The experience of losing your faith, or of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have written me about this. I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.
Flannery O'Connor, from a letter to Alfred Corn, 1962
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At the same time, in other letters (and in her stories), she argues that God works beyond our reason and emotion and belief. The reality of the Incarnation will blow you over while you think you are on some 'journey.' I think the great message of O'Connor is that grace is not dependent on our understanding of it.
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