Flannery O’Connor on the habit of being

They say that positivity reduces stress, and those who gratefully accept a glass half-full are better off (or at least better hydrated) than the half-empty crowd. There’s something appealing about being the sort of person who keeps an even keel and sails along under blue skies, never under the weather, never melancholic, and capable of overwhelming negative events with the sheer force of a positive attitude. I kind of wish I was that sort of person. It would save me a lot of existential angst, grousing, and time in the confessional admitting to my terrible attitude.

At the same time, though, I cannot help but think about the disruptive nature of grace. Flannery O’Connor, in a book of collected letters called The Habit of Being, writes, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” In other words, life isn’t smooth sailing. And we really don’t want it to be.

If we never face challenges, we won’t arrive to those singular moments when our hearts are finally stripped down and attuned to the voice of God. It’s difficulties that shake us from life-as-usual and teach us to rely on a deeper source of strength.

I’m sure there’s a healthy way to accept the pain of grace and, as long as it doesn’t shift into denial, positivity goes a long way in this regard. The point, though, is that if grace makes us flinch sometimes, that’s okay. It’s supposed to make us flinch.

The basic idea of Lent, as far as I can tell, is to be flung into the spiritual desert to maximize suffering. The priest smears ash on our forehead, reminds us we’re dying, and pushes us into the arena. As St. Mark indicates, we are driven by God himself into the wilderness to engage in spiritual combat, fasting, and discomfort. The idea is to maximize grace.

As O’Connor insists – grace can be ugly. In our comfortable, treat-yourself, stress-reducing, shopping-therapy adjacent lives, we’re asleep to the heroic challenge placed before us of dying to our old lives and taking on the new. Because we’re lethargic, we must be shocked awake. This is why O’Connor’s stories are so uncanny, full of strange and even violent events by which grace arrives to unlikely people. She makes her readers uncomfortable because she cares so much about us. She knows that, with a little push, we have the capacity to change.

“What people don't realize is how much religion costs,” she writes, “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.” In their book The Artistic Vision, Alex Sosler and Gary Ball note that O’Connor doesn’t write about the pain of grace because she loves pain. Rather, she’s cultivating a specific type of vision that sees beyond the categories of pessimism and optimism. They reference her “habit of being,” and compare it to a habit of seeing, quoting O’Connor that we cannot “scorn getting dusty.” In other words, we are made to be in the spiritual desert. Our pilgrimage helps us develop a habit of discerning beauty in all situations. Easter is beautiful and so is Lent. Cold rainy days are as beautiful as warm spring afternoons. Penance is beautiful and so is feasting.

This isn’t to say that everything that comes our way must be judged as equally good or fine. There are days I want to quit, when I fall into a choleric rant that makes my wife shake her head, pat me on the back, and hand me a cup of hot chocolate before sending me outside to sit in the sun for a while until I calm down. Sometimes, the glass if half-empty. Other times, it’s full to overflowing. There are days of joy so intense I hardly know what to do with myself or who to thank for the gift of being alive.

Some of life is good and some is bad. The point O’Connor is making isn’t that one is better than the other. What she’s saying is that, “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”

It’s a habit of being, a way of moving through the world that spies out the grace lurking in absolutely every human event. Grace arrives to us, at times, on a pillowy cloud. Other times, it plunges us into the Lenten arena to do battle with all that is hellish in us. Either way, it’s grace. I’m grateful for it. I’m looking for it, seeking the divine beauty that rises up and beyond negativity or positivity into a transcendent realm where the world is redeemed head to toe. Grace is the rarified air of another world, a divine mansion with open doors, a peace that passes understanding.