miniZibaldone

A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor Oh God please make my mind clear. Please make it clean. I ask You for a greater love for my holy Mother and I ask her for a greater love for You. Please help me to get down under things and find where You are. I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You. Please do not let the explanations of the psychologists about this make it turn suddenly cold. My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be. Please help all the ones I love to be free from their suffering. Please forgive me.

I know what you mean about being repulsed by the Church when you have only the Jansenist-Mechanical Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don't really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man's insurance system. It's never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can. Anyhow, I don't think it's a matter of wanting miracles. The miracles seem in fact to be the great embarrassment to the modern man, a kind of scandal. If the miracles could be argued away and Christ reduced to the status of a teacher, domesticated and fallible, then there'd be no problem. Anyway, to discover the Church you have to set out by yourself. The French Catholic novelists were a hero to me in this—Bloy, Bernanos, Mauriac. In philosophy, Gilson, Maritain an...

Reading is the first way to listen, and thus to learn. Invitation to read From  “ The Day After Redemption” “Where in your time, in your body has Jesus redeemed you? Show me where because I don’t see the place. If there was a place where Jesus had redeemed you, that would be the place for you to be, but which of you can find it?” At the beginning of Flannery O’Connor’s  Wise Blood , the would-be anti-Christ Hazel Motes says to Mrs.  Wally B. Hitchcock, a passenger seated in front of him on a train: “I reckon you think you have been redeemed.” Mrs. Hitchcock, clearly taken aback by the question, “snatched at her collar,” not knowing how to answer the question. “I reckon you think you have been redeemed,” Hazel insisted. “She blushed. After a second she said, yes life was an inspiration, and then she said she was hungry and asked if he didn’t want to go into the diner.” Thus begins Hazel Mote’s relentless efforts to expose Christian hypocrisy by founding ...

Signposts in a Strange Land Walker Percy  Walker Percy: A Life Patrick Samway The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy Jay Tolson           The Habit of the Heart: Letters of Flannery O'Connor   Flannery by Brad Gooch Three by Flannery O'Connor  The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy  Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy   The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy   Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy  The Second Coming by Walker Percy   Lancelot by Walker Percy  

The Discovery of Poetry by Frances Mayes The Alphonse Courrier Affair by Marta Morazzoni  A Mercy by Toni Morrison  The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy  Clouds of Witness by Dorothy Sayers  Professor Bernhardi and Other Plays by Arthur Schnitzler  The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien  The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien  The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien  Three by Flannery O'Connor  Travels  with a Hungry Bear by Mark Kramer

Flannery by Brad Gooch An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan by Jason Elliot   From Baghdad to Brooklyn by Jack Marshall  Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood by Ibtisam Barakat  Alexander Men: A Witness by Yves Hamant  Parish Priest by Douglas Brinkley  The Diary of Samuel Pepys  Musical Memories by Camille Saint-Saens  The Incompleat Folksinger by Pete Seeger  

Our sense of what is contained in our faith is deepened less by abstractions than by an encounter with mystery in what is human and often perverse .

G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works I gratis Ralph Wood G. K. Chesterton: Collected Works II G. K. Chesterton: The Autobiography gratis Ralph Wood The Habit of the Heart: Letters of Flannery O'Connor