O to grace how great a debtor

"If it can be said to be 'about' anything, then it is 'about' prophets and prophecy, 'about' revelation, and 'about' the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don't have a chance of spiritual growth without it." -Alice Waker on Flannery O'Connor's works

After a few years of being homeschooled, maybe my first year of high school, my mother purchased a new set of curriculum for my sister and me. The Sonlight program was Christian like the Bob Jones text books we used (I rue the day my parents bought them!) but it was a simple reading calendar rather than text books. As far as I remember, that year I read through history, english, social studies and so on. It was a welcome change picking up All's Quiet On the Western Front rather than picking through another tome on dates, facts, and figures, surrounding the World Wars.

Then in college I was fortunate enough to find a religion professor who handled things similarly. Larry, as we called him, assigned us Potok when we studied Judaism, the Ramayana for Hinduism, Elmer Gantry for the psychology of religion, and the more dubious The Celestine Prophecy for New Age thought. Again, a welcome relief as I found learning through works of fiction had a way of driving the point home in a round about, through the back door sort of way.

Like all terrible people I am stuck in my ways and still find this a superior method of learning. This summer Alan, on a booking buying ban, purchased a copy of Flannery O'Connor's complete works supposedly for me. I told him if he was going to play school teacher and make me read something he'd have to read it with me. So we went through Wise Blood and A Good Man is Hard to Find. To my chagrin I was enjoying the work of this sassy little Southern woman. Worse, her stories wouldn't leave my head for days, weeks.

I am moving through O'Connor's complete works and, after a short stint of being mad at her for killing off so many characters, the finer things of the stories emerged. I've never been one to "get" literature-- I was always wrong in English class when it came to analysing stories, always. But O'Connor I'm beginning to get. She writes of mercy, forgiveness, grace in a way that doesn't quite make sense until you sit on it a while. So, once again, novels are leading me on into something new, and the works of Flannery O'Connor are teaching me about God's grace in a way a devotional or theological text just would not be able to. Please pray I learn to understand.