Summary: Flannery O’Connor explores the intense and often painful nature of love, suggesting that true love can be both electrifying and terrifying. She illustrates this through the character Rayber, whose deep love for his son Bishop reveals the struggle between desire for connection and fear of vulnerability. Ultimately, O’Connor’s work challenges readers to confront the transformative power of divine love, which can shatter our comfortable illusions.
Poet Wallace Stevens said that we moderns have flattened out the Holy. We’ve turned the fiery Paraclete into a caged parakeet and the roaring Lion of Judah into a fat and lazy pussycat. (View Highlight)
We demand that our encounters with the Divine be pleasantly innocuous. We want the fascinans without the tremendum.4“Religious feeling,” wrote O’Connor, “hasbecome, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental.” (View Highlight)
That’s why Dostoevsky’s Elder Zossima says that genuine love, not the dreamily sentimental kind, is harsh and dreadful. (View Highlight)
Duc in altum!, says the Lord. Dive deeply into love and let yourself drown in it! (View Highlight)