I had to look up ‘mopey’ to make sure it was a word.

It is. Hooray!

I’ve been reading a fair amount of Flannery O’Connor recently. This is very lucky for me as–though her subtle yet incredibly profound commentary on life, faith, and humanity’s fallen nature is often lost on me–I have come to have a somewhat envious admiration of her ability to stomach reality, to embrace it head on.

In Mystery and Manners, she talks about how writing fiction isn’t about rejecting or somehow escaping from reality. In her opinion, it is actually a diving into real-ness– “and it’s startling,” she says.

Yes, yes it is.

If you read her short stories you’ll see what she means.

Her fiction isn’t nice. It’s not something you read to simply wind down before going to sleep. Her characters are hopelessly flawed and often act on their worst instincts. Her stories illicit disgust, horror, sadness and anger. There aren’t obvious happy endings.

As much as I appreciate the quality of her writing, it is hard for me to really enjoy her fiction. Not because it isn’t good–she is easily one of the most prolific American authors–but because it isn’t an escape. It really is diving into reality. A reality that is broken and hard and generally not what we hoped for or expected.

Maybe in life your artificial leg won’t get stolen, or you won’t drown, or get shot (Flannery’s characters have rotten luck). But there is, I think, a moment where you realize that life isn’t exactly what you thought it would be.

When you’re young, you think about what you want to be, or who you’re going to meet, or where you’re going to go, what you hope to accomplish–and the future seems to shine brightly, like a soft, warm glow guiding your way.

But it seems–at some point–that light is exstinguished, or at least dimmed. You realize that no job is perfect; or that what you thought you wanted to do isn’t what you want to do at all. You notice how relationships tend to come and go– and it’s usually a lot more going than coming.

You see how money is an inevitable nuisance. Paychecks seem to arrive sparingly and barely last as all the bills are taken care of. Suddenly the lifestyle you envisioned is no longer practical or attainable–but the longing remains.

Coworkers irritate, friends disappoint, relationships end.

And nothing, nothing seems to satisfy. Not entirely. there are moments of joy or pleasure or excitement. Sometimes even days. But then the song ends, the drink is finished, the person becomes tiresome or gets tired. It’s just all so fleeting–and in those dark, quiet moments that you try desperately to run away from, to avoid at all costs, in those moments you wonder why on earth you’re here and how the hell you’re supposed to find happiness.

At least I do.

And I realize how bitter or depressed I sound. How not fun this must be to read.

The truth is I am a little bitter and depressed at the moment. Some days more than others and not entirely. But I am.

That is a big reason why I have avoided writing for ‘the public’ again. I didn’t want to contaminate you with these morbid thoughts.

So why now?

Well, there are people who have encouraged me to start writing again.

I’m searching for hope, I’m searching for meaning and just the act of writing itself seems to somehow help.

I think life must be good–I believe it is is the Thomist philosophy (Flannery was a huge fan of Thomas Aquinas) that existence itself is inherently good.

I think a lot of times we just don’t understand. We are blind to the goodness because our feelings and intellect are so clouded. Clouded by the expectations we once held, and by our own incredibly limited pespective.

So, I guess you could say I’m not understanding.

But it’s something that Flannery’s writing is helping me with. Because though at first glance her writing is gruesome, there is in fact hope and grace intermingled between the tragedies and the worst of human nature.

You have to look for it–Father Damien is currently teaching a course on Flannery which is helping me immensely–but it’s there.

And I think this is one of Flannery’s many profound insights: life isn’t easy, it isn’t glamorous but there is good and always opportunities for grace.

I’m sure she learned this from personal experience. Having achieved a level of honor as a young writer, Flannery learned she had lupus–the disease from which her father died. She promptly left the city in which she resided and moved to a farm with her mother. She died there at the young age of 39.

She knew she was going to die. But she didn’t waste her life–she used it to spread the faith in her most ingenious and unusual way: writing stories about an ubelievably disappointing and incredibly marvelous reality.

You see, that is what Flannery was: a realist. People often read her stories and conclude that she must be a cynic. But really she is not cynical at all. She has the rare gift of seeing reality as it is and accepting the good with the bad. Where she sees brokenness she knows there is redemption. Where she sees darkness she knows there is also light. Where she sees a fallen person she knows grace can still abound.

This is incredibly unusual. Most people either can’t bare reality and so avoid it as much as they can (easy enough with all the distractions that exist in our world); or they see the world and all the pain and suffering it holds and so adopt a nihilistic mindset.

Both are forms of self-protection, and Flannery employed neither. She had the courage to face life–to face it in all of it’s terrible and wonderful glory.

I pray that I–a hopeless and eternally disappointed idealist– may one day (soon please) have a teeny tiny bit of that courage.

Lord help me see.

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”