The last few days I have been meandering through Library of America’s Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works and A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor.  My thought was to write more than I am posting but time has slipped by and today is her birthday.

As Catholics and all people around the world deal in some way with the Coronavirus pandemic, this quotation hit me.  Catholics are concerned as they should be about not being able to attend a public mass and receive holy communion; all people are turning their thoughts toward death.

Ms. O’Connor kept a prayer journal for a few years.  What follows is an excerpt as one reads Ms. O’Connor conversing with Our Lord:

I have been reading Mr. Kafka and I feel his problem getting grace.  But I see it doesn’t have to be that way for the Catholic who can go to Communion every day.  The Msgr. Today said it was the business of reason not emotion—the love of God…But I want to get near You.  Yet it seems almost a sin to suggest such a thing even.  Perhaps Communion doesn’t give the nearness I mean.  The nearness I mean comes after death perhaps.  It is what we are struggling for and if I found it either, I would be dead or I would have seen it for a second and life would be intolerable. (O’Connor 13-14)