After reading this journal entry of Flannery O’Connor’s, we wonder if she believed in free will:
Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for your story –- just like the typewriter was mine. Please let the story, dear God, in its revisions, be made too clear for any false & low interpretation because in it, I am not trying to disparage anybody’s religion although when it was coming out, I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. I don’t know now if it is consistent. Please don’t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right –- or any wrong. I want it to mean that the good in man sometimes shows through his commercialism but that it is not the fault of the commercialism that it does.
(Quoted from page 11 of A Prayer Journal, by Flannery O’Connor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.)
For a brief biography of Flannery O’Connor, click here. For images of or relating to Flannery O’Connor, click here.
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