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Examples Of Sacramentality In The Works Of Flannery O Connor

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As a novelist, Flannery O’Conner dedicated her life to revealing mysteries of the world by intertwining many examples of sacramentality, mediation, and communion in her stories and essays. Presently focusing on two of her essays, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers” and “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South”, O’Conner dives deep in to the realm of spiritual understanding and enlightenment. “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers” portrays a clear example of sacramentality through her belief of the incarnation of Jesus into human flesh. O’Conner believes that the vocation of the Catholic fiction writer is that mystery ought to be incarnated into human life through the words she places on paper. “Whatever the novelist sees in the way …show more content…

As the title of this essay tells us, an artist is not an artist if he has no one to acknowledge his works. A reader must first be interested in what the writer has to say. Mediators require two willing individuals to be connected by one common object, which in this case were O’Conner’s stories. The idea of a “Catholic novel” is not very enticing to most readers, which, for the majority, are not Catholic. For O’Conner, as a Catholic novelist she can wrap the reader’s attention around the story, but incarnate her subtitle beliefs in the readers …show more content…

“The novelist is concerned with the mystery of personality, and you cannot say much that is significant about this mystery unless the characters you create exist with the marks of a believable society about them“ (p.198). She mediates the message of God through her characters flaws and failures, because God created everything that a society is able to believe. He is universal. Finally, the communal presence about O’Conner is the robust community of the South. “The South—that is, the rural, Protestant, Bible Belt South—is a little beyond the pale of Catholic respect” (p.206). Although O’Conner is a Catholic in the Protestant South, she is able to communicate the divine message of God hidden throughout all of her stories. Her community readership is strongly supported by this large demographic of Southern Bible

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