A prayer of an artist, by Flannery O'Connor

"Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted. That is so far from what I deserve, of course, that I am naturally struck with the nerve of it.... All boils down to grace, I suppose."

A journal kept by the twenty-one-year-old Flannery O'Connor, whilst studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1946, will be published in November by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, titled A Prayer Journal. The New Yorker recently published a few excerpts of her prayers, one of which I include here. It is so very much her, yet we can hear our own voices in it too.

"Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and myself 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.

I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

I want very much to succeed in the world with what I want to do. I have prayed to You about this with my mind and my nerves on it and strung my nerves into a tension over it and said, 'oh God, please', and 'I must', and 'please, please'. I have not asked You, I feel, in the right way. Let me henceforth ask You with resignation--that not being or meant to be a slacking up in prayer but a less frenzied kind, realizing that the frenzy is caused by an eagerness for what I want and not a spiritual trust. I do not with to presume. I want to love.

Oh God, please make my mind clear.

Please make it clean.

I ask You for a greater love for my holy Mother and I ask her for a greater love for You.

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

I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You. Please do not let the explanations of the psychologists about this make it turn suddenly cold. My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be."