I’ve just finished reading A Prayer Journal by Southern writer and essayist Flannery O’Connor. The book includes a facsimile of the handwritten pages of the spiritual diary she kept in a composition notebook from January 1946 to September 1947, while a student at the University of Iowa.
I didn’t need to read the typeset version; the original text is plenty neat enough to understand, and her words and scratch outs become even more intimate. I was rooting for her all the way through.
At the age of 21, O’Connor wants desperately to become a successful writer, and she prays in just that manner–desperately. Until one day her approach strikes her as incorrect.
“I want very much to succeed,” O’Connor writes in an early entry. “I have prayed to You about this with my mind and my nerves on it and strung my nerves into a tension over it and said, ‘oh God please,’ and ‘I must,’ and ‘please, please.’ I have not asked You, I feel, in the right way. Let me henceforth ask You with resignation–that not being or meant to be a slacking up in prayer but a less frenzied kind–realizing that the frenzy is caused by an eagerness for what I want and not a spiritual trust. I do not wish to presume. I want to love.”
That passage has me praying a little differently now, with angels’ help, a little less frenzied.
