Flannery’s Prayers are available now for pre-order.
I don’t have my hands on the book yet, but I can’t wait to read the collection of Flannery O’Connor’s old prayers edited by W.A. Sessions. Reading a few of the excerpted prayers available in the New York Times and New Yorker, I wonder whether it is appropriate to read prayers that Flannery wrote to God — does that then make her prayers a performance of sort? It is one thing to read prayers someone wrote for the purpose of helping others pray, but I do wonder if Flannery herself ever thought her prayer journal would be published. I guess I’m going to have to get my hands on the book to learn that.
Meanwhile, here are a few excerpts that particularly struck me as a writer and as a woman always trying to get my “self” out of the way so I can love God’s glory and others can too.
“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 do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.
Give me the grace to be impatient for the time when I shall see You face to face and need no stimulus than that to adore You. Give me the grace, dear God, to see the bareness and the misery of the places where You are not adored and desecrated.
Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story — just like the typewriter was mine.”
What do you think? Have you ever written out prayers? Did you write them for others to read, or for God’s eyes alone?
Try writing a prayer today. It’s really cool if you read Scripture first and tie the prayer into that Scripture. If you want people to read it, share it in the comments section or in a letter or on social media.
