The Prayer Thread! My favorite place on SI. You all are in my prayers, daily.
I am re-reading my favorite essay in the world. Sometimes when I love something this much, I re-write it line by line in my journal so I can savor it and pay attention to the nuance. I'm going to re-write this essay here. It's not THAT long for an essay, but it will take a while. I will be serialized :) I hope you like it even a tiny bit as much as I do.
If you are reeling from infidelity, this will probably not land. It has nothing to do with infidelity other than God's use of the grotesque, which comes at the end.
Introduction to a Memoir of Mary Ann (1961)
by Flannery O'Connor
Stories of pious children tend to be false. This may be because they are told by adults, who see virtue where their subjects would see only a practical course of action; or it may be because such stories are written to edify and what is written to edify usually ends by amusing. For my part, I have never cared to read about little boys who build altars and play they are priests, or about little girls who dress up as nuns, or about those pious Protestant children who lack this equipment but brighten the corners where they are.
In the spring of 1960 I received a letter from Sister Evangelist, the Sister Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta. "This is a strange request," the letter read, "but we will try to tell our story as briefly as possible. In 1949 a little three-year-old girl, Mary Ann, was admitted to our Home as a patient. She proved to be a remarkable child and lived until she was twelve. Of those nine years, much is to be told. Patients, visitors, Sisters, all were influenced in some way by this afflicted child. True she had been born with a tumor on the side of her face; one eye had been removed, but the other eye sparkled, twinkled, danced mischievously, and after one meeting one never was conscious of her physical defect but recognized only the beautiful brave spirit and felt the joy of such contact. Now Mary Ann's story should be written but who to write it?"
Not me, I said to myself.
"We have had offers from nuns and others but we don't want a pious little recital. We want a story with a real impact on other lives just as Mary Ann herself had that impact on each life she touched . . . this wouldn't have to be a factual story. It could be a novel with many other characters but the outstanding character, Mary Ann."
A novel, I thought. Horrors.
Sister Evangelist ended by inviting me to write Mary Ann's story and to come up and spend a few days at the Home in Atlanta and "imbibe the atmosphere" where the little girl had lived for nine years.
It is always difficult to get across to people who are not professional writers that a talent to write does not mean a talent to write anything at all. I did not wish to imbibe Mary Ann's atmosphere. I was not capable of writing her story. Sister Evangelist had enclosed a picture of the child. I had glanced at it when I first opened the letter, and had put it quickly aside. Now I picked it up to give it a cursory look before returning it to the Sisters. It showed a little girl in her First Communion dress and veil. She was sitting on a bench, holding something I could not make out. Her small face was straight and bright on one side. The other side was protuberant, the eye was bandaged, the nose and mouth crowded slightly out of place. The child lookd out at her observer with an obvious happiness and composure. I continued to gaze at the picture long after I had thougth to be finished with it.
More next time . . .
