While I am embarrassed to admit it, until very recently I had never read any of Flannery O’Connor’s work. I knew she was considered one of the great Catholic writers, but somehow her prestige only served to intimidate me. However, when the Jesuit Media Lab offered a Lenten study on O’Connor, I decided the time was ripe for reading her at last. I had hoped to simply enjoy her short stories, and could not have imagined the lasting impact she would have on my spiritual and creative life.
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Flannery O’Connor was a brilliant American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She was born in Georgia in 1925, and her work is often placed in the Southern Gothic tradition. Her writing style is sardonic but approachable, and extraordinarily layered. While her adult life was impacted by lupus, which caused her premature death at age 39, she continued writing in spite of her physical setbacks, and her writing remains a paragon of American fiction.
Within each of O’Connor’s stories, violence shakes the characters out of their complacency and forces them to examine the darker side of themselves and society. O’Connor’s stories had a similar impact on me personally — they invited me to consider my own internal darkness, how I respond to society’s injustices, and how my creative work reflects the fallen world with honesty.
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Our class started with “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” which begins as an amusing story about a family going on a road trip. The grandmother does not approve of the destination and makes her disappointment obvious, while the rest of the family ignores her. I found myself chuckling at the rich descriptions of characters, nodding along to familiar southern phrases, and enjoying the prickly family dynamics. Then, in one shocking cat-out-of-the-bag moment, everything changed. Suddenly, the story introduced fear, violence, horror, and confounding spiritual conversations. I finished the story, placed it face down, and sat in utter bewilderment. What had I just read?
Our class instructor had encouraged us to read each story twice, but I was unsure if I wanted to read it again. Throughout the following day, though, the story haunted my thoughts. I read it once more and was surprised to discover how much I appreciated it. O’Connor’s writing was brilliant — her use of foreshadowing, imagery, and plot twists were superb, and her characterization of each person in the story made me feel as if I’d met them. And her use of violence to draw out contemplation on spiritual matters really did linger with her readers (or at least with this one!).
Reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” felt like holding up a mirror to examine whether I recognized the characters’ unlikeable, prejudiced qualities in myself. And this only deepened with our next selection, “The Displaced Person.” This story focuses on a family of Polish refugees who are placed on a rural farm in the aftermath of World War II, and O’Connor uses this premise to address her culture’s systemic racism and xenophobia. Many aspects of it felt horrifyingly familiar, and the connections to the injustice and racism of our own current moment were hard to miss.
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In class, we discussed whether this story was more interested in social or spiritual commentary, and concluded that, if we take seriously that Jesus himself was a displaced person, the social and spiritual elements are intrinsically linked. This story helped me recognize the relationship between the horrors in our world — war, racism, and immigrant abuse — and my own responsibility as a follower of Christ.
These stories caused me to consider not only the darkness within myself, but also how I respond to the violence of our world. Do I view each displaced person as Christ? When we face the injustices of our world with the stark honesty we find in O’Connor’s work, we come to see our desperate need for people of action, for individuals who name the darkness and fight to overcome it.
O’Connor notes in her essays that she used violence to “return [her] characters to reality and prepare them for their moment of grace.” As I read more of her short stories (we also discussed “Good Country People” and “Revelation”) I began to consider how art can address the violence and darkness in our world and bring us all to a moment of grace. So while my contemplation of O’Connor’s stories first affected my spiritual life, I soon saw the ripple effect it had on my creative life as well. It led me to expect more honesty from my own writing, and a greater recognition of the darkness within myself and the world around me.
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This honest acknowledgment of reality, without flourish or façade, brought a greater measure of grace into my creative pursuits. Without the recognition of the dark, the light loses its power. O’Connor taught me that bravely and honestly naming the injustice, horrors, and darkness of our world can inspire others to contemplation and change. And, like with the characters within her stories, this brush against harsh truth can lead us to our moment of grace and an awareness of our desperate need for a Savior.
