Flannery

A young Flannery O'Connor. She looks like a serious reader.

The following is a quote from a talk by an archbishop about O'Connor (inner quotes are from Flannery):

The Christian must yearn for and seek out faith, not just grudgingly take delivery of it if God sends it along: "Faith is a gift, but the will has a great deal to do with it. The loss of it is basically a failure of appetite, assisted by sterile intellect" (p. 451). But Christian faith cannot remain in the intellect; it must be lived for, with, and in Christ. Flannery O'Connor declared: "What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe" (p. 354). This cost of believing, of discipleship is crucial to an understanding of genuine Christian faith, as opposed to the casual, superficial, cultural Christianity that she so deplored. Genuine Christian faith transforms the meaning and value of everything; cosmetic Christianity merely brightens Sunday morning and highlights the tiny compartment of life labeled "religion."...In one letter Flannery O’Connor observes that “Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does. The Church does well to hold its own; you are asking that she show a profit. When she shows a profit, you have a saint, and not necessarily a canonized one.”