an extreme character, between non-belief and belief, so possibly that way. At the time that she was in Yaddo she had trouble with her publishers. She’d gotten a fellowship to write “Wise Blood” while she was at Iowa, and the publisher didn’t like the first draft and was kind of pushing her towards a more conventional novel and a more commercial novel, and Lowell was kind of bolstering her about going for, I think, the high road of art a little bit more, and also he was the one who really saw in her, almost, his interest in her faith, in religion and Catholicism, partly maybe enhanced her own sense of it, and I think he really encouraged that in her, so they both became kind of interested in medieval saints lives and things like that and spent Christmas Eve listening to Gregorian chant and Mass on records that Lowell had. So I think part of that really encouraged her medievalism. At that point at Yaddo she’d told someone she was a 13th-century Catholic. You can see all of that in “Wise Blood.” And also most practically Lowell introduced her to everyone who became important in her future life and career. He introduced her to Robert Giroux, her publisher, he introduced her to Sally Fitzgerald and her husband Robert Fitzgerald, the poet and translator, and she went to live with them for a year-and-a-half. So I think that he had this galvanizing influence on her, and she did say later in a rare moment in a letter that he was one person she really loved. I asked Robert Giroux if she was in love with him, and he said no, I think she was infatuated with him, and that’s a good kind of answer, but she did tend to like certain men who were larger than life and movie-star handsome in the way that her father had been, and I think Lowell had some of that, and Robie Macauley had some of that in Iowa, but I think it was a marriage of true minds between those two, and he was infatuated with that aspect of her.

Besides the Lowell infatuation I think that there was one person, Eric Langkjaer, who’s still alive, who I spoke with in Copenhagen, who was very helpful, sent me all the letters that O’Connor had written to him. He was a college textbook salesman, he had been to Princeton, he was working for Harcourt, and he was in the south and became introduced by a professor at Georgia College because she was a local author. He became, like Lowell, interested in her mind, I think, and they liked to discuss religion and theology, and she definitely, I would say, had this romantic interest in him, and also he got her off the farm. He would take her for rides, like dates that they went on. One culminated in a kiss, so there was definitely a romantic aspect to this, and Langkjaer then went for the summer to Europe, and there are these letters back and forth, one from O’Connor which she wrote at the bottom, if you were here we would talk for hundreds of hours on the porch, which crosses in the mail with one from him saying that he’s engaged to be married. So that was this crunch moment for her, because it was also the moment when she was moving towards first using a cane, and I think it was almost a last opportunity in that sense. But O’Connor being O’Connor, she got a kind of revenge. She wrote the story “Good Country People,” and the main character is this Bible salesman, and actually Eric Langkjaer, they used to joke and call his catalogue for college textbooks “the Bible,” and so the way in which he seduces almost the invulnerable Joy-Hulga and makes off with her wooden leg becomes a tale of vulnerability and intimacy, so she got revenge. She was never a victim. I mean, that’s the great thing about O’Connor. Sometimes writing about someone who died when she was 39 and seemed to have a constricted life might seem that it would be sad, but it wasn’t, because she was so indomitable in that way and because she had this sense of humor and she would just turn everything around. I could write about her being in the hospital at the end of her life, and she was just so funny about the nurses that there’s always something buoyant there.

Obviously her illness influenced the writing, and she was very private. She wasn’t comfortable, really, with too much gossip about her. She wasn’t comfortable with photographs of her particularly, but the Flannery O’Connor stories that we know and think of as O’Connor stories she started writing after she returned home to live with her mother, which also meant after she accepted and knew that she had lupus, actually, because for about a year-and-a-half her mother told her that she had rheumatoid arthritis, and she was still thinking about moving back to the north, and she went on a kind of vacation visit with the Fitzgeralds, and Sally Fitzgerald decided to tell her that she didn’t have rheumatoid arthritis, she had lupus, and she said, well, that’s good, I thought I had lupus and I thought I was going crazy. I’d rather be sick than crazy. Classic O’Connor humor at an incredible moment. But she moves home, and Sally Fitzgerald said that she began writing “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” when she herself began to face the other end of a rifle, in a sense. I mean her work becomes not just about the south and these people around her, but also about death, and I think you had to see that that moved her into the zone of writing that she hadn’t been in, and I also think that there’s an aspect there of magical thinking to her writing, that she really somehow felt that writing was keeping her alive. Her father died very quickly of lupus, so her own expectation was that it could be some very quick thing, I mean 6 months. She was actually then one of the early people on cortisone, and that kept her alive for these extra, really, 13 years while also causing her bones to break down, and I think very much that she was staying alive through writing, and you see it at the end of her life, where it becomes a real race with death, and she’s trying to finish this second collection of stories. She’s working on stories she keeps under her pillow in the hospital so the doctor won’t take them away from her. She’s editing one story after she’s had last rites, so all of this seems to me a very clear kind of sense that this is what’s keeping her alive, or why she’s alive. I mean she was definitely a woman on a mission in that sense. There’s a sense of mission behind her work, even if it’s not preachy and moralistic in that way, and I think that that’s all connected with lupus and death.

O’Connor often has these caricatures of her mother in her stories. In “Greenleaf” Mrs. May is probably the closest to Regina, and she’s gored by a bull in the end of that story. So these mothers who look like Regina often don’t come to happy ends. One of them is shot in the comforts of home. A friend of hers said, “You should be brought up on charges of matricide. What does she think when she reads them?” And O’Connor said, “Oh, she don’t read none of them,” so obviously a testy relationship, and I mean Regina O’Connor was tough. She was running a business on her own. There was something indomitable about her, but what can sometimes be missed is that first of all she was very caring and loving towards her only daughter and was really making this whole environment of this dairy farm possible for her, and they moved there really when O’Connor moved back home so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs, and soon after O’Connor’s death her mother moved back into town. So she basically got a whole dairy farm in operation, providing her daughter with material. I don’t know if she’s thinking of that. Robie Macauley, who was a novelist who knew O’Connor in Iowa, said the sense was that Regina was a tyrant, but a beloved tyrant, so I think you get both in O’Connor, the humor about Regina. At one point [O’Connor] said to Sally Fitzgerald, on a trip to Lourdes, her only trip outside the country she took with her mother, they were riding on a train and she said, “I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to my mother,” so there’s a sense in which she also was dependent on her. They came to some détente. Flannery had her writing time, and that was sacrosanct, at her desk, and the rest of the time she was willing to compromise.

I actually thought of [O’Connor] as reclusive and Emily Dickinson-like. Actually, she turned out to be having this very full life. She wrote letters every day, 3 or 4 letters. If anyone, if a reader wrote to her she would always answer them. During the afternoons, after writing in the mornings, she would have guests come on her back porch and talk to them, and she’d become somewhat of a cult figure, so driving up could be the poet James Dickey or Faulkner’s translator. She also had this, really, madness to explain her work and gave over 60 talks and lectures across America, often on crutches, going to Notre Dame or the University of Chicago or Smith. So all that is pretty active, but interestingly, the work, too, had a lot of life in it. I wrote one other biography, of the poet Frank O’Hara. He described his work as deep gossip, and everyone kind of got that. His poems were about his friends, about art openings, and kind of busy New York cosmopolitan life, but [O’Connor] had a lot of deep gossip in her work also. She would take names from the Milledgeville phonebook, like Tom T. Shiflet. The story “The Displaced Person”—the Guizac family was a displaced Polish family who had come to work on a farm, the Matysiak family who came to work on their farm, and I talked to Al Matysiak, the son, who is still alive and living in Milledgeville and has never read the story. So on the farm that all these stories take place on is a kind of photograph of Andalusia, and besides these inside jokes about her mother and her friends who would show up sometimes as characters in these stories she was also, again, taking on issues of the time, topical issues. She wrote “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” which is this kind of interracial ballet taking place on a newly integrated bus in the south. The year that Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech, which was televised, she wrote “Revelation,” which has its own kind of trip to the mountaintop visionary ending, although her mountain is purgatory, so she also corrects in a certain way MLK. And religion, big time, she takes on in her work, and the changing south. I mean, she was a writer of the south, but Faulkner was a writer of the Old South. She was maybe the first writer of the New South, which is the Atlanta New South and the south of cars and people actually being displaced from the farms, I think, to the cities, in the way we see Hazel Motes kind of wandering around through half-empty southern towns and abandoned farms.

The letters are interesting. First of all, you get the gossip of daily life. You have thoughts about art, theology, literature. You don’t get confessional presence necessarily, and you don’t ever hear a complaint, and when you then realize what’s going on with her life, medically especially, it’s slightly amazing what she can turn into a joke. She wrote in one of those letters there won’t be any biographies of me for the simple reason that life lived between the house and the chicken yard here doesn’t make exciting copy. But she’s keeping carbon copies of every letter that she’s sent, and when she did go abroad on a trip to Lourdes she wrote up a will and put Robert Fitzgerald in charge of these letters if something were to happen, so I do think that she did see them and was aware somehow that she was putting in these letters also thoughts about art, theology, and things that people would like to read. In fact, her early letters to the woman who is called “A” in that collection we later found out was Betty Hester. Although one woman was living in Atlanta and the other in Milledgeville, 90 miles apart, they didn’t meet, and in a way those letters are almost the most interesting. They’re like the letters to a young poet. O’Connor is using this occasion to explain to this sympathetic reader how she sees literature and theology, and she’s also trying to convert her. At a certain point Betty Hester then becomes Catholic, so it’s a kind of theological version of these letters to a young Catholic a little bit in them. I think [O’Connor] is one of the great apologists for Roman Catholicism in the 20th century, and this is probably because she’s trying to get Betty Hester to see what she sees in Catholicism in those letters.

I went into the project pretty clear-eyed, which was expecting this prickly personality, and I didn’t entirely agree with all of her politics and things, so I didn’t have that biographer’s being in love with your subject and then being let down or disillusioned, and indeed it worked a bit in reverse, so that by the time I finished the biography, especially in writing about those last months of O’Connor’s life, where she’s kind of in a race with death to finish these stories, you just can’t help but so much admire her discipline and courage, that in a way she became a more profound character than I expected, and I became a more sympathetic and empathetic with her life.

If she’s a saint she’s definitely a medieval saint, not a 19th-century saint, because she’s an extreme character and cranky and has a kind of W.C. Fields sensibility about those kinds of things, but one who can speak to us because she’s not saccharine, she’s not moralistic, but she has this kind of consciousness that goes with it that makes her, if anything, a postmodern saint.

O’Connor’s absolutely a great American writer and especially a great American short story writer. Robert Giroux told me that when he got “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in the mail from her, the first draft, and he took it home with his papers from work and read it that night, he thought this is as great as “Bartleby the Scrivener,” I mean a classic American story. When you read an O’Connor story, it continues to have some powerful effect. It has this kind of tug on your heart. I mean there’s something very grounding about those stories and disturbing about them, so they have powerful effects. I think part of why we’re drawn to them is no one can exactly, finally label what that effect is or solve the riddle of those stories, and her personality—I think that’s why we keep coming back to her. I think people have an expectation sometimes that I’m supposed to explain this story forever, or I’m supposed to explain O’Connor with one kind of psychological key, but she retains mystery herself and retains paradox. But that’s her fascination and the fascination of those stories.

Surprisingly, she never wrote about her Lourdes experience. She was forced into going to Lourdes by her cousin, Katie Seemes, a kind of wealthy older woman who had lived next to the family in Savannah and had decided to put up the money for this trip. Remember O’Connor was now on crutches and had lupus, so there was a cure kind of motivation there, I think. So she went with her mother, and she was resisting it. At the same time there was an obvious kind of fascination that she had. She talked about it with Katherine Ann Porter, and there she was very positive about doing this. Having written this biography, one thing that’s had a big influence on me is this “what would O’Connor think of this?” is constantly with me. You know, I’m like, on unlikely occasions, “what would O’Connor think of Madmen?” In Lourdes she said that she was someone who would rather die for her religion than take a bath for it, which means that she didn’t really want to go into the waters. She did finally and said that she didn’t pray for her bones, she prayed for her novel. She had her own take on this. It is interesting that she didn’t write about it, and it points to that she had a very strong sense of her material and she would write about that, that in a way when she tried to write about other kinds of material, it didn’t really work. People were meant to write about what they were meant to write about, and the Lourdes experience—she wasn’t a memoirist or a particularly confessional writer in that way, but she did come back from that trip and get to work on “The Violent Bear It Away” and had a kind of gust of energy for that, and that’s a novel in which, it just occurred to me now, where there’s this kind of baptism that involves a drowning and things, so the whole fear of getting in the water in that way might have reverberated in that book.

Robert Lowell

I’m very drawn to the novelistic biography, where you really, like in a 19th century novel, get a sense of someone from birth till death. You keep their pulse alive on every page as much as possible, and you have mixed with this all these facts and all this information that we love. And so in a certain way that allows room for a more complex and mysterious person, and I think that people’s lives are more complex than fiction, so biography is great in trying to reconcile all this. I open with a prologue called “Walking Backward,” and it’s a story, first, of O’Connor at five or six years old trying to teach her chicken to walk backwards and this being filmed by Pathe newsreel company who comes to Savannah to film this. The archive still exists. O’Connor, in a rare essay, “King of the Birds,” wrote about this. It was a rare example of confession and memoir and meditation on herself, and why she’d been so, she called it, marked for life by this experience, partly a joke on her own fame, in a sense. But she did talk about it often. She liked to tell the story of the chicken walking backwards to Robert Lowell and people later on, and I do think, though ,that if I had to pick one kind of trait, the contrariness of O’Connor explains a lot, so in a sense while I was leaving it open to hopefully capture the mystery and complexity of her life, I also started by pointing out contrariness. She was working counter-clockwise to the culture, writing stories with religious messages in a kind of secular culture. The way she lived her life, it was all contrary. When I mentioned race before, that she almost developed backwards, that she was in favor of integration when it was shocking to everyone in town in 1948, and when it became more popular in the early ’60s then she was suddenly against it. So in that way I did have certain interpretations of her that go through, like leitmotifs.

There’s a lot of significance to the peacocks, and it’s become her logo. It’s on the cover of my book. It’s often associated with O’Connor. I do think the key to the peacock is a little bit of the chicken walking backwards. She said it herself: whatever that was all about, actually it led to my peacocks. In her life, when she returned to the south and comes to live with her mother on the dairy farm, two things happen. She starts writing these great stories, and she orders her first peacock, and she’d never actually seen a peacock. By the end of her life she had 39 peacocks, which would, at least twice in the correspondence, they would all open their tails simultaneously, she said. These tails were a map of the universe, so there’s great beauty, and so she was obviously a great pattern-maker in her fiction. The last story that she wrote, “Judgment Day,” was a retelling of the first story, “The Geranium,” that she had published in Iowa. But also in her life she was sending messages and living by design, and so the peacock becomes her self-chosen kind of a symbol, and I think she liked it because it was a comic and gawky bird, like herself. It ate her mother’s flowers and kept everyone awake all night, and then at a certain transfigurative moment tails would open, and here’s all this beauty, which she saw as a symbol of the way her fiction worked, and also in the Middle Ages the peacock was a symbol of Christ in the church, so it all lined up for her in the peacocks.

I had the great good fortune of going to a small Texas university called East Texas State College, and there I had the extraordinarily great gift of having had a Roman Catholic major professor in English, and he taught us all the great literary texts of both the American and English traditions. But during my senior year of 1962-1963, he brought Flannery O’Connor to our campus, her only Texas visit—1962. She would die two years later in 1964 of lupus at the age of 39. And in those days every single undergraduate at this little college was required to read A Good Man is Hard to Find, that collection of her first short stories from 1955, and I was just overwhelmed. I was struck by something really strange, something really odd, something also very hilariously funny, and something that took my own world of rural east Texas, small-town east Texas, not sophisticated, not cultured, but turned it into art of the greatest, highest kind. But it was also very deeply Christian, comic-Christian and southern in ways that in some sense defined me, and I said to myself, if I can spend the rest of my life trying to fathom a writer like Flannery O’Connor and other writers like her, I’d have my calling, and that’s how it’s turned out to be, thanks to this one professor at this one small state school.

[Her work] can be appreciated, it can be read as a kind of document of its times, it can be read as an illustration of what a southern kind of literature of the 1950s would have looked like, but it can’t be really comprehended in the sense of grasped in all of its fullness apart from her Catholic Christianity. She said if I did not see through the lenses of my faith I’d have nothing to see. I’d have nothing to say. So quite literally there would be no Flannery O’Connor without her profound, life-centering faith in the Catholic Church and the Catholic tradition and the Gospel. You don’t have to have Christianity to understand Shakespeare, although it would help you understand a great deal of Shakespeare, but if you don’t understand O’Connor in the light of her faith, you really don’t understand her. You misunderstand her.

There can be a kind of reductionism and too quick reading of her in Christian terms. She, by the way, did not want to be known as a Catholic writer; she wanted to be known as a writer, that is to say as a woman whose work had its own excellence, that could stand on its own legs, that did not have to be propped up with the crutches of her faith as if it would crumble without it, so in that sense she is not a Catholic writer, and those that say there’s more to her than simply finding Christ figures—there really are almost none, or of tracing down Christian themes—is to misread her, I think they have a point, and she would agree to that point insofar as she said this: remember that reading literature is not like algebra, it is not a matter of finding x, that is to say the kind of extractable meaning that you can lift out of the text—that’s an Enlightenment notion by the way. Instead, she said once you find x you can forget it. A literary text is the embodiment of a whole way of experiencing the world, and therefore it’s going to have depth after depth, layer after layer, but for O’Connor there is nothing larger than the Gospel, nothing larger than the faith, so that those who say you must not reduce her to her faith are engaged in a fundamental category mistake. When you’ve got, as the Book of Colossians says, Christ present in the presence of the cosmos, then in a real sense the Gospel is larger than the universe, so there’s nothing outside it, grander than it, larger than it, and therefore she could encompass all that counts against it. There’s nihilism running rife through her stories. If you don’t pick up that nihilism, you’ve missed it. If you make a kind of sweet, easy Christian reading of her, you’ve missed it. But you can’t get to the core of her apart from her Christianity.

She wrote two novels, two collections of short stories, one collection of essays, and of course her very important collected letters called The Habit of Being, but out of that small body of work grew a kind of presence that simply cannot be exorcised. You cannot get rid of her, because when you read her you know that no one else could have written that work. In fact, Evelyn Waugh, not knowing that Flannery was a woman, said of her what he thought was something very complimentary but was in a certain way an insult, he said no woman could have written this work. Now Waugh of course got it really wrong, but his point was there’s something strange, spare, odd, alarming, troubling, but above all unforgettable about her. You cannot walk away from these stories saying, well, I’ve got O’Connor down, I’ll move on to something else, and so people keep returning to her. There are more than 50 books written on O’Connor now. She was the second writer in the Library of America series from the 20th century to be included. Faulkner was the first. That’s remarkable, that the second writer in that whole important series from the 20th century was Flannery O’Connor. So there’s something that’s perduring, lasting about her that’s just not going to go away.

The assumption made by most of her readers in the early ’50s when she came into print was that here we have another H.L. Mencken, here we have another Sinclair Lewis, here we have a sophisticate, and above all a Catholic sophisticate, making fun of these dumb, backwoods, benighted, backward fundamentalists who are screaming “Jesus saves,” who are doing wild and hairy things like handling snakes and so forth, so she must be mocking, she must be having fun with them, she must be satirizing them in the fashion of Mencken or Sinclair Lewis. Of course, Mencken called the Bible the nastiest name he could think of, you know—not the Cotton Belt, not the Tobacco Belt, but the ugly word, the Bible Belt. And for O’Connor that was the glory of her region, these people, backwoods—not our contemporary fundamentalists, not those that have moved into political power. These were the emarginated people in the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places, never making it into the news, never wanting to get into the news, never trying to push political candidates forward, never using the Gospel for some so-called larger political end. They were, instead, obsessed with God’s own self-identification in the Jews and in Jesus and in the book that is that story of self-identification, and so she saw—look, these are my brothers and sisters, they are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated Gospel, a Gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them, I cannot dismiss them, and so she winds up saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically, and of course that just stunned her secular audience, as they couldn’t understand at all what she was trying to do, when she was saying I think, in fact, what St. Thomas says. She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess. There’s one and one only quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that’s the love of God.  And in fact Thomas says you cannot love God moderately, you cannot love God in a kind of lukewarm fashion. We love God either absolutely or not at all. And she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

Now she sometimes criticizes them. Criticism and mockery, of course, are two different things. Mockery is to stand outside of and above and look down upon in a kind of scorn and disdain for that which you think is less than you are. Criticism is from the inside, trying to say, look, here’s something really important but that needs qualification, modification, and so there are stories in which she comes down on the anti-sacramental character of southern folk Christianity, the most powerful of which is called “Parker’s Back,” that story about a man who has—long before tattoos were de rigueur and fashionable—who has the figure of Jesus Christ tattooed on his back, and it is for that reason his wife rejects him. She cannot stand the idea of Jesus being figured image in any kind of incarnational way, certainly not in her church, and least of all on her husband’s back. So [O’Connor’s] critical of the anti-sacramental quality of that kind of southern folk Christianity, but she is not dismissive, never dismissive.

Prof. Ralph Wood

When these people have profound encounters with a living God into whose hands it is a fearful thing to fall, since the Book of Hebrews, they don’t know what to do with it. They say there are no structures, there are no forms, there are no disciplines, there are no sufficient habits in which to place these radical encounters with God, and so they go off and do nutty things. For example, when I was teaching in the south, a fellow up in Boone, North Carolina, decided that since we hear our Lord say if your hand offends you, cut it off, went to the shop at Appalachian State University, got a saw out, and cut his hand off. Well, again, O’Connor would not make fun of that. She would criticize that and say, again, his Christian world did not give him the forms in which to put a radical kind of Christianity, and so she’s critical of that lack of form, but not the lack of substance. Those are two very different things. She admires him for having very great substance. She said those who were such drastic Christians, if they had been in the Catholic world would have wound up in a monastery where they could have had their lives given a certain kind of shape, as they couldn’t in do-it-yourself religion.

Thomas Merton, in a famous phrase, says that the command “love God” has now the force, roughly, of “eat Wheaties.” It’s just another empty phrase. But for O’Connor, “grace” and “mystery” are not empty phrases. They are something than which there is no greater. The grace of God, for O’Connor, she said, must wound before it could heal. What we would want is the kind of grace that comforts, cheers, that always lifts up but never casts down. She says we want a Christianity that’s like a warm blanket, when in fact the Gospel is a cross. Of course, she’s absolutely right about that, so for her grace means the cross entering the world in such a fashion as to bring radical judgment, that is to say wounding, but of course far greater and deeper healing, that is to say, gracious redemption. Likewise with the word mystery: mystery does not mean for her a kind of a fuzzy, foggy, gooey something or other. It’s a very specific term for her.  For her the word mystery means that which is inexhaustible in our knowledge of God, that the deeper we go in understanding who the self-declared, self-revealed God is, the more there is yet to understand, so that the greater our knowledge of God, also the greater our ignorance of God, so that we know only a thumbnail of who God is. So mystery for her is, therefore, an inviting term. It is not a kind of term that stops conversation. It’s not that which is just a puzzle, an enigma to which you throw up your hands and say, well, that’s a mystery. On the contrary. Another translation of the word mysterion in Greek is not only mystery but sacrament, so for her the sacraments invite ever deeper, inexhaustible exploration, knowledge, truth, wisdom, and of course humility, because the more you understand the less you know you really understand.

The violence puts off many readers. A lot of folks encounter it and say I want no more of that. There’s enough violence in the world around us, why go read a writer where in her most famous story five people get killed? Where the protagonists of both of her novels turn out to be murderers, where almost every story ends in death. In fact, she said, I can’t imagine many good stories that don’t end in death, because she says death has always been like a brother to my imagination, and what she meant by that, of course, was that in the moment or the fact of death we bring our lives to the point of culmination, either of course in fullness, giving back to God, like in the parable of the talents, or squandered with nothing to return. So death is for her a moment of immense focus, clarity, and sharpened culmination, and therefore for her death was a thing that Christians are meant to live toward. I point out to my students, we celebrate the saints on their death days, not usually on their birthdays, so that violent death, as it were, is a way of speeding up that process, of making what would often be a long and slow and unprepared-for moment supremely well prepared for, either by suffering a violent death, or alas by committing a violent act of crime, murder, that makes you refocus. But those deaths are never gratuitous in O’Connor. In fact, she had a witticism I often repeat to help students. She said now remember, a lot of people get killed in my stories, but nobody gets hurt. And what she meant by that was that nobody’s tortured. Almost everyone goes to their deaths graciously. Think of that story where even the mother whose child is about to be murdered goes off to her death in a kind of accepting way, so that deaths are never there for their own sakes so that she can make our skin crawl. No one’s fingernails are plucked out, as they are in Dostoevsky, for example, no one made to squirm before being killed, but instead brought to moments of immense clarity about who they are in final, ultimate, metaphysical, theological terms. Now, that also happens to echo the fact that ours is the most violent world in the history of the human species. O’Connor knew well, though she did not live to witness the pronouncement of Pope John Paul II when he called ours the culture of death. She knew ours was the culture of death, that more people were killed by violent means in the 20th century than in all the preceding centuries combined. One of my students calls it the age of ashes, the century of blood, and that there is built into our existence a fundamental violence, an antagonism that causes people to kill each other in mass numbers, usually nation-states and their omnicompetent governments killing their own citizens, but also simply a widespread kind of seething fury that underlies everything, because of course that’s the real mark of God’s absence from our world. That’s the nihilism she thought characterizes our world. So she wanted to confront that nihilism, but not with stories that are nice, that are sweet, that are saccharine, that say don’t be violent, be good.  No, she meets violence with violence, but the violence she meets it with is redemptive violence, it’s the violence where people come to see themselves before God, and always when they see themselves in that form, maybe one exception, they come to the moment of repentance, to a moment of grace, so that a kind of horrifically destructive violence is answered by a wondrously redemptive, constructive violence. After all, the cross is the ultimately violent act, where we killed God himself, so you can’t have a Christianity that isn’t in some sense spiritually violent, in that if we were doing real warfare with all that counts against God, there’s going to be something internally violent, so most of her characters undergo an internal warfare more than an external kind of violence.

Mayhem, murder, a woman being gored by a bull that gets loose, a grandmother being shot 3 times in the chest by a mass murderer, a little boy drowning himself to be really baptized, on and on and on—those stories are also hilariously comic for two reasons. The most obvious reason, that O’Connor simply understands what is really comic about ordinary southern, country, untutored life. Southerners tell stories, southerners make jokes, southerners are just funny, and a lot of her funniest lines are from these characters. For example, at the end of The Violent Bear It Away, where the protagonist is, to his great surprise, confessing that he has in fact drowned a boy, tells this to a truck driver he’s hitched a ride with: “Hey man I just drowned a boy,” And the truck driver says, “Only one?” Well, you see, that’s not a sophisticated humor. O’Connor really liked Mark Twain, a kind of slapdash bang ’em up humor, and it’s usually out of anecdotes like that that things are funny. For example, in her story with the famously ugly title, “The Artificial Nigger,” a grandfather decides to take his son into the city to show him what a wonderfully common and safe world they live in out there in the rural countryside, whereas the city’s going to be really forbidding, and the boy will never want to go there again. He says I’m going to teach you how you never will get lost out here, and the boy says, “Out here there ain’t nowhere to get lost.” So it’s one-liners like that that are very funny. But of course O’Connor, as a deeply Christian writer, knows that comedy is the ultimately Christian category. When Dante writes his great book, he calls it the Commedia, the Comedy, because comedy is a literary form that always issues in life. It usually ends with a marriage. Of course, the New Testament ends with the great marriage feast of the lamb, with life coming into the world, with new birth, with resurrection. Tragedy, though a very great, noble art form, ends in death, and in some sense in defeat, usually in ennobling death, but still in a sense that finally things are to be despaired over. So it’s comic in that ultimate sense, that you can laugh not at O’Connor’s characters so much as with them, because you see—that we’re like them and that we need to undergo the same radical renovation they undergo.

“The Artificial Nigger” has caused a great deal of consternation among her readers. It means that her work is often not taught in high places in American academe, because that word is so offensive, and I confess it is offensive, it should be offensive, but it’s absolutely appropriate to the story and to the characters who use it, just as in Huckleberry Finn the word appears in an absolutely appropriate way by Mark Twain. For Flannery O’Connor, race was indeed the curse of the South in the sense that it was the single most important test which we as white Christians failed. Walker Percy of course says the same thing. She approaches the race question, however, not in the fashion that most people would expect, that is to say I can’t remember many, if any, places in her letters, which were voluminous, her using the phrase “civil rights,” because as Alasdair MacIntyre points out, rights are an invention of the 17th and 18th centuries.  For O’Connor, the mistreatment of black people is a violation of their being creatures made in the image of God. Therefore racial injustice is a horror to God, first of all, and of course to blacks, and therefore to be corrected. She supported, and I think especially in a late letter she supports Martin Luther King, because King is dealing with that question from within the church. King is appealing fundamentally to the Gospel saying, look, this is not how Christians treat their fellow Christians, and I think that was more or less O’Connor’s own approach. She did not like topical art. She says that “topical” is poison, and she meant by that if you set out to make a point in a story, it’s no longer a story. She says I always begin a story with some complex situation, and I ask, how in the world do people get into that jam, and how in the world might they get out? So she deals with the race question, the race problem in her stories in two ways. One, this is what is surprising, by showing the way in which racial injustice is a symptom of a larger disease. That’s a crucial distinction for her. The larger disease is a pandemic sinfulness of the human race in our fallenness, and that means for her everybody is sick. That means that black people who are sinned against are still sinful. That means that civil rights workers who are there seeking to overcome racial injustice are still sinners, no less than their white persecutors, and so she writes about the sinfulness, not so much in blacks, although she has some as they’d say “sorry blacks” in her stories, but she writes about self-righteous racial reformers who can go off and “do good,” so called, away from home, but who cannot attend to the people who are right at their feet. That is to say they cannot deal with their own mothers or fathers or brothers or sisters in such a way as to be redemptive and reconciled. So she’s concerned about the way in which, unless we’re very careful, we divide the world up into what someone said is the easiest moral question of the world, you know. Percy said if blacks are being mistreated, stop mistreating them. That’s pretty simple. But the complex matter is this matter of sinfulness that infects all of us, including, as I’ve said, those who are victimized and those who are trying to liberate them, the blacks, from their injustice. But the other way she treats the racial question, and far more deeply in my view, is to show the way in which black people have often been the means of redemption to white people because of the way in which blacks have born their suffering. In the South, almost all blacks are Christians, and therefore they have acquired something from the Gospel that has enabled them not to strike back, not return evil with evil, not to say “the fire next time.” O’Connor knows that justice delayed is in a real sense justice denied. But she also knows that justice too quickly corrected can mean new injustice created. You can drive out one devil by welcoming in seven devils through the back door. So in these other kinds of stories what she does is show moments of a strange kind of racial redemption, and she was moving into new territory at the very end of her life. The story that was left on her desk unfinished was called “Judgment Day,” in which a black man and a white man are living together, something really radical and strange in O’Connor. But far more importantly to me than that story is the one with the offensive title, “The Artificial Nigger,” where in very subtle ways most of my students don’t get, because it is so subtle, we confront a black Madonna by way of a large black woman standing in a door in the ghetto, and this young boy named Nelson, who’s never been in a church where there’s a figure of Mary, never seen a Madonna, has an instinctive sense that this must be what the mother of God would be like. He doesn’t use any kind of language in this story, but he has an instinctive sense that there’s some kind of accepting, embracing love of God that has this maternal quality that he’s never known. But more importantly, the story ends with a terrific sense in which this grandfather named Mr. Head and this grandson named Nelson have sinned against each other in that most diseased sort of way, the most fundamental way, violating each other, but they’re brought to their reconciliation before a broken Sambo. Now, for a northern audience that will have to be explained, that in the South, less and less now, thank goodness, many whites had black Sambos on their lawn, usually at the gate. They took two forms. Usually one would be a black jockey, holding a lantern, and was thus serving as the light post for entering the driveway. The other and far more degrading is the kind they encounter, and that’s of a black eating watermelon, which of course was a very demeaning way of ridiculing blacks as unworthy to do anything but eat watermelon and spit the seeds. But in this case, the black Sambo has not been attended to well. The watermelon has turned brown, so it’s barely discernable as watermelon. One eye has been chipped out so that you can’t really see that this is an ordinary face, and the back of the statue has come loose from its attachment, and so it’s leaning over, its mouth turned down, its eye chipped out. It becomes a crucifix before which these two terrible sinners against each other are reconciled, and there can be no other crucifix for this white man and this white boy than that figure by a black Sambo. I think that’s why it was her favorite story. It’s her largest embodiment of the Gospel in fiction, in ways that are not at all preachy or sermonic or point-making.

For O’Connor the term sacramental is not a loose and baggy term that applies to any sense of something slightly holy anywhere. It means instead something in the world that has discernable analogies with what lies beyond the world, so you can see visible signs of God’s invisible grace if you have the lenses for seeing them. Those occur in a lot of places in O’Connor’s fiction, for example, very often in a tree line, which in southern Georgia and Florida you often have, that stretches on and on to infinity. That becomes for her a moment of discerning what lies beyond us. The trilling of a bird in a lonely woods makes you pause: Why four notes rather than three? Why that noise and that alone? Again, it calls into mind a world beyond this one. But above all just silence.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Silence was, for her—as St. Thomas said, silence honors God, and so many times her protagonists and characters come to their moment of awareness of who they are in silence, all of those things having the sacramental quality. Now, on the other hand, the word sacrament means something very different. It’s not an adjective but a noun, and of course as a Catholic, for her there are seven sacraments, and that means therefore that sacrament is an act in which something happens, in which what was not present is made present, and the most famous incident about that business is a famous New York dinner party hosted by Robert Lowell and his wife, and a lot of the literati of New York were present, one of whom was Mary McCarthy, the kind of literary doyenne of New York society in the ’50s, and McCarthy had just written a book called Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, the basic thesis of which is how I outgrew the Catholic Church, how it became too small for me, how I transcended my narrow Irish Catholicism. Flannery O’Connor rarely spoke unless spoken to. She was shy. She was not a hail woman well met. She never said a word until Mary McCarthy said, well, you know, I’m not a Catholic, don’t believe any of that hocus pocus. I nonetheless find Eucharistic symbolism useful in my art. There is after all a kind of cultural resonance to bread and wine that people will kind of pick up on it and know that something significant is going on because you’re putting it to symbolic use. Well, Flannery O’Connor, who had not said a word the whole evening, rose to the edge of her chair and said in her best Georgia drawl, which I can’t imitate, “If the Eucharist is only a symbol then I say to hell with it.” In other words, for her this is the real presence of our Lord, and not just for her as a Catholic, but surely for us who are Protestant.  In the 14th chapter of John we read, if you eat of my meat and if you drink of my blood, you have life in you, and if you don’t, you don’t have life in you, and Paul says if you drink of this cup unworthily you risk your own damnation. Well, something is happening, and that’s not just something. It is God’s own real presence, where Christians are meant to feed and find their very sustenance without which we cannot do. So Flannery O’Connor’s life was sacramental to the core. She went to Mass every day when possible, trudging through the deep snows of Iowa when she was a graduate student there, getting out of the YWCA in New York, trudging down to the local Catholic church, because the Eucharist, the Supper, the Communion is the place where we receive into us that which we cannot possibly give ourselves, and whereby the church of course is made into the mystical body of Christ, where we’re transubstantiated no less than of course the bread and the wine. And so that works itself out in her fiction over and over again, though not overtly; usually covertly, because again she doesn’t want the kind of trundle in Catholic sacraments that let the reader know, okay, here’s a Catholic, she’s going to show you something. It’s always sly, indirect, at a kind of acute angle, as in for example the story called “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” where this little girl who’s been eaten up with her own Catholic pride, she’s so proud of being a Catholic as over against these dumb Church of God boys. To one of them she says “you dumb ox, you dumb Church of God boy,” and of course that’s exactly the name for Thomas Aquinas, the dumb ox. He was big, he was slow to speak, and he was often taken advantage of with jokes and the like. But at the end she sees that consecrated host at the service of benediction, not the Eucharist but there on the altar, like a huge sun, and sees there’s life, and in so seeing undergoes her own radical humiliation that becomes her humility.

One can read her as a nihilist. I’ve had students tell me that they read her in high school, they read her as a nihilist because a lot of people get killed. In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” you’ve got the serial killer who finally decides there’s nothing to do but plug her, kills her, walks off. Nihilism. And O’Connor said nihilism is the gas we all breath, and then she added what is a very frightening footnote. She said whether inside or outside the church it’s the gas we breathe. So there’s nihilism in the church.  The church can become the place where we enact the nothingness of our world, where in a horrifically not just anti-sacramental but sacrilegious way we deny God. So nihilism is never anything she dismisses. She admired Nietzsche for that reason. He named our illness. He had no cure, but he named our illness. In fact, she said, “I read recently about a new technique where we can breed the wings off chickens so they will have these big, fat, luscious chicken breasts that we can eat.” She said, “We are an age of wingless chickens, which is what I think Nietzsche must have meant when he says God is dead.” She never dismisses nihilism. It’s there. However, she read St. Thomas every night 20 minutes before bed. Well, that’s not bedtime reading, if you’ve read Thomas. Thomas is tough. He’s a knotty, dense, complex, rich, meaty thinker who was the great, formative influence on her thinking, but again in a background sort of way, not in a foregrounded sort of way. And she made jokes about this. She said I can envision the day when my momma walks into my room and says turn off the lights, and I say sed contra, on the contrary, light being eternal cannot be shut off, and she added “or some such nonsense like that.” So she made fun of her own Thomism, but she got her Thomism largely through Jacques Maritain, who taught her in his book Art and Scholasticism that art is a virtue of the practical intellect, by which he meant that art achieves its purpose and in that sense gives glory to God by being what it is and not another thing, by being really good art. Not by preaching, not by being nice, not by being cheerful, but by being whole. People kept saying why don’t you write a fiction that’s wholesome? She said I do. I write fiction that’s whole, because there’s nothing extraneous, there’s nothing disingenuous, it all has to be there, and so she felt that her first calling was to practice the habit of good art making, as St. Thomas had taught her, without any necessary regard for how good a person she may have been. She knew she was not a good person, as none of us truly is. Jacques Maritain in fact quotes Oscar Wilde, who says that a man is a poisoner is nothing against his prose, and Chesterton says a man may be able to hit his grandmother at 100 yards. That means he’s a good shot but not necessarily a good person.  So O’Connor wanted to be a good shot. She wanted to create really good art, in the deepest sense, that’s whole, that grasps the fullness of any scene or situation in all of its dimensions, from the depths of the demonic to the heights of the transcendent, and thereby she would glorify God, and she got that from Thomas, especially through Maritain.

She welcomed the Second Vatican Council. It ends in 1965, she dies a year before. She especially welcomed the council’s new emphasis upon scripture. It wasn’t entirely new, it had begun with the institutes in Jerusalem and the Medieval Institute in Toronto. She felt that the church was really digging into its deepest resources, which are scripture and tradition, and that could be only for the good. She was scandalized, to be honest, by a number of Catholics who did not know the Bible. The old Protestant canard that Catholics don’t know scripture was to her all too true. She made it, by the way, her point, not for that ever to be said of her. She knew scripture inside and out. So this new refreshment of the church, this opening of the church’s windows to the world of scripture and tradition was really refreshing. She also wanted the church to really engage modern thought. She did not want the church to be medievalizing in the bad sense of trying to be nostalgic, recovering a lost age. For example, for a while she was an enthusiast for the work of Teilhard de Chardin because she thought Teilhard was offering a new synthesis of classic, Catholic, orthodox theology with Darwinian evolutionary science, that he had brought those together into a new configuration of wholeness. She had lived to see that that was wrong. She lived to be critical to him. In fact, I think she’s making fun of his famous phrase, “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” in her story with that title because what happens there is you’ve got these two rising forces they don’t converge, they clash. So she welcomed the new stress on scripture, she welcomed the new opening to the world of modern thought. However, I don’t think she would have welcomed the radical alterations of the liturgy. She was no classicist, she did not read Latin, she read Thomas in translation, but she felt that even uneducated Catholics could follow the Mass in Latin and that therefore I expect she would have seen no great need to have said it in the vernacular. That’s my suspicion, and I am quite sure she would have protested against the denudation of the churches of its sacred images, at least the radical stripping of so many Catholic churches. Now she didn’t like frivolous decorations. For example, when her Irish Catholic priest in Milledgeville festooned the church in green for St Patrick’s Day she was horrified, because she wanted to make sure being Catholic did not mean being Irish, although she had an Irish name. Being Catholic meant being a member of the church universal and complete. But I don’t think, therefore, she would have liked the way in which so many Catholic churches ceased looking like Catholic churches. Not that you have to have fancy decor  She said for me mass involved the same act if it’s said out of a suitcase in a boiler room as it is said at St. Peter’s in Rome. So it’s not it all has to be in a perfectly aesthetically pleasing context or setting. But I think at the same time she would not have wanted to be folksy and so devoid of reverence. Remember those balloon Masses of the late 1960s? I’m horrified to think what O’Connor might have said about those. One of my friends at Notre Dame, John O’Callaghan, said there are some of those Masses that made you want to go say confession after you had attended them, not before. I think she might have had that same regard.

Thomas Merton compared her to Sophocles. That’s a stunning statement, to say the least, by Merton, because Sophocles certainly is the greatest of the Greek tragedians and a figure that kind of gives us the main texts in some ways of the Western world, the Oedipus trilogy, but I think that’s a bit extravagant, frankly. I think O’Connor would be not too well pleased to be put on that kind of not just pedestal but pinnacle. I would call her a major minor writer. By that I mean someone very important, but not a person of the very—I wouldn’t put her with Dante or Shakespeare or with Sophocles. I’d put her with people like, for example, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet of the 19th century, Evelyn Waugh, the great Catholic novelist of the 20th, Claudel, Bernanos, the great French writers. But I would add to that something that can’t be said of any English Catholic or any French Catholic, and that is Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced. That’s an astonishing fact, when as Chesterton said this is the nation that has the soul of a church, the nation that has more churchgoing people than any other industrialized advancement, and yet name our major writers, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickinson, Frost, Stevens—not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. There are points in which their work certainly has Christian quality, especially in Emily Dickinson, but you would not call any of them a Christian writer. So you have this one figure, and again on the edges of American culture. She’s a southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer. That’s a claim large enough, it seems to me.

I think the sacramental barrenness of so much American Christianity has failed to enliven the imagination of its products. I mean, for example, the Hispanic maid in my building at Baylor is a woman who is not literate, yet she knows the whole Christian story because she has seen it figured in images in her Catholic church. She’s greatly impressed that I’m named after the archangel Raphael, so she’s picked up by osmosis, just by breathing in the sacramental, imagistic world of her Catholicism, a kind of richly imaginative way of construing the world. But the church in America has been too often a reflection of America. It has not been sufficiently countercultural. It was not at the places where it should have stood over against the culture with a kind of prophetic witness that would make writers of the caliber of the ones I mentioned pay attention. I mean, Mark Twain was horrified by slavery and Mark Twain’s a southerner. What were southern churches saying about slavery? Not much. Emerson, you know, winds up with a kind of Unitarianism that is so devoid of thick Gospel content that he can’t produce any kind of art that would be, again, profoundly Christian. So at both the political and the intellectual level I think the church has failed to provide an alternative that would really, again, arrest the attention of our brightest, ablest, most imaginative thinkers. That’s why Hawthorne is drawn to the Puritans. The Puritans at least tried; they may have gotten it wrong, but he takes them way more seriously than he does the experiment at Brook Farm, where everybody went around saying “how’s your Over-Soul?” and things like that.

Thomas Merton’s influence is more directly political. He was a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War. He, together with Dorothy Day, who also exercised an equally important influence on American culture, it seems to me, if not more important, because her work survived through the Catholic Worker Movement. In fact, the joke was that after Merton’s death a lot of Cistercian monasteries said hurray, at last we don’t have all these people thinking they are called to be Cistercians because they’ve read Thomas Merton, so in some ways it’s as if his work had a kind of counterproductive effect. Merton’s influence, it seems to me, is scattered. It has political effect. He’s very good about retrieving Cistercian mystical thought, hugely. His book New Seeds of Contemplation is, to me, one of the great books of mystical literature in our time. He writes very good poetry, but not poetry of the highest order. His essays, I think, are the essence of his work. In that regard he’d be more like Wendell Berry. I’d compare Merton to Berry. Berry is our best Protestant and Baptist essayist. I think Merton was probably our best Catholic essayist, but O’Connor moves in a different realm. She moves in a different realm, and that is a realm that’s not simply prose fiction on the one hand, nor kind of elevated insight on the other hand through essays, but the reconfiguration of everything through the lenses of the Christian faith. She liked to quote Conrad. Conrad said the function of a writer is to make the audience see. To make the audience see, and by “see” O’Connor interpreted that to mean not simply figure out that’s an oak and that’s not a hickory, not simply some kind of realism, but to have vision. Sight is one thing. Sight is simply to use the eye as a kind of ocular organ for perceiving furniture, lamps, and the like. But the eye when seeing through, seeing something behind it informed by the Christian faith, and it becomes a lens for beholding what she calls “distances” that are far off close up. Then you’ve accomplished something. That’s what she does. She’s prophetic in that sense. She says I’m a realist of distances, not a realist of surfaces or a realist of appearances, but a realist of distances—trying to bring that which is far off close up. It was far off, of course, as the transcendence of God, the otherness of God, the sinfulness of human nature that goes unrecognized and so forth. I don’t think Merton ever accomplishes anything that great, and that’s why I think she will last in a way he won’t.

Already we’ve seen downturns and upturns in O’Connor’s reputation. There was a while where her work was held in a good deal not just of suspicion but disdain, because of the way in which her characters do, when appropriate, and only when appropriate, use the N word, in the way in which she was dismissed, I’m afraid, about people in high places, as a Catholic, and therefore in her own way a fundamentalist. I know people who call O’Connor a fundamentalist, which means she believes in the basic doctrines of the church, so that there have already been ups and downs, but what we’re in now in the midst of is a new kind of resurgence that I think will continue. It will have its low points, I don’t doubt that it will, but she said even if it takes 200 years for my work to be appreciated that’s okay. My Catholic friends said remember for us a thousand years isn’t a very long time. And so if there is a thousand years, I think O’Connor will be appreciated a millennium from now.

I myself am from Georgia and had never discovered Flannery O’Connor while living in the South, but while I was in a boarding school in Massachusetts at age 16 had works of Flannery O’Connor assigned to me in English class and read her for the first time, and shortly thereafter a friend of mine gave me her letters as a Christmas gift, and I read those somewhat assiduously and became very interested in her person, in her stories.

Reading Flannery O’Connor for the first time did change my life a little bit. I mean it was the first time I had read a Christian thinker, or a Christian writer who I thought was impressive intellectually and challenging. I was a secular person, and her worldview was so different, so abrasive in some ways, very jarring.

I found it offensive and fascinating and problematic and attractive, and so I acquired a sort of new sensitivity to Catholic thought. It was the first time I read a Catholic intellectual, and then I started reading some of the people she wrote about in her letters, the works she was reading of philosophy or theology, and discovered from that something about the Catholic intellectual tradition, and that led me to actually become a Christian. My mother’s from a Protestant background, so I initially sought baptism as a Protestant and then remained interested in Catholicism partly through [O’Connor’s] influence and then kept reading authors in that tradition, and eventually, within about three years, became a Roman Catholic.

Father Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

I can’t say that Flannery O’Connor’s writings directly influenced my decision to become a Catholic priest. I think that came from a higher source and intervention. But I think she was the first person I ever read who gave me the impression that Thomas Aquinas’s thought would be maybe quite important, and I joined the Dominican order eventually, which is an order that Thomas Aquinas was a member of, and where his thinking is very prevalent, so she gave me a first initial sympathy to his thought.

Many of her characters are people struggling with the question of whether there’s any meaning in the world at all or any meaning in life, and she has a great capacity to at the same time in a certain way project what that personality is—the searcher, or the person who questions meaning, and she also satirizes that person, sometimes brutally, and it’s both showing the pain of the person in disbelief or with lack of religious orientation and at the same time making fun of them. That is so provocative and almost painful, and I think it gave me the impression that someone could both understand me or understand something about me and also challenge me very deeply in my conception of the world religiously. I think that understanding of modern unbelief, and at the same time that kind of almost robust satire of modern unbelief was very provocative to me. It gave me the impression she had some perspective that would be interesting to chase down.

Flannery O’Connor’s said “people who read my works tend to think I’m a hillbilly nihilist, but I would like to be seen rather as a hillbilly Thomist,” and one of the things I think she’s clearly taken from St. Thomas is this understanding of what a sacrament is. In the Catholic tradition there are seven sacraments, and a sacrament is both a sign and an instrument of grace, so that it symbolizes what it also confides, that is to say the grace of God. She says very clearly in a number of places her stories are about how God’s grace works invisibly in the world for people who don’t have sacraments. So she’s trying to write as a kind of hillbilly Thomist about how God works in a non-Catholic terrain of southern Protestantism, of skeptical southern progressivists etc., and in that context looking at how kind of grace manifests itself in signs that are instruments, but you don’t have baptism, confession, and the Mass, which she says are the center of her life. You have instead odd and grotesque, historically surprising events where people encounter the grace of God. Someone throws the book across the room at someone they’re angry at, and the book is called “Human Development,” and when it smacks the person on the head you have the confiding of grace. The book is a sign and instrument of human development, and the absolute becomes manifest in this very concrete, sacramental way. In her story “Greenleaf” you have Miss May who’s gored to death by a bull, who represents Christ, and as the horn of the bull pierces her heart she looks up to heaven, and the bull is a sort of sacramental presence of grace. That’s very odd, it’s very provocative. It’s Catholic but with a very strange twist. The second thing I’d say about sacraments for Aquinas is they’re only suggestive of a glory to come. They’re not a full realization of what we will see in heaven, and so there’s a lot in Flannery O’Connor about a partial, almost secret unveiling of God in the world, leaving the reader with questions and leading the reader toward more questioning about God. So there’s a sort of mysterious ambivalence. If God’s at work in the world, we don’t find him very easily. His grace can explode onto the world, but it also leads us to a higher aspiration to see God, to know God beyond this world. That’s very Catholic. She talks about how she wants to stimulate an understanding of God’s grace hidden in the American South.

I think she’s trying to both teach and shock. Teach and shock are not opposed for her. She says that in a very secular world that we have trouble recognizing the sacred except under the signs of violence. But it’s not a violence that is from the outside. I mean she’s clear about that. The violence of the external, physical events that are shocking is meant to reflect an inner violence of the conversion of love, and she says this when she talks about the title of her book The Violent Bear it Away. She says St. Thomas says the violence that bears us away to Christ is the violence of love that allows us to overcome the defects of our own nature that’s fallen and that’s fragile and can be selfish and egoist. So it’s about the violence of love converting itself to God. The shocking violence of the exterior world is supposed to mirror the internal conversion of love. It’s not something that’s opposed to the will or destroying our freedom. It’s something opening our freedom. She’s very clear about that. Her stories are humorous because her stories are about liberation, but it’s often a liberation that comes despite our selves. We don’t want to be free. We actually want to be free from the love of God, and the love of God comes in kind of comic ways, almost violently frees us to be our better selves.

Flannery O’Connor was a very intuitive, I would almost say shoot-from-the-hip kind of Catholic. She had a deep intuitive sense of the truth in Catholic faith.

She says in one of her letters I am a Catholic not in the way some people are Baptists or Methodists, but in the way some people are atheists. It has a kind of evidential force for me that I find difficult to question’, not in the sense that she was an anti-intellectual. If anything she read avidly, lots of secular as well as religious authors and theologians. But there’s a sense in which she’s grounded in something prior to speculations or deductions or arguments. She’s got a deep intuitive sense of Christ present in the Mass. She says Mass is the stable pillar of her life, that it’s what makes life in the modern world tolerable for her. So she’s a fairly traditional Catholic, I think.

Flannery O’Connor says repeatedly in her letters to Betty Hester that dogma is not a force that’s anti-intellectual for a believing Catholic, nor does it cramp one’s freedom, but rather dogma preserves and safeguards mysteries that open the mind to contemplation and preserve the freedom of the person to approach God more intimately. So she sees dogma not as something anti-intellectual or hampering the development of the human person, but opening the human person up to the mystery of God. She was very concerned about the Catholic Church’s moral teachings in the sense that she was very committed to them. She knew in her own day about the controversy about the question of regulation of birth and birth control, and she was pretty clear that she was on the side of the church’s traditional teaching. She said we should be prepared to move over and get used to being crowded rather than anybody commit the least sin with regard to the Church’s teachings in this domain, so I don’t know how she would have reacted to the liturgical changes of Vatican II, but I think in terms of the teaching of the Catholic Church concerning doctrine and morals, she had a very deep reverence for the church’s tradition.

She says a southern writer is challenged to write as a Catholic because you’re writing in a Protestant culture. It’s not a Catholic culture, and so you’re showing how certain truths that Catholics may have even become numb to about their own faith can be discovered under grotesque or ironic forms by Protestants. She tells a story about this where she mentions a real event in the ’50s of a Tennessee revivalist minister who for his Lenten revival tied a living lamb by a chain to a cross for his congregation and then sacrificed it there in front of the congregation. She said, well, he may have been doing that for show, but I think that’s just as close to the Mass as he can get, and she says what he is doing there represents, in a certain ironic way, under forms that Catholics might not even recognize easily, a truth they’re living day to day in Mass. But she says if I wrote things that I think are truly grotesque, like if I wrote about people with totally meaningless lives, it might be considered normal in the north—she says that—but when I write about anything southern it would be considered grotesque in the north. She says in the south, because it’s Christ-haunted, you find, at least in her day and age she could say that, because it’s Christ haunted it’s not Christ-centered, you find she says a disfigured image of Christ in people’s suffering and in their brokenness, even if it’s disfigured and broken it’s better than no Christ at all. In the end of the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” when The Misfit kills the grandmother, and the blood of the grandmother is on his eyes, on his glasses, and he cleanses them, her death—he kills her because she’s compassionate to him. She’s compassionate to him because she sees he agonizes over the person of Christ, and there’s a moment in which grace touches her and saves her but also invites him to salvation, and his eyes are open for a moment by her blood, and he says she would have been a good woman if there had just been someone there to kill her every day of her life. And I think what Flannery O’Connor is saying in part is the Catholic life of expiation and suffering for others is what also makes us good people. We don’t have, as Catholics, someone there to shoot us every day of our life. What we have every day is the Catholic Mass. We die with Christ in the Mass, we live with him, and she says the suffering of human beings everywhere is in some way an initial participation of that mystery, an anticipation of redemption in Christ. So she’s looking at Southerners in the imperfections of their faith, their deep human imperfections, and she’s seeing how Christ is sort of hidden in them in ways that foreshadow or speak of Catholic realities, of God uniting us in our suffering to the mystery of the cross, so I think that there’s something like that going on.

Thomas Merton is a person whose whole life is characterized by movement, and even up until the end of his life he’s really trying to figure out what he believes in a certain way, and there’s a dynamic there that fascinated his generation, because it’s somebody really trying to find the truth whose a nonbeliever, who becomes open to Catholicism, who converts, who writes eloquently about his conversion, but he was restless, whereas with Flannery O’Connor you get the impression of somebody who accepted herself as a Catholic and as a person who’s Southern and as a person from the rural South, as a person who is sick and had to go home physically ill and live with her mother and be cared for until death. There’s a certain solidity to her, a bemusing certitude. But also, I think, more than Merton she’s fascinated by speaking with unbelievers. I think Merton is trying to articulate his experience of faith for his generation, how to believe in the world today. I think she’s much more interested in communicating traditional Catholic truths to people who are radically separated from the Christian tradition.

Sophocles points out the tragedies in life and the monstrous dimensions of human existence, and Flannery O’Connor doesn’t have a tragic worldview, but there’s a tragic moment in her stories. She’s very Augustinian. She says the truth of the doctrine of original sin is at the base of all my stories, and also the truth of redemption. So where she’s very different from a lot of our contemporary sensibilities is she thinks it’s both necessary, but also somewhat humorous, to see our fragilities and our weaknesses and our brokenness. She’s very interested in showing human brokenness and even our ugliness, not as an end in itself, I mean that’s where it is the tragic dimension, and almost the grotesque dimension, but it’s ultimately comic for her, because once you admit your brokenness, or you can admit your brokenness if you see the flip side of it, which is the mystery of redemption and grace, and the fact that God in the end is compassionate. So the way grace breaks in and makes use of our disillusionment with ourselves, the tragic conundrums we’re in, is almost playful. It’s almost a violent playfulness, but there’s a sort of gravity of love that comes into characters’ lives, disillusions them, shows them the tragic component of their life, shows them their brokenness, but also only ever does that to introduce them into something higher, which is God’s love and mercy, and there’s something comic about it in the way she writes about it.

I think the most important thing for contemporary Catholics about Flannery O’Connor’s work is that she has the mindset of a person who’s expecting to be misunderstood in contemporary culture. She’s writing provocatively, elliptically, suggestively about what she treasures most or believes in most deeply, the mystery of Christ, mystery of grace, but in a world where she expects to be misunderstood, perhaps resented, even despised, and that tension that animates her work is very suggestive for modern Catholics who increasingly understand themselves to be in a very secular surrounding society that doesn’t necessarily understand their viewpoints. So she’s trying to talk to people who are even hostile or very different in mindset. She has a very strong consciousness that she’s speaking to and with people who find Catholicism alien or strange, and she’s attempting to convey truths of the Catholic faith in elliptical or suggestive or inviting ways, provocative ways, but she wants to defy immediate expectations and instead move on to more substantive conversation, and she’s found a way to do that through a literary format, and I think that’s one of the great challenges for Catholics in an increasingly secular world is how do you talk about your faith when it’s likely to be perceived as alienating to people in ways that move beyond the initial constraints of provocation and into a deeper, substantive discussion, and Flannery O’Connor’s figured out a way to do that in a literary motif.

She is an artistic genius, so just on a natural level her work has an incredible originality to it, and she can embody something of the genius of her culture, so to speak, in a very raw, almost primitive way. She has this deep absolutism, this deep, concrete way of writing. She’s mastered the Southern dialect, so there’s something just as a literary art form very original and very inviting, and a lot of the people who originally read it were not particularly interested in the religious ideas, the religious content, and I think as time goes by, as people read more of her letters and see what the whole corpus of her writing is about, it becomes more evident that you have to have a theological level of reading to see her deepest aspirations. She is very explicit about that herself, and I suppose also because she says really, basically in her letters, the two choices in the modern world, she says that it’s—in rural Georgia 1955 the two choices in the modern world are really between nihilism or Roman Catholicism, and that’s a very odd viewpoint in Protestant, if I may say, Biblicist, southeastern culture in America in 1955 but that doesn’t seem like such a strange juxtaposition to us 50 years later. She talks about the advent of an age of nihilism, and I think she means by that an age in which all values seem relative and a matter of subjective preference, and it’s impossible to discern if there’s any transcendent meaning in life. She says that leaves you a humanity like certain chickens where they bred off the wings, made them smaller to get more white meat, so humanity becomes a bunch of wingless chickens. She says, “I think that’s what Nietzsche meant when he said God is dead.” In the absence of a value system in a relativistic world, people become just kind of non-vital. They lose their vitality, and she’s offering up a vision of a deep Catholic vitality based on grace, based on a sacramental view of the world.

Martin Heidegger

I think we’re living in a time when there’s an increased de-Christianization or secularization of contemporary culture, and what happens in that sociologically is that a majority of people who were previously educated in the Protestant or the Catholic tradition tend to gravitate toward a more secularized stance of interpretation of the world, so that to be a Christian in contemporary Europe or America tends to make you more of an anomaly. That being the case, the people who actually persevere or tend to continue to want to be religious tend to have a countercultural identity, and you see that more in evangelical movements and in the Roman Catholic movement in America. So young people today who are devout Roman Catholics tend to expect to be misunderstood, maybe even disagreed with frequently, so at the same time their interest in recovering their tradition, also because they feel like it’s under threat, the identity of the very church and her tradition is perceived as being subject to perhaps ceasing to be.

There’s no question we live in a more secularized America than in the age of Flannery O’Connor. I don’t know what her influence will continue to be, but I think the fact that she understands her writing to be geared towards a very secularized world, or that the real choice in her writing is between a robust Catholic identity or capitulation to a very secularized world, I think that tension or juxtaposition is something she lived very personally in her own decision to be a believer. I think that she continues to speak to people who are confronting that decision. She read Nietzsche, she read Sartre, she read Heidegger. And Hulga or Joy, in the story “Good Country People,” is a person who moves from a cynical, dark view of reality based on her own very superficial understanding of Heidegger, pseudo-intellectual, really. Flannery O’Connor’s making fun of herself and moves to this shocking conversion of realizing her need for grace in the end of the story, at least we can suppose, I think, and she really represents Flannery O’Connor herself who walked on crutches while she was writing the story, who doesn’t have a leg to stand on, so to speak, if you put her in terms of Joy or Hulga, and who discovered her need for grace, that she can’t just live by her own powers, and has moved from a secular worldview to a religious worldview. I think that the juxtaposition in Flannery O’Connor’s life itself between the decision to practice her Catholic faith versus her encounter with secular thinkers like Nietzsche and Joyce and Heidegger, that juxtaposition continues to be one that is very visceral for a lot of Americans, or a lot of modern people, that her writing speaks to—the decision between a radical unbelief, which is in her character Hazel Motes before his conversion versus radical discipleship in a very secular world, which is Hazel Motes after he’s converted and puts his eyes out and converts to God in a really radical way. She, of course, sees him as a saint. He’s a nihilist before, he’s a saint afterwards, and that is an interesting commentary on options that a lot of people would consider still viable options, to pursue a life of God or to pursue a life without God. So she’s really trying to put the choice in front of us.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In 2002, we aired a profile of the young, bestselling poet Mattie Stepanek and his mother Jeni. They both suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy. The messages of hope and peace in Mattie’s writings inspired millions of people around the world. Mattie died in 2004, but Jeni is working to keep his memory alive. She talked with Kim Lawton about how her faith gives her the strength to move forward.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s standing room only at the Border’s Bookstore in Bethesda, Maryland, where Jeni Stepanek is talking about her new book called Messenger. The book is about her son Mattie, the New York Times bestselling inspirational poet who died five years ago at the age of 13. Mattie had a rare form of muscular dystrophy, the same disease that afflicts Jeni. This is the store where Mattie had launched his books, too, and the fact that he’s not here tonight highlights the loss that’s still raw.

JENI STEPANEK: Since he died, I’ve hit some very, very low points. I have had mornings where I’m not quite sure what the sane reason is to bother getting out of bed. I always find one, and if I can’t find one, what I’ve learned is to allow other people to give me a sane reason to get out of bed.

LAWTON: One of Jeni’s biggest reasons for getting out of bed every day is her quest to keep Mattie’s legacy alive. In his short life Mattie wrote six books of poetry and a collection of essays that he collaborated on with Jimmy Carter. He became a friend to the rich and famous and touched millions of people around the world with his message of hope and peace.

MATTIE STEPANEK: God gives me hope that there is something greater than us, something better and bigger than the here and now that can help us live.

LAWTON: Mattie told us in an interview seven years ago that he believed God had a plan for his life.

MATTIE STEPANEK: I feel that God has given me a very special opportunity that I should not let go to waste. I use the gift he has given me.

LAWTON: Jeni says from the time he was just a little boy, Mattie told her God was putting messages in his heart.

JENI STEPANEK: And I began to get concerned, actually, and ask him questions like, “Are you hearing voices? Is God’s voice a man’s voice or a woman’s voice?” And he looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, “Mommy, God’s voice is not like this. It’s a message in my heart.”

LAWTON: Mattie believed God wanted him to give voice to those messages, and he did that through his poems, which he called his “heartsongs.” Jeni says there were several basic themes.

JENI STEPANEK: Hope is real, peace is possible, and life is worthy. The best I can understand it is that it really is the universal truth. It’s what Jesus Christ taught us, it’s what Gandhi teaches us, it’s what Martin Luther King teaches us, it’s what any good speaker, any peacemaker teaches us: In giving we shall receive, in doing good, good happens.

LAWTON: Since Mattie died, Jeni has gotten thousands of letters and emails from people who say he continues to inspire them. There’s even a grassroots movement of people who want the Roman Catholic Church to open an official investigation into whether Mattie should be recognized as a saint.

JENI STEPANEK: I have had people who have contacted me to say they believe Mattie has interceded in their lives. They believe that Mattie has healed their child, or touched their spirit, or turned them back to God, or prevented them from suicide.

LAWTON: As the mom of a kid who loved practical jokes and didn’t always make his bed, she finds it all humbling and, a bit overwhelming.

JENI STEPANEK: I feel the responsibility to share with people the truth of my son’s life. What I don’t want people doing is thinking, oh Mattie, you know, and putting him up on a pedestal: he’s a little guru, he was perfect, he never got angry, he never got sad, he only spoke bits of wisdom. I mean, he wasn’t. That’s not who Mattie was.

LAWTON: Jeni chairs a foundation named for Mattie that tries to make his message as accessible as possible. There are school curriculum projects based on Mattie’s writings, and parks like this one in Rockville, Maryland, that has a life-sized statue of Mattie and his beloved service dog, Micah, who is now Jeni’s. Jeni herself has also become an inspiration to many. Mattie was her fourth child to die of the disease that she didn’t even know she was carrying.

JENI STEPANEK: When I was having these children, I did not know I was going to give birth to children with this condition. When I was having children I was apparently healthy, active, running two to five miles a day, coaching and playing sports, working on my first doctoral degree.

LAWTON: She was diagnosed when Mattie was nearly two, after her oldest two children had already died and her third child was also dying from the disease. She and her husband divorced, so her focus became being a single mom.

JENI STEPANEK: So even though you grieve the loss of your child, when there’s still another living child, not that the grief isn’t there, but you have to focus on celebrating life with that child, with the one that’s still alive. When Mattie died, that’s when the grief became so overwhelming, because where do you put your mommy role?

LAWTON: Jeni says her Catholic faith helped her cope, and she says despite some times of questioning God, her faith has grown dramatically.

JENI STEPANEK: I’m very good at, through prayer, giving God a to-do list, all right? Dear God, this is where I need you, and this is how you can meet my needs, and I give God the little to-do list, and I think I began to realize towards the end of Mattie’s life prayer is not just giving God your wishes. It’s asking to bring God into whatever the moments are in my day.

LAWTON: She also has a close circle of friends, chief among them her roommate, Sandy Newcomb, and Sandy’s extended family, whom Mattie called their “kin family.” Jeni says they’ve made all the difference in her life.

SANDY NEWCOMB: I’d like to think in some way that my support of Jeni and Mattie has helped them to be able to do what God wants them to do.

LAWTON: Jeni’s own health continues to deteriorate. She says the most difficult thing is giving up independence and control.

JENI STEPANEK: It’s really hard knowing I will always be the passenger in a car. I will never be driving again. That’s a really, really tough thing when I’m a doer, a giver, a be-er, and you have to be the recipient and call someone and ask them to do something for you. That’s a tough lesson for me.

LAWTON: Although people tell her they’ve felt Mattie’s spirit, Jeni never has.

JENI STEPANEK: And what I would give to have my son come and stand and just say “hi” or “yo,” just say anything, just touch me. But I know that that would be wrong, and I think that my son is wiser than that, because if my son came and spoke to me or touched me, and I knew without doubt this is my son, I so miss him that I’m afraid I’d never emotionally or physically be able to move from that spot.

LAWTON: She says near the end of his life Mattie knew he was dying and tried to prepare her. But she couldn’t accept it.

JENI STEPANEK: It was one of my mommy decisions that I regret. You know, I should’ve just put my arm around him and said that must be really difficult. You must feel very alone. I just, I couldn’t tend to it, and I feel very badly. I will forever feel badly about that. But I don’t think he holds that against me. I think he knew that I was being a mommy.

LAWTON: Still, she says Mattie gave her the hope and faith to move forward.

JENI STEPANEK: He said when I’m gone promise me you will choose to inhale, not breathe merely to exist, and that means finding some worthy reason to move into each next moment, and that’s the most difficult choice I face every single day. But it’s the most worthy choice.

LAWTON: She says she’s learned that it’s not how long you live that matters, but the depth with which you live those days. I’m Kim Lawton in Rockville, Maryland.

Q: Why was it important to you to tell Mattie’s story now?

There were a couple of reasons. One is Mattie’s been gone for five years now, and in those five years more and more good things have come from his life. We have parks and libraries and school curriculum, school curricula growing, the Just Peace Summit where teens come from all over the world to study his message, and I thought, people are so inspired by Mattie’s writings, by Mattie’s message of hope and peace, I thought it mattered that people know who was the child behind that message, that people know the details of Mattie’s life story, particularly because Mattie believed that he was a messenger, that that was his reason for being. and I knew that if something happened to me, nobody would ever know the truth of Mattie’s story. So that was one goal, was to really lay down the details of Mattie’s life. The other reason that I wanted to tell Mattie’s story is people very often come to me and they say, “I’m so inspired. How could I ever be like this child?” And what I wanted people to know is that he was really an ordinary little boy who made extraordinary choices and that each of us can make those same choices, that each of us can live an extraordinary life regardless of the blessings and burdens that are balanced into each day. And I thought that that mattered to share with people so they could identify with Mattie and—you can’t be Mattie, you can’t raise your child to be Mattie, we can’t ever be another human being, but we can use other human beings as our role models, and I wanted to show how plain and simple my son was. He was as witty as he was wise.

Q: You write in the book about how he really did feel that he was a messenger. In what way? How did he feel that? He really felt it came from God.

Mattie first started telling me when he was about three or four years old that God put messages in his heart, and that his reason for being, that God’s role, God’s plan for him was that he was good with words and that he was to shape words around God’s messages and offer them to other people so that they would hear God’s message as well. Now when your three- and four-year-old says this, I thought it was very sweet, I thought he had some nice things to say, but I couldn’t understand—I didn’t really understand about what he was trying to tell me about God putting messages in his heart, and when he hit about four years old, he began doing things like, in the middle of playing, he would drop to his knees, meditate for two minutes, 10 minutes, and then stand up and say, “I need to write this down. I have a message from God, and I need to put words to it.” And I began to get concerned, actually, and ask him questions like, “Are you hearing voices? Is God’s voice a man’s voice or a woman’s voice? High pitched, low pitched?” I didn’t understand what he was saying, and he looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, “Mommy, God’s voice is not like this. It’s a message in my heart, and my job is to give words, to give voice to God’s message.” Mattie spent his entire life saying things like this, and I spoke with priests and rabbis and ministers about this, and I have to admit I don’t think I ever, during his lifetime, fully understood his role as a messenger. I believe he believed that he was a messenger for God. I believed that what he was saying and doing was all good.  I could not understand how you could actually hear God’s voice in your heart and use your own words and voice to offer a message to others. I think it’s been more since he died, and the ongoing letters and emails and calls that I get from people who tell me that they remember Mattie from when he was alive, or they’re just learning about Mattie now, and how he continues to inspire them—that is almost like they’re getting a message from God. And I think I’m now beginning to understand that he really—his spirituality and morality were really intertwined, that he did hear messages from God, not in a voice, not in some delusion, but that he was truly inspired with something good, which is God.

Q: What were some of those messages? For people who aren’t familiar with him and his poems, how do you distill the messages?

I think the messages that Mattie offered us from God really fell into two categories, and one could easily be summed up as hope is real, peace is possible, and life is worthy, and he has poem after poem, essay after essay, speech after speech where he discusses, or shares in a literary form, how those look. You know, why hope is real, why it’s not just wearing rose colored glasses or being in denial or turning your head to the truth, that hope begins with an attitude and an attitude is a choice. So I think that’s really one part of the message is all about hope and peace and life, regardless of challenges or the joys in somebody’s life. And then the other side, the other flow of messages that he talked about as coming from God, was what he started calling “heart songs” when he was about 5 years old, and trying to help people understand that we all have a reason for being. Just like you read, or hear, in church God’s plan—Mattie called it our reason for being, our heart song. And the best I can understand it is that it really is the universal truth. It’s what Jesus Christ taught us, it’s what Gandhi taught us, it’s what Martin Luther King teaches us, it’s what any good speaker, any peacemaker teaches us: in giving we shall receive, in doing good, good happens. That doesn’t mean you become rich in money. It doesn’t mean you get miracle after miracle and you live longer. It doesn’t mean that your life is peachy because you’re doing good things, but it means that if you’re open to God being a part of your life, if you can understand your reason for being and offer that to other people, it will come back to you. [It] took me a long time to understand that as well, and I finally came to understand that what he meant by heart song—he told me once when he was about 12 years old, because I said I don’t know what my heart song is, I really, I don’t know my heart song. And he said, “What do you need? What do you want most in life? What do you ache for? What would you do anything to have in your life?” He said that’s the first part of your heart song, because you know why it matters. You’re close to it. If you need money, if you need love, if you need happiness, if you need to be known, you understand why that matters. Your reason for being is to offer that to others. And what Mattie needed and wanted was happiness and love that lead to hope and peace. So he gave that freely to other people through his writings, through his speeches, and in giving other people these messages of hope and peace, that came back to him, and I began to understand that—that is God’s plan for us, to be fully who we were created to be. And what we need we offer it to others, because we get why that matters.

Q: And that’s a spiritual ministry? I think people hear some of the poems and miss the spiritual dimension that seems to be the foundation.

Yes. Now not every poem that he wrote had a spiritual dimension. Some were just pure fun. Some were—people would often ask him to write poetry for an organization or for a specific cause. But the bulk of his poetry, if you really read it carefully, there is a message of hope, of peace, of life, of offering, of finding what’s at your core. When he—I mean one of the most depressing poems I think he ever wrote is called “Abyss,” and it’s when he began really wondering, is my life ending? Am I going to get another miracle? When is my mortality going to end? And he really wasn’t looking forward to death, and he just really felt that he was in a dark space. But in writing about this so people go, “Yeah, I understand and I feel like this,” he said when you’re in this abyss, all you have to do is look up and realize even if you’re at the bottom, there’s the light. You just have to choose what you look at, choose your vision, and once you see it you climb right out. So even when he was struggling, he still would find some way to find inspiration or offer inspiration to other people by identifying with other people’s challenges or sharing his own so that other people could identify with him.

Q: What do you hear from people? You still get letters and emails. What kinds of things do people say, even today?

I get a lot of letters from school children who didn’t think they liked poetry until they started reading Mattie’s material, and then they realized poetry is not something beyond them, it’s not something way intellectual and that you can’t understand, that it’s shaping words in a special way on a page and carefully choosing each word so that it matters. I would say the bulk of what I get is where people say this is how my life has changed because of Mattie, because of what I’ve read, because I saw him on TV, because a friend gave me one of his books. Right now there’s History Associates, a local archive company. They’ve taken 50 boxes from my basement of fan mail and publicity information about Mattie, and they met with me a couple of weeks ago, and they said, “We’ve really tried to sort it, because everybody says they’re inspired.” So they’re trying to say I’m inspired to be a better person, I’m inspired to pray, I’m inspired to be a better parent, I’m inspired to think gentler, to be less judging. They’re trying to now categorize what that inspiration looks like or feels like to different people. I also, especially since it’s been 5 years since he died, get lots, or a fair number, of letters and emails from people who ask questions like when is Mattie going to have a committee for sainthood? What is the prayer I can pray for Mattie, for his cause? I’ve had a dozen or so people ask me for relics. And I go back and I tell people there’s been talk, but there is no formal committee. That doesn’t even begin until year five. But I even get, after he died I got mail from people all over the world that was addressed to “Mattie—Child Poet of America.” Or “St. Mattie—First Child Saint of America,” no other address, and these things would just end up in my mail box which, was very—I mean that’s an overwhelming—it’s beautiful, but the responsibility for me, when I sit back and think my son not only touched lives when he was alive, but since he died, he is continuing to touch lives, to inspire people. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world to have somebody write to you.…

Q: What’s that like as a mother, to know people think your child is a saint?

Well, I’m really careful with that because, one, he’s not recognized as a saint. I mean, if you take a saint as an ordinary person who lived an extraordinary life of holiness and called others to be their best self, absolutely my son is a saint, though not recognized. There are many, many people who are saints though not recognized, and yes, I do hope that one day there is an investigation for his cause, not because that would make me proud, because I think my son could continue being a source of intercession and inspiration for the world, which—that happens more when people are aware of him. So yes, for that reason, I think it would be lovely. But, you know, when I step back and think of me as Mattie’s mom, well, I was the one who would say, “Mattie is your bed made?” And he would say, “Does it look made?” It’s like, well, that wasn’t the question. I was the one that would have to answer his questions of, “If I’m going to be a writer and peacemaker, why do I need trigonometry and chemistry courses?” I saw the little boy, the human side, the child who cried when his feelings were hurt, who was scared of certain things. So I think that’s a blessing for me that I saw the full spectrum of my son. But the responsibility that I feel and the privilege that I feel to think that my son is touching people and touching lives long after my lifetime, long after this generation’s lifetime, is a profound thought that is very humbling, very, very humbling to sit back and think as rough as my life is I would never will or wish my life on anyone else in the world, but how grateful I am that I was chosen to be this child’s mother, that that was part of my reason to be. What a beautiful gift that was that I got to be Mattie’s mom, including the unmade bed. I’m just thrilled about that.

Q: What is that responsibility that you feel?

I think the responsibility is to—part of that was the reason I chose to write this book. I feel the responsibility to share with people the truth of my son’s life. What I don’t want people doing is thinking, “Oh, Mattie,” you know, and putting him up on a pedestal: he’s a little guru, he was perfect, he never got angry, he never got sad, he only spoke bits of wisdom. I mean, he wasn’t—that’s not who Mattie was. So I think the responsibility is for me to share as much information as I can about my son, about his life, so that people do know that he was real. They do know that living a good life doesn’t mean living a perfect life. It means always having God being a part of your life, always, if you have one of those dark moments, that you know instead of saying well, okay, I’m down, I might as well stay here. You pick yourself up, you choose to get out of bed another day. I think it’s my responsibility to offer that information to other people which was kind of hard for me, because I’m more of a private person. Mattie’s an extrovert. I mean he just loved sharing anything and everything with crowds. I’m a little more private, and it was a little more difficult to go out in public to share all the details of our life, but I think when the details of your life can inspire people to find hope when they’re really struggling, or to realize,  you know what, I am doing a good job parenting, or despite my burdens I have blessings—whatever the inspiration is that you draw for yourself, for you family, for your coworkers in whatever you’re doing, I feel like it’s my responsibility and my privilege, they’re hand in hand, to share that message—my story, Mattie’s story—and to share those details in a way that brings people closer to him in a very real way—not in a little guru way, but in a very real way.

Q: How has your faith changed in the last five years? How has everything that happened affected your spiritual journey?

I don’t know that my faith has changed dramatically in the last five years. I can say that my faith has grown dramatically across the 20 years that I had with my children, and it’s continued to grow on that spectrum since I’ve buried my fourth and only surviving child, which was Mattie. I think one of the greatest changes I had in faith came during Mattie’s final months. I’m very good at, through prayer, giving God a to-do list, all right? Dear God, this is where I need you, and this is how you can meet my needs. And I give God the little to-do list, and I think I began to realize, towards the end of Mattie’s life, prayer is not just giving God your wishes and your to-do list, it’s asking God to be on my to-do list for the day. It’s asking to bring God into whatever the moments are in my day, so that really started before Mattie died. Since he died, I’ve hit some very, very low points. I think about a year and half after he died, you know, people think if you get through that first year it’s all going to be okay, you get through that first year, and everybody’s there for the first anniversary, because everybody remembers Mattie died. Even my first three children, people are there for the first Christmas, the first birthday, the first anniversary. But then people go back to their everyday life, they go back to their norms, and I can never go back to my everyday life. I can’t go back to my norms because my norm was parenting my children. And it’s not that your life ends, but there’s this dramatic shift. Your path is no longer—you’re still going to end up at the same end point in your life, but you’re taking a totally unplanned path. You’re really starting all over again. I have had mornings where I’m not quite sure what the sane reason is to bother getting out of bed. I always find one, and if I can’t find one, what I’ve learned is to allow other people to give me a sane reason to get out of bed. And I think that’s one of the gifts from God, is that God is present in other people, in my kin family, in my friends. So as sad as some days are, and as much as I miss my children, I really work hard to open my spirit to God’s presence through other people, because I believe my children are with God. I don’t believe that heaven is some place up in the sky, up in a cloud. When people say, oh, Mattie’s right up there, I don’t see that. I see Mattie as right up here. I see spirit and heaven as being wherever there’s goodness, and if that goodness is in a space or in nature or in other people, that goodness is God, and my children are with God. So, you know, I seek to feel what I am looking for, a connection through heaven and goodness, through whatever I can find in the world that’s good.  I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but that’s where I am. I’m more praying that God just shows me doors and windows, because I’m really not sure what I’m supposed to be doing in life other than doing good, being my best self. So I ask God to help me recognize any opportunities to do that.

Q: You have an incredible support network. You have some really close people who’ve walked with you from the very beginning. Talk a little more about the role those people have played in your life.

I think if you were to stop and think about the details of Mattie’s life and my life, you think, okay, there’s been financial problems. There’s been a divorce. There’s been four children with disabilities who’ve died. I have a disability that’s progressing every year. You think about those details, and you think, wow, what a horrible life. And since all of my children have died you would look at me and think I’m very much alone. And in all honesty, there are times when I feel alone, because I love my children and miss them. I will never stop mourning the loss of my children, but I also don’t go through each day miserable, because Mattie and I have always had people around us that bring light to our life. In the book you learn more about what Mattie called our “kin family,” and he said you’re related to kin through life, not necessarily blood. It may or may not be blood. But he said blood relations can sometimes be sweet or sour, and kin relations are through life, and life is always good. So Sandy Newcomb is more like a sister to me than a friend, and her three children, who are now adults, two of them with their own children now, they’re like family to me. They’re my kin, and we celebrate holidays and, you know, when one person’s sad we’re all sad, and when one person’s having a moment of joy we all feel joy. I do talk about in the book at one point Mattie asked Sandy, why do you always do such good things for my mom and me? And when Mattie asked her this question he had been in the ICU for about 5 months. At the time Sandy still had two children living at home. She was working two jobs. She herself is divorced and a single parent, and yet she came to the hospital at least three days a week and would spend most of the night there with Mattie so that I could go in the waiting room and take a little break. And she said because that’s all that God asks us to do is to do good for others, to love your neighbor. And she told Mattie that your neighbor is whoever God puts in the path of your life, and if we just all reorganize that and do what we can in the moments that we can, life goes on. Mattie and I have often prayed in gratitude that we have people like that in our lives, that we have such an incredible circle of support. I mean, I’m in two different churches. I’m a Roman Catholic, I love Catholicism. I love the Holy Eucharist. Sandy is Presbyterian. I go with her to her church as well, where I find the most wonderful fellowship, the group of people that are there, just—there are good people everywhere. You just have to be open to that.

Q: You’ve mentioned your speech about not looking at life as how long you live, but how you live. Tell me about that.

One of the speeches that I give is called “Our Dash in Time.” I first heard it in the Presbyterian church from a minister who was talking about the difference between chronos and kairos. Chronos is really a two-dimensional look. It’s a measurement of life in seconds and centuries, whereas your kairos isn’t just seconds and centuries, it’s looking at the depth of the time that you live. So you can look at Mattie’s life, and the dash that marks 1990 to 2004 was not quite 14 years, and you think, what could somebody do in less that 14 years? But because of how Mattie chose to live, because of the kairos of Mattie’s life, the depth of his time, my gosh, I mean he lived an incredibly full life—not just with opportunities to do things, but with how he thought, how he chose to treasure a sunrise, a sunset, a baby holding his finger, I mean, just taking little tiny moments and cherishing them and making them that memorable, that celebrated, and inspiring others to do the same. Not that we don’t want many, many moments in our life; everybody wants to have as many heartbeats as they can. But it really is the measurement of your heart songs, or the depth of your life, that is how we’re going to be remembered. So Mattie, in less than 14 years, is remembered with this powerful legacy, and people smile when they hear his name. It’s sad that he’s gone, and people shake their head at that. But anybody that you say the word “Mattie” to that knows who he is. They smile. That’s powerful. That’s how I want to be remembered, with a smile, not as, oh, that poor woman, she buried her four children, but, wow, that poor woman, she buried her four children, but boy did she love life, and boy those kids were sure happy. I want to be remembered as a smile on people’s faces just like Mattie, and that comes from how you life your life, not how long you live your life.

Q: How are you feeling these days?

Health-wise I have a progressive condition, which is very frustrating. Mattie and I are very resilient, optimistic people. When you have a disease that’s constantly changing, getting worse, you can’t ever just get used to it. You know, we moved into this house a little over three years ago, set it up accessible, and everything was right where I could reach it. Oh, my goodness, a year later, it’s like, well, I can’t reach this anymore, I can’t reach this, so you change things.  It’s like, every year, you don’t notice it day to day, but when you go to decorate your Christmas tree or when you go back to the same place, you go to the beach every summer, and you suddenly realize I can’t lift my arm high enough to do this, I can’t transfer independently, you know, out of my wheelchair, I can’t decorate even the closest branch on my Christmas tree anymore. That’s not a lot of fun. Losing the ability to drive, you know, I feel like as I hit middle age, where you have the opportunity to really synthesize academic knowledge and experiential knowledge and spiritual knowledge, and you’re hitting a point where you just feel so blessed with it’s beginning to come together, you actually can do less and less and less physically, and you become dependent on other people, and that’s been really hard for me. And medically I’ve hit a few scares in the last year, with, like, cardiac-type things. It’s kind of scary, but I try as hard as I can to live in each moment and to not think about what’s going to happen. You have to think about what’s going to happen tomorrow, but you can’t focus on that. You have to have a vision for it but not get lost dwelling on it, in the same way with the past you can’t look at the past and get stuck in it in a way that you can’t move forward, and you can’t look at the future and what might happen tomorrow in such a way that you’re afraid to enter it. So I think that’s what Mattie meant with hope. You don’t live in denial, you don’t say the past didn’t happen and the future’s not going to bring its challenges, but you move through it the best you can and have a good attitude. You reflect the moment in a way that God’s there with you.

Q: For a lot of people it’s about control—what you can control and what you can’t.

I’m all about control. I’m an OCD, love control, absolutely, and it’s hard giving that up, you know, and it’s little things, you know. I like cleaning my own house. I like folding my own laundry because I fold in thirds. I’ve learned compulsive people fold in thirds. But now it’s I’m so grateful for anybody that does my laundry I don’t care if it’s folded in quarters or halves or thirds or fifths. I’m happy that people are doing it. But it’s really hard letting go of that control. It’s really hard knowing I will always be the passenger in a car. I will never be driving again. That’s a really, really tough thing when I’m a doer, a giver, a be-er, and you have to be the recipient and call someone and ask them to do something for you. That’s a tough lesson for me.

Q: What are you doing professionally these days?

I would say I’m an advocate and a consultant, a motivational speaker. I love writing, speaking, doing research, and the fields that I work with range from education, health care and family-centered care collaboration, but also peace and hope. I do a lot of mentoring of teenagers around the world who want to understand, how is peace possible? And I help people understand Mattie’s premises. Mattie called it the three choices for peace. What are these choices, how can we embrace them—that peace is not just an absence of violence, peace is also a conversation with people you don’t know or don’t understand. Peace is taking care of the earth. Just helping people understand how basic needs, equitably meeting basic needs of people, leads to peace. So my speeches are everything from how to work with families whose children might be dying to why does it matter that people feel happiness, hope, and have food and water and education? How does that lead to peace? And I love the work that I do.

Q: And the Mattie J.T. Stepanek Foundation?

After Mattie died, people that are in my neighborhood, in the city of Rockville [Maryland] in the King Farm community, they said Mattie’s message is not one that we want to get lost with the fact that he died barely a teenager. Had Mattie been [in his] 30s or 40s when he died, there’s a chance that he would have had an automatic place in history, and there were people who knew Mattie as a person, and part of the reason that I said I wrote this book—that  he wasn’t a guru, he was witty and wise, he was very real. So people who were his neighbors said we need to make sure people understand who Mattie was, what was his message. So they started the Mattie Stepanek Foundation, and really the mission of our foundation is to make Mattie’s message available and accessible, accessible meaning understandable. So we are working on curriculum guides so that teachers who want to incorporate peace or poetry or character development into preschool, into high school, into a university course, that there’s different worksheets or presentations, videos that they could rely on to introduce anything from “Heartsongs” to the three choices for peace to their students, and there are actually schools around the country who are already doing this type of work, and we’re trying to help incorporate what they’re doing with what we are doing. But it’s really just keeping that message of hope and peace out there and alive, and I think what we believe the foundation is, is that Mattie’s message is not unique. He offered us the universal message, you know: Give and you shall receive. Mattie’s life was unique. Mattie’s experiences were unique. Mattie’s choices as a young child were unique. So as a messenger he’s very powerful, you know. People listen when they hear Mattie’s words either on a page or on TV or even in the park named after him, the sound bites you can listen to. So because of that the message is the same thing other people say, but as a messenger he’s very unique, and people are drawn to him for any number of reasons. So it’s to keep that available for people, and I’m proud to be the eternal chair of this foundation.

Q: Other people say they have sensed Mattie. Have you?

I have had people who have contacted me to say they believe Mattie has interceded in their lives. They believe that Mattie has healed their child or touched their spirit or turned them back to God or prevented them from suicide. I have gotten messages; some of the messages I think are very profound and very believable. Some I think are people who want to feel something good. I personally have not felt my son, I would love to feel him, but I think if—I think my son, if he is speaking into people’s hearts or spirits, if he is interceding in people’s lives, and people recognize it…things like that are very powerful for me to hear, and what I would give to have my son come and stand and just say hi or yo, just say anything, just touch me, but I know that that would be wrong, and I think that my son is wiser than that, because if my son came and spoke to me or touched me, and I knew without doubt this is my son, I so miss him that I’m afraid I’d never emotionally or physically be able to move from that spot. I would be trapped, thinking OK, if he could do it once, this must be the magic portal. I’m going to stay right here, and I find that the people who tell me they have received some message from Mattie are ones that are able to move on after that. Those are the ones I believe more….

Before Mattie died, in the final week of his life, I mean, Mattie knew he was dying and I did, too. But a parent can never, ever just say, OK, it’s time, you can go. I mean, that’s a really tough thing, even as your child is dying in front of your eyes and your heart. You can’t give them permission. You can’t be OK with it. You can give them permission, but you can’t really be OK because that goes against everything that parenting is. It’s not okay to bury a child, it’s not OK. No matter how good a life that child lived, no matter how graceful the death is, the death of a child—nothing makes it right. So Mattie was clearly ready to go but wanted me to be, he wanted me to let him know that I’d be OK, and he had said things that he had said to other people before: you can’t lie down in the ashes of another person’s life. He had said all kinds of profound things: Take my message forward. Your message, my message are so similar, Mom, be a messenger for me. You know, take the torch, give more light to your own message, beautiful things. I think the thought that was most meaningful, and if I ever write about my life story about grief—because this book is not my story, it’s Mattie’s story. It’s not my story of loss. It’s his story of life—if I ever wrote my own story it would be called “Choosing to Inhale,” because that was the challenge my son gave me. He said when I’m gone, promise me you will choose to inhale, not breathe merely to exist, and that means finding some worthy reason to move into each next moment, and that’s the most difficult choice I face every single day, but it’s the most worthy choice. Once I’ve made that choice to move forward, to move with God, to be a messenger, to give a speech, to write a book, to serve as a consultant, all the different things I do, I have to choose that, because the easiest thing to do would be to lay in bed until it’s my time to be with my son again. But he challenged me to make life more than breathing. Choose to inhale.

I had four children in a four-and-a-half year time span, which makes me a very firm, good Irish Catholic woman, which is what I am. But when I was having these children, I did not know I was going to give birth to children with this condition. When I was having children, I was apparently healthy, active, running two to five miles a day, coaching and playing sports, working on my first doctoral degree, had no clue—and it was clear something was wrong with the children, but they were misdiagnosed, and with the misdiagnoses came the misprognoses of recurrence. So I thought the first one was a fluke of nature, the second one was recessive, you know, they told me the third one would be healthy. Mattie’s my fourth. I had, I mean, I was doing, practicing many ways not to have a fourth. He was clearly a spirit meant to be, not an accident, a spirit meant to be. So yes, by the time Mattie was born I had already buried two children and had a third that was going to die from the same condition, and I knew that Mattie, short of a miracle, was going to have this mystery ailment that afflicted my children. We found out when Mattie was two what was wrong with me, and that’s when they went back and backtracked and figured out what was wrong with the kids, and I had no more children after that. What kept me going through all of that—while one of my children was alive, what keeps you going is very different than what keeps me going now. When your child’s alive, your number one focus is keep that child alive, and if the child’s not in an active medical crisis, then make that child know life is good despite the equipment, despite the ventilator, the trach, the needles, being in the hospital. Why would you want to celebrate life? Why would you want to live longer?  So how I coped during the bulk of the 20 years when I had my children was by teaching them that life is a celebration….I gave my children a celebration of life in whatever few months or years they had. So even though you grieve the loss of your child, when there’s still another living child, not that the grief isn’t there, but you have to focus on celebrating life with that child, with the one that’s still alive. You can’t give them your grief just because you miss their sibling. When Mattie died, that’s when the grief became so overwhelming, because where do you put your mommy role? It’s really difficult to be a mommy to children who have died. You know, bringing flowers to their grave, cutting the grass around their marker, that’s—it’s a very unnatural role, but you don’t suddenly not feel like you’re a mommy any more. You want to nurture, you want to take care of things, and you want to teach somebody to celebrate life. So while my children were alive, clearly I coped, you know, through religion, through faith, through spirituality, but also I had my children. That was my celebration. It’s a very different thing once there is no child there, and you really are relying on God, your spirituality, and the kin family of support that’s around you to help you choose to inhale everyday.

Mattie knew his entire life that he had a condition that could lead to early death, that he had a life-threatening condition. When he was 10 years old, he realized that that possibility of an early death was becoming more of a probability. We really thought he was going to die before his 11th birthday.  We’re not quite sure how he eked out those last three years. We’re thrilled that he did. I think it was when Mattie was 13, it was the fall of 2003, Mattie had several conversations with me where he said, “God’s no longer giving me messages. God’s just walking with me through my life,” and at that point he realized his time on earth was complete and that he would probably die sometime during the coming year because he had fulfilled his reason to be. And he was not excited about that. He really wanted God to say you’ve done such a good job I’m going to give you five bonus years. I mean, he was not anxious to die. But I think he realized when he was 13, I’ve done what I came to do. I’ve done it well. There was a sense of urgency that he felt to get as much in place as possible that could go on after him. He called it his echo and his silhouette. You know, get as much writing down; get as many video tapes in so that things would last. So he always knew that he would die soon. I think at 13, I think on the day that he turned 13 he knew he was not going to turn 14. He was very clear. He tried to tell me spring of 2004 before he went into cardiac arrest. He kept trying to prepare me for what was about to come, and I couldn’t listen to him. I just—I couldn’t. I knew what he wanted to say, and I thought, if I listen to you I’m going to tell you, it’s almost like saying, OK, all right, and I couldn’t do it, and I feel very badly about that now. I feel like I didn’t—it was one of my mommy decisions that I regret. You know, I should’ve just put my arm around him and said that must be really difficult, you must feel very alone. But I thought if I did that he’d think I’m saying, wow, this is really sad but it’s—you’re right. So I wouldn’t even let him talk to me about it. I just—I couldn’t tend to it, and I feel very badly. I will forever feel badly about that. But I don’t think he holds that against me, I think he knew that I was being a mommy.

“Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?”

Those stirring words come from one of the most durable spiritual guides of all time, the Rule of St. Benedict.  It’s been said everything one needs to know about living the spiritual life is contained in this little book. Over the past year, this 1,500-year-old treatise has become, for me, a constant companion.

Since June of 2008, I’ve had the extraordinary opportunity to spend an average of a week a month at Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine monastery for women in Atchison, Kansas. I’ve been invited to share as deeply as a lay person can in the spiritual life of the sisters for a book I’ve been asked to write. I admit I questioned at first what practical wisdom a monastery might hold for a modern, married, professional woman like me. It turns out I’ve learned plenty.

I used to think of monasteries as outmoded remnants of a past era. But now, when I enter Mount St. Scholastica, I feel as if I’m peering into the future, a future our world so desperately needs—one that stresses community over competitiveness, service over self-aggrandizement, quietude over gratuitous talk, and simplicity over constant consumption. The Mount is a place where those who listen are valued as much as those who speak up; a place where people forgo personal wealth but want for nothing, where prayers are said for the victims of violent crime and bells are tolled when a Death Row prisoner is executed.

I identify now with the words of Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk and spiritual writer. After his first visit as a young man to the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton wrote in his journal: “I had wondered what was holding this country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. It is this monastery.”

Whenever I walk into Mount St. Scholastica, I have the sense that I’m entering a deeper reality. It starts with the beginning of the day. The sisters don’t wake up and immediately turn on National Public Radio or read The New York Times, as I do. Day begins with Morning Praise. The sisters trace the sign of the cross over their lips and say, “Lord, open my lips, and we shall proclaim your praise.” It’s a way of promising that the entire day is going to be a form of praise. It’s not about checking off all the things on one’s to-do list, or plotting to sell more things today than yesterday or, as in my case, writing more words than I did the day before. It’s about making sure everything we do in the course of the day is an act of praise, an expression of gratitude for life.

After the sisters say that little prayer, they sing. Imagine how different our days might begin, if we started out each morning singing—even just mentally singing something in our head. If you’re someone who loves Broadway show tunes, as I do, you might choose “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Or it could be a favorite hymn (“We Rise Again from Ashes” is one of my morning favorites).

People think of monasteries of very quiet, perhaps even lonely places. But the truth is they teem with activity. The sisters work outside at many different jobs: teaching, doing social work, counseling, and hospital chaplaincy (one at the Mount was even a firefighter, another a funeral director), but everyone also has a job to perform within the monastery. Each sister takes a turn at cleaning the bathrooms and doing the dishes (albeit with industrial-size mechanical dishwashers). Even the prioress and the PhDs have their “at bat” at these menial jobs. It’s a way of saying that all work is sacred. Ora et labora, work and prayer, is the Benedictine motto. I like to think of it not so much as work and prayer, but work as prayer.

“Let the cellarer [the monastery supply clerk] handle the kitchen utensils as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar,” St. Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a reminder to respect the common objects and utensils of our lives and a promise to extend that respect to the people around us, the community we live in, our natural resources, and our environment.

In his book on the Rule of St. Benedict (Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living, Morehouse Publishing, 1996) John McQuiston, a trial attorney, points out, “Everything we have is on loan. Our homes, businesses, rivers, closest relationships, bodies, and experiences, everything we have is ours in trust and must be returned at the end of our use of it.” This is the way of monastics. As we continue to reap the damages of our throw-away society, we can see just how far-sighted monasteries have been.

There are some old monastic customs that the sisters don’t follow anymore, and frankly I wish some of them could become a part of our everyday lives. My friend, Sister Thomasita Homan, told me that for many years, whenever a group of sisters were assigned to work together a project, they would bow to each other and say in German (the native language of the first Benedictines in Atchison), “Have patience with me.” Imagine doing that in today’s workplace! I think about how much more pleasant it might be, when I’m out reporting a story for PBS, if I bowed to the cameraman, bowed to the producer, and they to me, and we asked each other to have patience, please, with each others’ human frailties.

Such humility forms the core of monastic life. It is especially important for Benedictines, who take a vow of stability. The vow commits them to live—and grow—with the same group of people at the same monastery for the rest of their lives. Stability recognizes, as one sister put it, that “there’s nowhere else but here.”

At Mount St. Scholastica, there are sisters who have lived together for as many as 75 years. Having moved from state to state here in the U.S. and lived in three European cities over the course of my career, the notion of spending one’s entire life in the same place seems quite foreign to me. In fact, the whole concept is alien to our highly mobile American society. Stability reminds us to grow where we’re planted. A monk was asked, “What is it then to be stable?” And he answered, “You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere; that you do not need to seek God elsewhere. God is here, and it is useless to seek God elsewhere, because it is not God that is absent from us. It is we who are absent from God.”

Often that absence stems from a simple lack of balance. We have an abundance of food in this country, plenty of gadgets and opportunities for recreation. What we lack is time to enjoy them. The rhythm of monastic life opens the way for balance. Benedict in his Rule stipulates that monks get seven hours rest a night. Those who require more food because they are ill or weak should get it, and those who aren’t strong enough to do physical labor won’t be forced to do it. The Benedictines even go so far as to call leisure “holy.”

I saw firsthand the Benedictine way of balance when I was at Mount St. Scholastica as Lent began this year. First, the sisters enjoyed the monastic version of Mardi Gras. All of them, even the elderly ones living in the nursing home wing, gathered for beignets and hot chocolate. Not just any hot chocolate, but hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps. The sisters laughed and joked and were having a grand time. But at the appointed moment, everyone got up from their tables and walked in a procession from the community room to the dining room. There, a fire blazed in the fireplace. One of the sisters carried in the palms from last year’s Palm Sunday. One by one she threw the branches in the fire to create the ashes for this year’s Ash Wednesday, and from that moment on there was complete silence in the monastery for the rest of the night and all day Ash Wednesday. A time for fun and leisure, yes, and a time to be serious and prayerful. Balance.

Perhaps the most important word I’ve learned at the monastery is a Latin word: conversatio. It refers to another one of the vows taken specifically by Benedictine monks and sisters: conversatio morum, literally “conversion of morals.” The phrase is often loosely translated as “conversion of life.” But I like the definition Sister Thomasita once gave to me:  conversatio as a constant “turning toward,” a constant conversation with life.

I like the idea of turning because it connotes change, and there are certain aspects of my life I’ve been trying to change for a long time. Like my quick temper. I find that I like the person I am at the monastery much better than the person I am in my everyday life, because when I’m at the monastery I’m calm. I’m patient. I don’t lose my temper. Once, just a few days after I returned home from the monastery, I argued with my beautiful husband. It was a totally silly, unnecessary argument, and I emailed Sister Thomasita and asked, “Why do I have these stupid arguments with my husband, who’s the person as close to me as God? Why can’t I live conversatio in my day-to-day life with the people I’m closest to? And she answered, “You are living conversatio. Your struggle. That’s the conversatio.” And that gave me hope—hope that I don’t have to be a saint. I just have to be human.

“Keep death before you daily,” Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a potent reminder not to spend my life twisting in anger or caught up with what Thomas Merton called “useless care.” My stays at the monastery propel me every day to remember what is essential, what gives my life meaning. Merton referred to it as finding “the hidden ground of our being,” finding that place where we not only discover God, but where God can discover us.

I suppose I am just one of the many Benedict has spoken to through the ages who yearns for life and desires to see good days. “Run, then,” Benedict reminds me and all of us, “while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you.”

Judith Valente, a contributing correspondent for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, is also a poet and co-editor with Charles Reynard of Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press, 2005).

It is true that for many people “faith” and “belief” are just two words for the same thing. But they are not the same, and in order to grasp the magnitude of the religious upheaval now under way, it is important to clarify the difference. Faith is about deep-seated confidence. In everyday speech we usually apply it to people we trust or the values we treasure. It is what theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) called “ultimate concern,” a matter of what the Hebrews spoke of as the “heart.”

Belief, on the other hand, is more like opinion. We often use the term in everyday speech to express a degree of uncertainty. “I don’t really know about that,” we say, “but I believe it may be so.” Beliefs can be held lightly or with emotional intensity, but they are more propositional than existential. We can believe something to be true without it making much difference to us, but we place our faith only in something that is vital for the way we live. Of course people sometimes confuse faith with beliefs, but it will be hard to comprehend the tectonic shift in Christianity today unless we understand the distinction between the two.

The Spanish writer Miguel Unamuno (1964-1936) dramatizes the radical dissimilarity of faith and belief in his short story “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr,” in which a young man returns from the city to his native village in Spain because his mother is dying. In the presence of the local priest she clutches his hand and asks him to pray for her. The son does not answer, but as they leave the room, he tells the priest that, much as he would like to, he cannot pray for his mother because he does not believe in God. “That’s nonsense,” the priest replies. “You don’t have to believe in God to pray.”

The priest in Unamuno’s story recognized the distinction between faith and belief. He knew that prayer, like faith, is more primordial than belief. He might have engaged the son who wanted to pray but did not believe in God in a theological squabble. He could have hauled out the frayed old “proofs” for the existence of God, whereupon the young man might have quoted the equally jaded arguments against the proofs. Both probably knew that such arguments go nowhere. The French writer Simone Weil (1909-43) also knew. In her Notebooks, she once scribbled a gnomic sentence: “If we love God, even though we think he doesn’t exist, he will make his existence manifest.” Weil’s words sound paradoxical, but in the course of her short and painful life—she died at thirty-four—she learned that love and faith are both more primal than beliefs.

*

Creeds are clusters of beliefs. But the history of Christianity is not a history of creeds. It is the story of a people of faith who sometimes cobbled together creeds out of beliefs. It is also the history of equally faithful people who questioned, altered, and discarded those same creeds. As with church buildings, from clapboard chapels to Gothic cathedrals, creeds are symbols by which Christians have at times sought to represent their faith. But both the doctrinal canons and the architectural constrictions are means to an end. Making either the defining element warps the underlying reality of faith.

*

Several years ago an acquaintance of mine described himself to me in a casual conversation as “a practicing Christian, not always a believing one.” His remark puzzled me, but it also began to clarify some of the enigmas that had swirled within both my personal faith and my thinking about religion and theology. His remark suggested that the belief/nonbelief axis is a misleading way of describing Christianity. It misses the whole point of not only Christianity, but other religions as well. I have never heard this insight expressed more eloquently than I did one evening in Milan, Italy, where in 1995 Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini had invited me to give a talk at what he called his annual “Lectureship for Nonbelievers.”

I had not known what to expect, but it turned out to be quite a glittering occasion. A large crowd draped in Armani and Prada had assembled in an ornate public hall, and I was already seated when Martini, who stands well over six feet tall, entered in a scarlet cassock and black biretta, the full regalia of a prince of the church. He welcomed the audience and then went on to say that by calling this an event for “nonbelievers” he did not intend to imply anything about the people present. “The line between belief and unbelief,” he said, “runs through the middle of each one of us, including myself, a bishop of the church.”

Psalm 23

A psalm, by David.

God is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.
You lay me down in lush meadows.
You guide me toward tranquil waters,
reviving my soul.
You lead me down paths of righteousness
for that is your nature.
And when I walk though the valley, overshadowed by death,
I will fear no harm, for you are with me.
Your rod and staff—they comfort me.
You spread a table before me
in the face of my greatest fears.
You drench my head with oil;
my cup overflows past the brim.
Surely goodness and kindness
will accompany me all the days of my life
and I will have dwelt in the house of the Holy
for the length of my days.

Psalm 32

By David, a psalm of understanding.

Blessed is the one who lifts up her transgressions to God;
her sins will be forgiven.

Blessed is the one for whom the Holy One
need not reckon his faults;
whose spirit is clean of deceit.

When I ploughed the fields in silence,
my bones wasted away;
they groaned all day as I worked.

For day and night your hand weighed heavy against me;
the juice of my breast went dry, like the brittle fruit of summer–Selah.

I made my sin known to you.
My wrongs I no longer attempted to hide.

I said, I will confess my rebellions to the Eternal–
and you forgave my sins and errors–Selah.

For this, let the one who loves you
pray at any time she can find–
do not let the flood of waters overtake her.

You are a hiding place for me,
protecting me from anguish.
You surround me with a loud cry of rescue–Selah.

I will enlighten and illumine for you
the path you should walk.
My eyes will give witness.

Don’t be like a horse,
a mule without understanding
with a bridle and halter put on to restrain it.

In such a way God cannot approach you.

Many are the pains of those who persist in their wrongs,
but those who trust in their Creator are surrounded by love.

Take joy in God and let the righteous rejoice.
Cry out with gladness, all who are steadfast of heart.

Psalm 90

A prayer of Moses, man of God.

God, you have been a dwelling place for us
from one generation to the next.

Before mountains were born,
before earth and its people came to exist.

From eternity until eternity you are holy.

Mortals can turn to you until they are crushed.
You say, “Return, children of Adam.”

Because a thousand years you can hold in your sight
like a yesterday passing into today,
a watchman’s hour of relief at night.

You flood the years; they pass like sleep.
By morning, they vanish like grass.

At dawn a person flowers and is fragrant;
by evening we become withered and dry.

For by your wrath we are extinguished.
By your anger we are made to feel afraid.

You have laid out our transgressions before you,
our secrets are illumined by the light of your face.

All our hours pass by in your fury.
Our years come to an end as though imagined.

The days of our years are seventy;
if we are strong, maybe eighty.

All our boasts are toil and delusion,
because life passes and rushes and flies away.

Who can bear the force of your rejection?
Our fear of you seems to us like your anger.

Make known to us the portion of our days
so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Turn back to us, God—-Oh, how long?
Have compassion on those trying to serve your will.

Fill our morning with acts of your kindness
and we will sing and rejoice all our days.

Bring us joy in proportion to our days of affliction,
years we saw only strife.

May your acts be visible to your servants,
your splendor to their children’s eyes.

May the sweetness of the Holy One, our Creator,
be constantly before us.

And the work of our hands, give us direction.
And the work of our hands–give it direction toward you.