Thursday, September 20, 2012

Flannery O'Connor answers the silly notion that we should be able to have the Church our way...

In a 1958 letter to her friend Cecil Dawkins Flannery O'Connor wrote: 

To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in human affairs, whereas it is our dignity that we are allowed more or less to get on with those graces that come through faith and the sacraments and which work through our human nature. God has chosen to operate in this manner. We can't understand this but we can't reject it without rejecting life...

You don't serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective, I'll have none of it. Your pain at its lack of effectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God. We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.

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