In honor of Flannery O'Connor's birthday (thank you, Writer's Almanac on NPR), a quote from one of her letters that Professor Dorr read to my Religion in American Literature class during my undergrad days.
Flannery O’Connor to Alfred Corn, May 30, 1962:
"As a freshman in college you are bombarded with new ideas, or rather pieces of ideas, new frames of reference, an activation of the intellectual life which is only beginning, but which is already running ahead of your lived experience. After a year of this, you think you cannot believe. You are just beginning to realize how difficult it is to have faith and the measure of a commitment to it, but you are too young to decide you don’t have faith just because you feel you can’t believe. About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do, and I think from your letter that you will not take the path of least resistance in this matter and simply decide that you have lost your faith and that there is nothing you can do about it. […] If you want your faith, you have to work for it. […] For every book you read that is anti-Christian, make it your business to read one that presents the other side of the picture. […] Don’t think that you have to abandon reason to be a Christian. […] To find out about faith, you have to go to the people who have it and you have to go to the most intelligent ones if you are going to stand up intellectually to agnostics and the general run of pagans that you are going to find in the majority of people around you. […] Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism. It will keep you free—not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you."
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Flannery O'Connor was a vibrant voice for Christianity. What I love about her is her ability to go straight to the heart by speaking truth, sometimes with all its ugliness. She was calling out to a generation (and now ours) to open your eyes and be vigilant - look around and see real good and evil and make choices accordingly.
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