My Dear God

This won't be a very long blog, as I have another essay I want to begin today and frankly what I'm about to post is by a far more wonderful writer.

Last week's New Yorker featured a selection of excerpts from Flannery O'Connor's journal titled "My Dear God", and it's a group of prayers that she wrote out to God, begging His mercy and blessing on her work, her ambitions, her desires. It is a good liturgy for any writer, artist, or seeker, or anyone who gets easily distracted by cookies (you'll have to read it to get that last part).

It was good medicine to read, frankly because of how honest she was--wretchedly confessing her desires for greatness, her her desire to be a fine writer, and yet acknowledging that she KNOWS that none of it will matter if she forges ahead without God's blessing, without His guidance.

(It's nice to know that other writers experience the same sort of angst, I thought)

She writes freely about not being able to write. She writes about feeling some despair about this, but because she trusts in God, she does not have to despair. And so she writes to God and for God; in Him and through Him.

"My dear God," is an address and appeal of both knowns and unknowns and ultimately a submission of all things to Him. But such a submission isn't from God's tyrannical domination, she acknowledges, it is the result of being engaged with the Divine Love, in and through which reality exists.

In reading this, I was so humbled. Like Chesterton's prayer of common grace over everything, so O'Connor pleads for God's direction over her every word. I pray it is my prayer too.