A Mystic, Immediately
A Mystic, Immediately
Erika Veurink
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.
It presupposes faith and love.”
— Simone Weil
I write in my prayer journal almost every morning. I don’t look up or lift my pen. I never reread pages. The air around me stirs with eagerness, but I don’t notice. My prayers are repetitive and solipsistic. I use the word “please.” I say, “You are good” right before “Amen,” every time. My prayers are mirrors and piles and muscle memory. The pages are tilting strings of loops. I have to remind myself to exhale. My prayers’ effectiveness isn’t the point. What I’m hoping for is leverage, to “get down under things and find where You are.”
Flannery O’Connor wrote that, in a prayer journal she kept almost every morning. She was a student at the University of Iowa, between the ages of twenty and twenty-two. A tiny dorm, fiction writing, the foreign chill of an Iowa winter—her sincerity for salvation makes me blush while reading.
She was Mary F. O’Connor from Milledgeville, Georgia. Then she was Flannery O’Connor at the Iowa Writers Workshop. When people talk about Flannery O’Connor, they talk about violence. They talk about her harshness, the angular staunchness of “the truth doesn’t change according to your ability to stomach it.” Her short stories are heralded. Her racism is impossible to ignore. And yet, when I read A Prayer Journal, I read the elemental struggle of mustering faith. I want to talk about her wandering, the God-shaped loneliness she outlined in ink.
Corresponding on the topic of being raised Catholic, O’Connor wrote that, “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.” Her prayer journal was a hope of that conviction. Her fiction was a universe of that harshness.
Like any journal, there is no introduction. The first pages of O’Connor’s notebook were never recovered. In her typical style, she opens with a mallet swing of honesty: “Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to.” She describes God as a slim crescent of the moon hidden by the earth’s shadow, a “very beautiful” slim crescent. And then her script teeters off, heaves, stops.
I know this because the back of the book contains a facsimile copy of her prayers catalogued in her Sterling notebook. If her handwriting was to be analyzed, the high dotted “i” might speak to her imagination, the lack of slant to her guardedness, the tight spacing as solitude.
But reading any journal feels intrusive. Prayer itself is intrusive. As a child, being called on to pray out loud would send a fever up my back. It was unnatural, preposterous, to address God in this public-facing way. What of our private language translated outside of my pages?
I made it a habit to open my public prayers by addressing the weather. I thanked God for my health. I used masculine language and reminded the divine oneness that he was powerful, that I was grateful. My private prayers never felt as loud as those seconds speaking in a shaking voice, staring at my folded hands. There was nothing to say. When I wrote, I kept turning pages until my hand cramped.
Alone, I prayed to understand: joy, my smallness, the string connecting every hidden thing
Flannery O’Connor prayed to understand: her vocation, how to make “belief believable.”
Evangelicalism didn’t give me language for a contrite heart. O’Connor’s Catholic confession collided with her teenage bluntness: “Contrition in me is largely imperfect. I don’t know if I've ever been sorry for a sin because it hurt You,” she wrote.
“Help me to see sin so I can know sin,” I wrote in my journal, aged nine.
A Prayer Journal contains no prayers of thanksgiving. The volume is gloriously imbalanced—confession between an eye roll, supplication, cleverness and laziness heralded as secret spiritual gifts.
“Dear God, About hope, I am somewhat at a loss. It is so easy to say I hope to—the tongue slides over it. I think perhaps hope can only be realized by contrasting it with despair. And I am too lazy to despair.” And in a later entry, a confession for her attempts at cleverness, a retraction of said confession, and a request to be considered so.
Her urgency reads as a love letter, the sort of immediate demands infatuation inspires. St. Augustine said, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” Flannery O'Connor said, “Make me a mystic, immediately.” Her vulnerability resounds with the eternal desire of saints and sinners alike: the urgency of understanding.
Without revision, without the pressures of workshop or the thought of a reader, O’Connor’s prayers or perhaps, letters, sail past formality. She writes of suffering, after the death of her father, unaware of the same fate that would befall her in fifteen year’s time, candidly. “Looking back I have suffered, not my share, but enough to call it that but there’s a terrific balance due.”
O’Connor worshipped the work of French essayist and poet, Leon Bloy, known for his passionate defense of the Roman Catholic church. He wrote, ”Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence.” Her fiction would adhere to this theory, the idea of life proven any by the light of the suffering that moves through it.
But her own life was proven by the cheese she wrote about eating and the editors she prayed would read her work, the vocation she pleaded to embody. “God is feeding me and what I’m praying for is an appetite,” she wrote. In an 2001 essay titled, “Flannery O'Connor's Revelatory Honesty,” Hilton Als wrote of “her uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the sh— and the stars.” The best prayers hold the quotidian up to the holy. This is the work of this world, the shared vocation of Believers.
This morning, I prayed for stamina enough to see grace, for quietness, for the warmth of the sun to mean something to me. I prayed for my sister. I prayed for the girl I was when I was younger, the woman I am now. When I finished, with “You are good” and “Amen” I felt emptied. The filling, the mumbling, the stopping, the tilting, the emptying—that’s why I pray. The Creation Myth stretches to Revelation in one page of a lined composition notebook.
I become unburdened.
Erika Veurink
Writer & MFA
Erika has been published in Brooklyn Review, Cheap Pop, Hobart & Midwest Review
Photography by Enrique Delgado