The Habit of Being. By Flannery O’Connor, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988.
Flannery O’Connor is probably my favorite American writer. Her work is permeated in her own unique voice: wry, earthy, humorous, frank, profound, and unflinchingly honest. Her world is distinctly her own, filled with darkness and light, where the characters are deeply flawed but always children of God, and the morals of her stories are always clear but never obvious.
O’Connor suffered from lupus, and spent much of her far too short life on her family farm, writing and raising peacocks. Before she died at the age of thirty-nine, she left a small but powerful assortment of writings behind her, consisting of two novels, thirty-two short stories, and assorted short nonfiction and spiritual writings. The Habit of Beingis a collection of O’Connor’s correspondence, consisting of assorted letters that O’Connor wrote to friends over several years. It serves as both a biography and a series of spiritual musings.
The prose in the letters is often unpolished, and it carries more weight and presence because it contains all of her typos and spelling errors. The letters come across as an intelligent woman explaining her worldview and baring her soul, as well as explaining as why she wrote, and what parts of herself and her religious beliefs she incorporated into her work and why.
In one letter, she writes:
“I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It’s to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.”
O’Connor has often been described as a creator of Southern Gothic, a crafter of grotesques and eccentrics. This is both true and an oversimplification. O’Connor was not creating a fantasy world or an exaggerated or caricaturized version of society, but instead, she accentuated certain flaws in society and in her characters in order to better illustrate how sin is a poison and how the worst dangers to society and individuals can be the problems that most people least suspect, or what is even more likely, how things that people don’t believe are problems turn out to be far more dangerous than the average person ever imagines.
O’Connor writes:
“The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.”
Going into more detail as to what she means by “Christian realism,” O’Connor writes:
“I believe too that there is only one Reality and that that is the end of it, but the term, “Christian Realism,” has become necessary for me, perhaps in a purely academic way, because I find myself in a world where everybody has his compartment, puts you in yours, shuts the door and departs. One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for.”
In her letters, the people O’Connor is “conscious of writing for” are often close friends, though others are more distant acquaintances looking for details of her thoughts on religion, Catholic doctrine, and all sorts of other principles. O’Connor never comes across as a proselytizer, but rather as an explainer– she provides her own pithy definitions of terms and explanations of doctrines. She always comes across as well-educated and original in her attempts to explain details that might intimidate lesser writers.
“Dogma can in no way limit a limitless God. The person outside the Church attaches a different meaning to it than the person in. For me a dogma is only a gateway to contemplation and is an instrument of freedom and not of restriction. It preserves mystery for the human mind. Henry James said the young woman of the future would know nothing of mystery or manners. He had no business to limit it to one sex.”
As talented as O’Connor is at serving as a Catholic apologist, she is just as skilled as describing herself, her goals, and her relationship with her work.
“I won’t ever be able entirely to understand my own work or even my own motivations. It is first of all a gift, but the direction it has taken has been because of the Church in me or the effect of the Church’s teaching, not because of a personal perception or love of God. For you to think this would be possible because of your ignorance of me; for me to think it would be sinful in a high degree. I am not a mystic and I do not lead a holy life. Not that I can claim any interesting or pleasurable sins (my sense of the devil is strong) but I know all about the garden variety, pride, gluttony, envy and sloth, and what is more to the point, my virtues are as timid as my vices. I think sin occasionally brings one closer to God, but not habitual sin and not this petty kind that blocks every small good. A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him…
However, the individual in the Church is, no matter how worthless himself, a part of the Body of Christ and a participator in the Redemption. There is no blueprint that the Church gives for understanding this. It is a matter of faith and the Church can force no one to believe it. When I ask myself how I know I believe, I have no satisfactory answer at all, no assurance at all, no feeling at all. I can only say with Peter, Lord I believe, help my unbelief. And all I can say about my love of God, is, Lord help me in my lack of it. I distrust pious phrases, particularly when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.”
A recurring theme of O’Connor’s fiction and letters is the idea that grace is found where one least expects it. Throughout her letters, she hammers home the point that the people who see the Catholic Church as twisted mass of complex and unnecessary rules are flat-out wrong. For O’Connor, the Church is force that frees, inspires, and educates. Leaving the Church would mean entering a darker, duller, and danker world, lacking the fullness of grace.
“In the face of anyone’s experience, someone like myself who has had almost no experience, must be humble. I will never have the experience of the convert, or of the one who fails to be converted, or even in all probability of the formidable sinner; but your effort not to be seduced by the Church moves me greatly. God permits it for some reason though it is the devil’s greatest work of hallucination. Fr. [Jean] de Menasce told somebody not to come into the Church until he felt it would be an enlargement of his freedom. This is what you are doing and you are right, but do not make your feeling of the voluptuous seductive powers of the Church into a hard shell to protect yourself from her. I suppose it is like marriage, that when you get into it, you find it is the beginning, not the end, of the struggle to make love work.
I think most people come to the Church by means the Church does not allow, else there would be no need their getting to her at all. However, this is true inside as well, as the operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug…
I have some long and tall thoughts on the subject of God’s working through nature, but I will not inflict them on you now. I find I have a habit of announcing the obvious in pompous and dogmatic periods. I like to forget that I’m only a storyteller.”
The Habit of Being is an easy and enjoyable read– O’Connor’s short missives make for concise, clever, and clear apologetics, and make their points with more wit, style, and good humor that most writers. O’Connor comes across as more than a skilled writer– after reading The Habit of Being, one soon wants her as a pen pal.
–Chris Chan
