Resisting Grace

[image error]“Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does … It is easy for any child to pick out the faults in the sermon on his way home from church every Sunday. It is impossible for him to find out the hidden love that makes a man, in spite of his intellectual limitations, his neuroticism, his own lack of strength, give up his life to the service of God’s people, however bumblingly he may go about it … It is what is invisible that God sees and that the Christian must look for. Because he knows the consequences of sin, he knows how deep you have to go to find love … To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness. Charity is hard and endures.”

-Flannery O’Conner

Letter to Cecil Dawkins in Pilgrim Souls: A Collection of Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. Amy Mandelker and Elizabeth Powers (1999), 539-40.