Flannery O'Connor: A Heart that Burned to be God’s Instrument

Many consider Flannery O’Connor one of the greatest American short story writers. Her funny and shocking, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is one of my favorites, and her book Mystery and Manners is a brilliant exploration of writing as a Christian.

About eight years ago a friend gifted me a collection of her prayers called A Prayer Journal. The book is brief, only forty pages long–and it is not because she prayed only a few pages worth. No, the words reveal a woman whose heart burned for God. 

“Dear Lord,” she writes, “please make me want You. It would be the greatest bliss. Not just to want You when I think about You but to want You all the time, to have the want driving in me, to have it like a cancer in me” (36).

I have returned to her journal many times for inspiration and encouragement over the years. O’Connor refused to separate her life as an author from her life as a Christian. Her faith was integral to it. “Please let Christian principles permeate my writing,” she prays in one entry, “and please let there be enough of my writing (published) for Christian principles to permeate” (5). Let us explore for a moment when it meant for Flannery O’Connor to write fiction as a Christian. 

Writing as Christian

To start, it did not mean writing devotional fiction where the gospel is made explicit in every work. For her, seeing the world as it is was the key. “The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always,” she explains in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, “but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees” (178). Christian teaching helps us see accurately, for it is a light, not a hindrance, for the novelist to view the world by, “an instrument for penetrating reality” (178). 

One way the Christian writer sees the world differently is how she interprets the conflict in a story. O’Connor explains that “The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin” (167). The wickedness we see in both villains and heroes is not simply lack of education or improper upbringing, but ultimately the consequences of the Fall that have consequences for eternity (167). 

O’Connor thought that we would not have “great religious fiction” until we have the “combination of believing artist and believing society” (168). Something I think we have even less of today. But if the Christian writer reflects humanity’s “broken condition and, through it, the face of the devil we are possessed by,” this is a starting point. 

I think she is right, one trap in storytelling is to make sin and evil relative, a trend we see in many of our anti-hero movies in which the lines between good and evil fizzle away. The other trap is when we minimize the reality of sin and skip too quickly to salvation, cheapening it and making it something any human being can accomplish on his own. 

The Christian faith forces us to confront sin as what it is, a force that shackles us, separating us from God, man, creation, and ourselves. Only by seeing the sin in this way, do we recognize humanity’s helplessness and our need for Christ, from whom true salvation comes. 

The Wrestling Match 

Behind her confident assertions on writing, her journal lets us see her struggle behind the scenes. It looks like a wrestling match. In one corner was her ambition to write well and achieve success, and on the other, to live well, which for her was a whole-hearted devotion to God. She understood the stakes. “At the same time,” she explains, “I want all the things opposed to it [to loving God all the way]—I want to be a fine writer. Any success will tend to swell my head—unconsciously even” (23). 

O’Connor fought against selfish-ambition and arrogance by remembering again and again that her writing was a gift given to her, not something she manufactured. “If I ever do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me” (23). 

In one of her most moving passages, she prays, “Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine” (11). 

Her words are a vital reminder for all of us, including our students receiving a classical Christian education. Our gifts and training are not ours to horde, but to give away. They do not originate within our genius but flow from the Author of Creativity. We are but stewards of them and instruments for his work. 

On August 3, 1964, Flannery O’Connor died from lupus. No one knows where God will take her quirky characters, violent encounters, and moments of grace. But I am confident God will answer her prayers and use her writing in unexpected ways—for his Story and His glory. 

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Dane Bundy is President of Stage & Story and Director of Fine Arts at Regents School of Austin.