By Brother Benedict, Monastic Contributor
There are writers whose words comfort, and there are those whose words wound—and thank God for the latter, else we would never be healed.
Flannery O’Connor belongs to that rare and sanctified second group. She is not easy to read. She is not nice. But she is good, and that is enough.
On what would have been her 100th year, there are those who still ask whether she should be read at all. They comb her stories for offense, they question her imagery, her violence, her faith. And yet O’Connor—though long buried—still speaks with the kind of moral gravity that makes most of our present discourse seem like murmuring into a pillow.
She wrote of freaks, fools, and failures. She gave us flawed priests and broken prophets. Her world was grotesque because the human soul, left unredeemed, is grotesque. In her hands, the Southern Gothic was not a style but a theology: original sin with a drawl.
What makes O’Connor endure is not merely her prose—though it is sharp enough to cut glass—but her clarity. She saw, as few others dared to see, that grace is most often experienced as violence. That we do not drift gently into the truth; we are struck by it, suddenly, like a tree falling across the path.
In Eyehasseen, we hold literature not for pleasure alone, but for purgation. A book must scrape the rust from the conscience. It must speak of sin and justice and the mercy that hurts before it heals. Flannery O’Connor does all this. She does it in the voice of a peacock, a shotgun, and a grandmother who won’t shut up.
Yes, she offends. But so does the Gospel. And the prophets. And the Cross.
So let the critics come. Let them cluck and dissect. Meanwhile, the rest of us will keep reading O’Connor—unsettled, wounded, and, God willing, changed.