COFFEE BREAK 381

+ The New Yorker offers "Inheritance and Invention: Flannery O'Connor's Prayer Journal."

Excerpt 1: "She sensed that the act of creation in both was not her own. 'My dear God,' she wrote, 'how stupid we people are until You give us something. Even in praying it is You who have to pray in us.' Like the Psalmist who asked God for words to pray, O’Connor believed that words themselves are a gift from God. She wrote, 'There is a whole sensible world around me that I should be able to turn to Your praise; but I cannot do it. Yet at some insipid moment when I may possibly be thinking of floor wax or pigeon eggs, the opening of a beautiful prayer may come up from my subconscious and lead me to write something exalted.'"

Excerpt 2: "The journal is chiefly an interior one, a record of a Christian who hoped the rightful orientation of her own life would contribute to righting the orientation of the world. O’Connor yearns for prayer to come effortlessly, even while exerting great intellectual effort to understand and induce it. 'Prayer should be composed I understand of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and supplication and I would like to see what I can do with each without an exegesis.' Confessing that her mind 'is a prey to all sorts of intellectual quackery,' she asks for a faith motivated by love, not fear: 'Give me the grace, dear God, to adore You, for even this I cannot do for myself.'”