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"Please let the story, dear God, in its revisions, be made too clear for any false & low interpretation," she writes in one prayer, and in another, gives voice to a feeling that every writer in the world can relate to. "Dear God, I am so discouraged about my work." Like Andy Warhol, O'Connor was a devout Catholic, and she tried to attend Mass every day. "God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me," she says, and concludes another entry with "Dear God please help me to be an artist, please let it lead to You." For O'Connor, like some characters in her books, faith played out as a fierce battle between the realities of an unjust world and the absolute belief that there is more to life. In one prayer she muses that "perhaps the idea would be that good can show through even something that is cheap," and in another she calmly notes that everything has a spiritual price. "The intellectual & artistic delights God gives us are visions & like visions we pay for them."
O'Connor stopped writing the journal in 1947, and she died of lupus in 1964. "A Prayer Journal" is a slim book but a powerful one, since even at this young age O'Connor was writing sentences that startle with their clarity. "Can't anyone teach me how to pray?" reads one entry, and in that regard O'Connor needn't have worried. She prayed as well as she wrote.
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