O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal showcases growing pains of one tested in faith

Reading someone’s journal seems like an invasion of privacy of the greatest degree. As Catholics, we seem to have a habit of publishing the private writings of saints, but this is done to better show the ways they pursued and loved God and offered their sufferings to him. While she is not a saint, Flannery O’Connor’s conversations with God as recorded in the brief pages of A Prayer Journal might be familiar.

A Prayer Journal gives us the private reflections of Flannery O’Connor, a young woman who is now held as one of the greatest writers in the American Literary Canon. Born on March 25, 1925 in Savanah, Ga., O’Connor was raised in a devout Catholic family and spent most of her life on their farm in Milledgeville, Ga. While she considered herself a novelist, she is most widely known for her short stories—such as A Good Man is Hard to Find—usually set in the American South and deal with people in need of grace.

These journal entries were written from January 1946 to September 1947 while she attended writers’ workshops in Iowa City. The first few pages of the journal have been lost, but the first full sentence we read is her frank statement: “Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to” (3). The following entries depict a woman in her early twenties away from home for the first time, facing the sea of other influences in the largely secular artistic community she found herself in. While her writing greatly benefited from the intellectual atmosphere, there is a skepticism that wanted to creep in as well. O’Connor was fully aware of it and brought it to prayer: “I dread, Oh Lord, losing my faith... [My mind] is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery” (5). It is these admissions of weakness and her resolutions to keep trying that model the ups and downs of so many of our prayer lives. This book may be particularly encouraging for those who find themselves in fields of work in which one’s faith is called into question openly or indirectly. In this day, that’s most of them. 

There is also a beauty to the sureness with which she accepts her vocation in prayer: “I must write down that I am to be an artist” (29). She enjoyed writing and knew she was good at it. 

If the journal had been longer, perhaps there could be something to say about her better days. To catch a glimpse of that fuller picture, one would need to read her letters or essays. I’d also note that, as these were private entries, they are less polished than her other works. But they still have that glimmer, the succinct and penetrating lens that can be seen in her later, more developed works. This book in particular shows the growing pains in a life that would not last very long.

O’Connor was singled out for her talent and became a popular writer, paying her bills by doing speaking tours. But her travels slowly ceased as she struggled against lupus. O’Connor died in 1964. She was 39 years old.

This publication of a very private work treats O’Connor with great respect, including a facsimile of the actual journal after the corrected transcription. (O’Connor had some trouble with her spelling—another relatable characteristic—so the publishers chose to correct those instances to remove distractions). Seeing her own writing makes these struggles and childlike honesty all the more real. And before the transcription, there is an introduction by W.A. Sessions, a good friend of O’Connor’s who published many of her works during her lifetime, describing the events in her timeline that affected these entries.

All of this together gives a fuller, more honest story of a woman who can seem like a titan to those who read her works: she was a person who knew she was in need of grace.