Forty years ago...

...a little after midnight on August 3, Flannery O'Connor passed from this life at the age of 39.

There's a 24-hour long gathering at her home, Andalusia Farm, beginning right about now, as I blog this.

Here's a news story about the event from the Macon paper

Here's a recent Washington Times article about O'Connor

In case you missed it, here's a report of our recent visit to Milledgeville and Andalusia

And below is a short essay I pulled together and submitted to NPR for a commentary, but alas, never heard back about. Don't jump the gun - I've been on NPR before, so there's no plot agin Katlics here. At least I don't think. Those familiar with this blog will find nothing new here, but here it is anyway.

A bit after midnight on August 3, folks will gather at a farmhouse in Milledgeville, Georgia, thirty miles east of Macon, to remember the woman who lived there once, and who died forty years ago that night.

Her name was Flannery O’Connor, and she wrote stories.

More than “just stories,” of course. O’Connor wrote strange, shocking, uncompromising short stories and novels, set mostly in her native south, peopled by farmers, sharecroppers, Bible salesmen, murderers, snotty little girls, lost boys, displaced persons and self-mutilating prophets.

And never far, like a shadow, Christ, lurking behind trees, haunting.

For what we have here is no mere stereotypical Southern Gothic landscape, filled with the grotesque for our entertainment at their expense. O’Connor wrote out of a deep, thoroughly Catholic vision of life, and saw her vocation of writing as essentially telling stories to uncover “mystery through manners, grace through nature.”

Her stories, situated in the specific spot of the mid-20th century rural “Christ-haunted” South, dramatize what she accepted as universal truth: that the world has, “for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for,” and this world broken by sin is fighting that same redemption literally to the death.

Andalusia is what she called this farm where she wrote most of her works, her wonderful published letters, where she lived with her mother Regina until her untimely death from lupus, the same disease that had killed her father. We once might have said that it was outside of Milledgeville, but the encroaching Wal-Marts and Fazolis have made it pretty hard to say that anymore. The landscape O’Connor knew has certainly changed. The external landscape, anyway.

But perhaps not so much. Andalusia has recently been opened to the public. I went there a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in several visits, finally able to do more than hang on the fence on the dirt road off the highway, looking in from the outside.

I’m a Catholic too, and there’s a part of me, I’ll admit that can’t help but think of Flannery, in her graceful suffering and commitment to her vocation, as a saint. I felt, standing outside of her very own room, put on the first floor so she would not have to use the stairs, studying the narrow bed, the old tyepwriter, even the crutches, that I was on some sort of holy ground, akin to any officially sanctioned shrine I’ve walked in. And yes, I prayed.

There are no peacocks, any more, which is what most people want to know about Andalusia, for everyone associates Flannery O”Connor with peacocks. Upon her death, they were given away, to the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit east of Atlanta, among other places. But there is a mule, and while my husband carried our toddler son out to see him, I stood on the wide, cool front porch and looked out at the trees in the yard. There was traffic on the highway beyond them, but I couldn’t hear it. It was quiet.

I took out my camera one last time and focused it on those large, graceful trees. Like the people who will gather there from all over to remember her on the anniversary of her death, I wanted to see something. Somehow, I wanted to capture what Flannery saw.

But of course, only Flannery could do that.

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