A Prayer Journal

By Flannery O'Connor

Book Overview

"I would like to write a beautiful prayer," writes the young Flannery O'Connor in this deeply spiritual journal, recently discovered among her papers in Georgia. "There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise." Written between 1946 and 1947 while O'Connor was a student far from home at the University of Iowa, A Prayer Journal is a rare portal into the interior life of the great writer. Not only does it map O'Connor's singular relationship with the divine, but it shows how entwined her literary desire was with her yearning for God. "I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually . . . I do not want to be lonely all my life but people only make us lonelier by reminding us of God. Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You."

O'Connor could not be more plain about her literary ambition: "Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted," she writes. Yet she struggles with any trace of self-regard: "Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story."

As W. A. Sessions, who knew O'Connor, writes in his introduction, it was no coincidence that she began writing the stories that would become her first novel, Wise Blood, during the years when she wrote these singularly imaginative Christian meditations. Including a facsimile of the entire journal in O'Connor's own hand, A Prayer Journal is the record of a brilliant young woman's coming-of-age, a cry from the heart for love, grace, and art.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374236917
• ISBN13: 9780374236915
• Release Date: November 2013
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Insights into a Young Writer

How do you rate someone's personal prayers? You can't, but I did anyway. Such amazing heart-felt prayers from O'Connor while still in college and not the published author she'd come to be! The author worried that her prayers and her life would be mediocre, but not so! These, as she admits, are not traditional prayers. I keep a prayer journal, and mine are definitely traditional prayers for the sick and my own needs, prayers of thankfulness and praise. They might even be "boring" prayers. O'Connor honestly questions her faith, her walk with God, her fears, and her need to be a writer and not a mediocre one at that. I'd say she had no worries on the latter, but she had no crystal ball, did she? She wrote these poems in the 1940's while in college and had fears of "intellectual quackery"--psychologists, scientists, and learned people--stealing her faith from her because her "mind is not strong." She worries about heaven, hell, and grace and says, "I don't want to fear to be out, I want to love to be in." Fear is a constant theme in her prayers, and she tells God and herself that she'd rather her walk with God be based on love and not on fear. She can turn a phrase so well, even in the personal prayers. I liked that half the book gives us the typed and slightly edited version, but then the last half is a copy of the journal in her own handwriting. This makes her prayers more meaningful to the reader, though I suspect she never intended anyone else to see them. I don't feel guilty reading them, however. Her insights are refreshing, and I think she would be glad to know they are helpful. I've never been a big fan of her writing otherwise. Her stories and novels are bizarre and frightening to me, but I was much younger when I read them. I wonder if now I might find them different. I will have to see! I end with this quote from her journal: "I would like to write a beautiful prayer but I have nothing to do it from. There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to your praise; but I cannot do it. Yet at some insipid moment when I may possibly be thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs, the opening of a beautiful prayer may come from my subconscious and lead me to write these things."