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A review by jnepal
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor by Sally Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor
5.0
Love, love, love Mary Flannery O'Connor!
I hope to worship God in the New Jerusalem with her. I wish she hadn't had to go through suffering to get there, though. I wish none of us did. But Adam and Eve tripped on a snake with a lie in its fangs.
She was beautiful, though, really beautiful.
I love this quote about her faith, "Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy--fully armed too as it's a highly dangerous quest."
I love her funnyness, "At Emory they had a list of questions for me to answer and the first one was: Do you write from imagination or experience? My inclination at such a point is always to get deathly stupid and say, 'Ah jus writes.'"
"Her letters to me get less and less cordial and I get the idea that by now she is convinced I am a moron. I am convinced of it too so she ain't by herself."
She wrote by smell, "But I have no critical sense. I write entirely by smell as it were and criticize the same."
She loved Jesus, "The introduction is about the things that hold us fast in Christ when Christ is taken to be divine. It is worthless if it is not true."
Or how 'bout this quote on her difference of writing style with Graham Greene, "...there is a difference of fiction certainly and probably a difference of theological emphasis as well. If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming 'Jesus loves me!' I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it..."
I wish I could have met her.
Note: She does seem to have been (cliche) somewhat of a product of her time and place (as we all are to one degree or another)... she didn't seem to grasp, with her whole heart, the importance of reconciliation within and without the body of Christ as it has to do with peoples from different ethnicities/races (i.e. between white and black, specifically). It just feels like she hadn't been struck by the cross enough in this area of her heart as in other places of her heart. Nevertheless, she was definitely no lover of the klan or of those who treated others as less than human. She certainly seemed to agree that grace was the only thing that could bring true reconciliation, unfortunately (at least in these letters) she seems not to have been as concerned with it as she should have been (as we should be). Not that we have to be engaged in it full time, but that it needs to matter. I could be wrong though, about how she felt and what she believed in her heart.
I hope to worship God in the New Jerusalem with her. I wish she hadn't had to go through suffering to get there, though. I wish none of us did. But Adam and Eve tripped on a snake with a lie in its fangs.
She was beautiful, though, really beautiful.
I love this quote about her faith, "Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy--fully armed too as it's a highly dangerous quest."
I love her funnyness, "At Emory they had a list of questions for me to answer and the first one was: Do you write from imagination or experience? My inclination at such a point is always to get deathly stupid and say, 'Ah jus writes.'"
"Her letters to me get less and less cordial and I get the idea that by now she is convinced I am a moron. I am convinced of it too so she ain't by herself."
She wrote by smell, "But I have no critical sense. I write entirely by smell as it were and criticize the same."
She loved Jesus, "The introduction is about the things that hold us fast in Christ when Christ is taken to be divine. It is worthless if it is not true."
Or how 'bout this quote on her difference of writing style with Graham Greene, "...there is a difference of fiction certainly and probably a difference of theological emphasis as well. If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming 'Jesus loves me!' I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it..."
I wish I could have met her.
Note: She does seem to have been (cliche) somewhat of a product of her time and place (as we all are to one degree or another)... she didn't seem to grasp, with her whole heart, the importance of reconciliation within and without the body of Christ as it has to do with peoples from different ethnicities/races (i.e. between white and black, specifically). It just feels like she hadn't been struck by the cross enough in this area of her heart as in other places of her heart. Nevertheless, she was definitely no lover of the klan or of those who treated others as less than human. She certainly seemed to agree that grace was the only thing that could bring true reconciliation, unfortunately (at least in these letters) she seems not to have been as concerned with it as she should have been (as we should be). Not that we have to be engaged in it full time, but that it needs to matter. I could be wrong though, about how she felt and what she believed in her heart.