Why Write?

On this Labor Day I am making my way through Ralph Wood's recent book on Flannery O'Connor, arguably in his view the greatest Christian writer in 20th century America. The book catalogues her fascination with what he calls "the Christ-Haunted South," which is the nexus out of which she wrote. A devout Catholic, O'Connor was both fascinated by and admiring of the a fundamentalist Baptist tradition that she saw--in its spirit if not always its theology--as an antidote to the pervasive nihilism in both the secular and religious life of her time.

O'Connor's writing is not an easy read. Her short stories, the main body of her work, are filled with weird characters and strange evocative narrative that seem on the surface almost scandalous and therefore irrelevant, less than acceptable to average people. Yet time spent in them creates in one a passion for reading more of her and her characters--largely I think because they point to a passion for the life of faith that unmasks the trivialities that so dominated the secular and religious life of her time.

Afflicted with lupus and dying already in her thirties, the tenor of her spirit remains a haunting reminder to all of us that death itself, as she once wrote, is "the most significant position life offers the Christian," just as, Wood reminds us, the psalmists say in 39:4 ("Lord, make me to know mine end and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am") and 90:4 and 12 ("So teach us to number our days ... that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom").

With a deft sense of style as well as humor, and a dogged determination not to think of herself as anything special, this literary giant put her whole vocation as a writer in wonderful perspective. Reflecting on Jesus parable of the talents she wrote a friend, "The human comes before art. You do not write the best that you can for the sake of the art but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God to use or not use as he sees fit."

No wonder being dead she yet speaks so powerfully and redemptively. The God she loved and believed in so passionately is seeing to that.