INHERITANCE AND INVENTION: FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S PRAYER JOURNAL

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/11/inheritance-invention-flannery-oconnors-prayer-journal.html



How should one pray? Not even the Psalmists or the disciples knew the answer. The Psalms are filled with pleas for God to place words on the tongues of believers; the disciples were even so bold as to ask Christ to teach them how to pray. The struggle to listen, but also to speak to God, animates the scriptures.

We have inherited the rewards of that struggle—the Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer—along with other prayers, from the liturgical life of the church, like the Doxology, and from the life of the community, like the Serenity Prayer. To these inherited prayers we add our own, spontaneous expressions: the whisper of thanks for a car accident anticipated but averted, the silent but specific petition for a promotion or a raise, a team’s collective plea to win, the wild screams for understanding after the death of a child.

The tension between the conventional prayers that we inherit and the prayers we invent can be fierce, especially for the believer whose vocation is writing. The publication of Flannery O’Connor’s “Prayer Journal” (excerpted in the magazine in September) offers a glimpse into one writer’s wrestling with the problem of how to pray. William Sessions, who came to know O’Connor when they both wrote for the Archdiocese of Atlanta’s newspaper, and who is at work on an authorized biography of her, recently discovered the journal, which records O’Connor’s prayer life from January, 1946, through September, 1947, when she was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Because the first few pages are missing, it begins with an auspicious fragment, “effort at artistry,” which it is, not only in its contents but in the life of the one who authored it.

It may seem strange to publish a prayer journal, but believers have long sought encouragement in the prayers of others. While prayers are often private, they always presume an audience, even if it is only the invisible listener, God. There are prayer journals for the young and the old, for particular vocations, for specific seasons in the liturgical year; there are journals crafted from the Church Fathers and Church Mothers, from mystics and martyrs, from the famous and the obscure. Prayers are selected and printed in festive editions for new parents, the sick, the bereaved, the anxious, the environmentally conscious, the imprisoned, the freshly converted, and just about every other group you can imagine.