This week in The New Yorker they have published a big excerpt of the writer Flannery O'Connor's prayer journal, from the time she was in the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
Here's a taste:
Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. . . .
I always find it fascinating to read about writers who are simultaneously struggling with their art and their faith, and reading Flannery O'Connor's essays about how she viewed herself as a "Catholic writer" in Mystery and Manners was hugely influential in my own writing life as I was studying for my MFA. O'Connor makes the argument that Christian writers will write darker fiction than non-religious writers, because they see a world in danger, but that the best fiction does not attempt to use belief as a hammer to bash over the head of the readers, but as a mirror to hold up for them. Hence O'Connor's gothic tales that show us Bible salesmen who steal wooden legs and philosophical escaped murderers who execute old ladies. . .
For those of you with a subscription to The New Yorker (which is not a bad idea if you want to understand publishing literary short stories), the link to more of her prayer journal is here.
And here is an article on the subject for those of you without a subscription.
What do you think? How do faith and writing come together for you?
I love that O'Connor acknowledges God as the source of her creativity. She prays, “Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine.”
ReplyDeleteI believe that one temptation we share as artists is conceitedness. We praise ourselves (however quietly) for our creativity, imagination, and sheer fervor. We've all experienced that moment at the end of a long assignment in which we metaphorically - and sometimes, literally - raise our limp, emaciated arms victoriously and marvel that 'no one but me could have written this.' There's a danger in that, one to complex for me to tackle here and frankly, one that I don't fully comprehend.
Yet I know in my own life that believing that God endowed me with the gift to visualize characters and to imagine and then manifest their journeys through writing is what propels me to pursue pure art. Yes, I will journal impulsively to maintain my own sanity and I will complete (tardy or not) the assignments which my classes ask of me. But I will do so selfishly: to complain to God, to prove my own worthiness, to earn points toward an A.
It is only when I am conscious of God's presence while writing, when I am aware that he is both capable and willing to speak through me that my self is dispelled and some glint of divinity shines through my composition. When I say, "the self is dispelled" I do not mean that I am not an active participant in the work or that no essence of me is embedded in the story. I only mean that my work then is less polluted by the many temptations and distractions that the self is vulnerable to, that I am writing more purposefully, and am keenly receptive to God's leading.
I apologize if I sound supercilious. In honesty, very seldom do I achieve this state of purity and selflessness in my writing. Most often, I am inching toward a word count or moving stubbornly toward a fixed point (a clever plot twist I've devised etc.,) and am unwilling or unable to write so meditatively.
But I am serious when I say that regardless of my laziness and haughtiness and the innumerable limits of my intellectual capability, when I am writing in a space with God for God, my writing is at its best.
This state of pure art, the belief that God is both present and active in my work, is the sole beacon of hope for me as a writer and I have decisively chosen to believe in it. Otherwise, I am merely a frayed, terribly inadequate writer - the least of these surely - and desperately without a cause.