Lenten Campaign 2025
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The Feast of the Annunciation is one of the most joyous dates on the Christian calendar. Not only is it the date on which God became Incarnate in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the date on which the Word became Flesh, it is also, according to tradition, the historical date of the Crucifixion. This should give us pause for thought, and pause for prayer. The beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of Our Lord’s mortal life, are celebrated on the same date: March 25. Amazing!
There is, however, an additional reason to celebrate March 25 this year because it is also the centenary of the birth of Flannery O’Connor, one of the greatest Catholic writers of the 20th century. Had we known her, we might indeed have wished her a “happy birthday” on this particular date of the year but we had better not wish her “a nice day.” Flannery O’Connor didn’t do “nice.”
“Why can’t you write some nice stories?” her mother asked her. The question is one that is also asked by many others who have read, or who have tried to read, Flannery O’Connor’s stories. Why are they so dark? Why is there so much violence? Why are they not “nice”?
The answer to these questions is that you can’t be nice if you’re looking the devil in the eye. Nor can you whisper when the world is deaf.
“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do,” O’Connor wrote, “you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume they do not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”
In other words, and paradoxically, Flannery O’Connor was not “nice” because she was seeking to evangelize. She wanted to wake her readers up so that they could see the presence of evil, certainly, but also, and more importantly, so that they could see the presence of God. She knew, to recall the words of the St. Michael prayer that is said after Mass, that “the devil prowls throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.” She knew the words of St. Peter in Scripture that Satan “goeth about seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). She gave her second novel the title, The Violent Bear It Away, to echo the words of Christ: “And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away” (Matthew 11:12).
In the light of the Gospel, faced with the darkness of evil, it is necessary for the writer to portray evil truly, which is to portray it negatively.
“I don’t believe that you can ask an artist to be affirmative, any more than you can ask him to be negative,” O’Connor wrote. “I mortally and strongly defend the right of the artist to select a negative aspect of the world to portray and as the world gets more materialistic there will be more such to select from. ... The question is not is this negative or positive, but is it believable.”
What is not believable, because not true, is the sort of story that ignores the darkness of evil to paint a picture that is unrealistically optimistic and bright or, which is worse, the sort of story which makes evil attractive by daubing it diabolically with the deceitful cosmetics of the lie. That which portrays the darkness as light is a lie, whereas that which portrays it as darkness is true. In metaphysics, as in physics, making the negative positive is negative, whereas showing the negative to be negative is positive.
Ultimately, Flannery O’Connor shows people the darkness in order to bring them to the light. Her works are all about the presence of grace. We’ll let her have the final words as written in her essay, “On Her Own Work”:
“In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.”
