Posted by giveawayboy on March 12, 2005 at 02:59:30:
O.K. Thanks to Ragemonkey I was able to discover this great blog with quotes from Flannery O'Connor. They included this quote from HABIT OF BEING which comes from a letter O'Connor wrote to Alfred Corn. In it Flannery is referring to some correspondence between Robert Bridges and Gerard Manley Hopkins to make a point about belief:
"About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do...[Robert] Bridges once wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins and asked him to tell him how he, Bridges, could believe. He must have expected from Hopkins a long philosophical answer. Hopkins wrote back, "Give alms." He was trying to say to Bridges that God is to be experienced in Charity (in the sense of love for divine image in human beings)."
Flannery is one of my all time favorite writers. I plowed through her short stories in my college years and was very taken by her novel WISE BLOOD. One book which I totally love is Paul Elie's THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN: AN AMERICAN PILGRIMAGE, which is a joint bio of the lives of four great American writers, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, author of THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN, Walker Percy, who wrote THE MOVIEGOER and LOVE IN THE RUINS and last but not least, Dorothy Day, who, along with Peter Maurin, founded the THE CATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENT in 1933. Each of these heroic Christians have strengthened the spiritual lives of countless people in the modern age. But it's hard for me to consider these folks without a brief mention of Edith Stein, the Jewish philosopher who became Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, ultimately linking her lives with the Jewish people and dying in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. Some of her writings include THE SCIENCE OF THE CROSS, ON THE PROBLEM OF EMPATHY and WAYS TO KNOW GOD. Stein was no American however, her life and work always resonate with those other four for me. I can't separate them all.
