A Flannery O'Connor Advent

Week 1: Hope, Crescent Moons, & Fiery Sunsets

“Please help me to get down under things and find where You are.”¹

Today begins the Christian season of Advent. To anyone familiar with Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and novels, it may seem perverse to associate her with Advent’s four traditional gifts of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. After all, grotesqueries and violence, punctuated by flashes of dry humor, are her authorial signatures.

Yet that’s precisely what I intend to do in this brief meditation and the three that will follow it, week-by-week, in this holy season. It’s easier to do than you may think. A deep spirituality, one founded on the four Advent gifts, is the undercurrent running through everything O’Connor wrote. Dive beneath the surface of her stories—“get down under things,” as O’Connor said—and you plunge into the deep water of God.² The same thing can be said of life itself: venture below the surface and you discover the Source of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. As the Lord recommends, duc in altum! (Luke 5:4)

Hope is the first Advent spiritual gift. That’s why the appointed lectionary readings for the first week focus on Hebraic prophecies of the coming of a Messiah. Hope oughtn’t to be confused, as it often is, with naive optimism or wishful thinking, neither of which is grounded on much of anything other than self-centered desire. Instead, Advent hope is built on faith that God exists, that God’s promises of redemption and fulfillment are trustworthy, and that consequently the future, howsoever bleak the present may seem, will be a blessing. In the midst of darkest winter,

unto us a Child is born,
unto us a Son is given;
and the government will be upon His shoulder.
And His name will be called
Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of His government and peace
there will be no end. (Isaiah 9:6-7a)

Hope always expresses longing—but again, a yearning based on faith rather than me-centric desire. O’Connor recognized this. Running throughout both her published and private writing is a theme of double-stranded hope: the primary hope for ultimate fulfillment in God and the accompaning hope for the strength to open oneself to its reception.

O’Connor expresses both in a beautifully evocative prayer written when she was a very young woman.

“Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.”³

The longing/hope expressed in this prayer, that the ego can get out of the way to make room for God, is voiced again in O’Connor’s 1954 short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” The protagonist, an unpleasantly (but at times hilariously) sardonic and judgmental girl, recognizes that her behavior is at odds with her hopeful longing for God. The insight comes to her, significantly, while at Eucharistic Adoration.

“The child knelt down [beside] her mother and […] they were well into the Tantum Ergo before her ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she was in the presence of God. Hep me not to be so mean. Hep me not to give her so much sass. Hep me not to talk like I do. Hep me to get quiet and then empty.”⁴

This, like O’Connor’s personal prayer of crescent moon and self shadow, is a prayer of hope and longing.

The opposite of hopeful longing is despair, the bleak conviction that there’s no ground for trust or faith and that consequently the future is to be dreaded rather than longed for. Winter remains dark, and it’s always winter. No Child is coming. No Child will be born unto us.

In an essay focused on the craft of writing, O’Connor notes in passing that despairing people, fearful as they are of any experiential confirmation of their hopelessness, withdraw into themselves. This defensive strategy may be understandable but, tragically, it only exacerbates their misery because it also slams the door on experiences that could whisper to them the possibility of hope. “They don’t take long looks at anything,” she writes, “because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”⁵

But despair is alien to Advent hope and Advent longing. Even though O’Connor’s stories often end with horrific moments of truth descending upon protagonists—the crash of grace upon their hitherto closed souls and hearts—the chance that they’ll experience rebirth from the collision is always left open.

The conclusion of “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” is a hauntingly beautiful example of this. As the child leaves church with her mother, a “big nun swooped down on her mischievously and nearly smothered her in the black habit, mashing the side of her face into the crucifix hitched onto her belt.”⁶ The girl is marked, as it were, with the imprint of a symbol which, despite its horrific associations with torture and death, is also a sign of hope. Seated in the back seat of her mother’s car on the drive home, the girl, still bearing the imprint of the crucifix on her cheek, stares out the window at the setting sun. “The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.”⁷

That afterglow is the hope born of trust that in turn births holy longing. It’s the road to God. And such hope is an Advent blessing.

Next Week: A Flannery O’Connor Advent - Advent 2, Peace

1. Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), p. 4.

2. In O’Connor’s short story “The River,” water as a metaphor for the divine milieu. The Complete Stories (New York: Noonday Press, 1999), pp. 157-174.

3. O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, p. 3.

4. “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” Complete Stories, pp. 247-248.

5. “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), p. 78.

6. “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” Complete Stories, p. 248.

7. Ibid.