Category Archives: North America

Henri Nouwen — September 21

Europe, North America, This century (1937-2025)

Bible connection

Read Colossians 3:1-3

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

All about Henri Nouwen (1932-1996)

On this day in 1996, Father Henri Nouwen died at age 64. Born in the Netherlands, he taught in universities in Europe and at Yale, Harvard and Notre Dame in the U.S. The last decade of his life, he spent in the L’Arche community of Toronto, sharing his life with community members with severe disabilities. Henri’s transparency, intelligence and faith brought him many readers. He has led many of us to deeply value solitude and contemplative practices.

In this excerpt from The Way of the Heart Henri reflects on the call to solitude that led the Desert Fathers and Mothers (and us, still today) to understand their gifts by fleeing the shipwreck of the society of their day:

Our society is not a community radiant with the love of Christ, but a dangerous network of domination and manipulation in which we can easily get entangled and lose our soul. The basic question is whether we ministers of Jesus Christ have not already been so deeply molded by the seductive powers of our dark world that we have become blind to our own and other people’s fatal state and have lost the power and motivation to swim for our lives.

Other Nouwen quotes:

“As soon as we are alone…inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediately shut out all our inner doubts, anxieties, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distraction, we often find that our inner distraction manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Making All Things New and Other Classics

“Aren’t you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don’t you often hope: ‘May this book, idea, course, trip, job, country or relationship fulfill my deepest desire.’ But as long as you are waiting for that mysterious moment you will go on running helter-skelter, always anxious and restless, always lustful and angry, never fully satisfied. You know that this is the compulsiveness that keeps us going and busy, but at the same time makes us wonder whether we are getting anywhere in the long run. This is the way to spiritual exhaustion and burn-out. This is the way to spiritual death.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World

“Hospitality means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life

“For most of my life I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair.

Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not “How am I to find God?” but “How am I to let myself be found by him?” The question is not “How am I to know God?” but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming

More

The Henri Nouwen Society can tell you everything: [link]

On Nouwen’s struggles with celibacy and orientation: [link]

What do we do with this?

Nouwen is famous for encouraging self-reliant and denial-ridden Christians to accept their neediness and self-delusion. He taught that healers are wounded, like Jesus.

Are you avoiding solitude because your outer distractions are helping you avoid your inner turmoil and the struggle of spiritual development? Probably. We hope your church is  devoted to going deep with God. If so, they’ll be dealing with many people who are determined to stay shallow. Let God pull you under. Be receptive to being loved. Don’t get stuck avoiding the dreadful thought that you don’t love enough or are not loved well enough.

Johnny Cash — September 12

North America, This century (1937-2025)
Johnny Cash Pondering — Michelle Dick

Bible connection

The Spirit of God came on Azariah son of Oded. He went out to meet Asa and said to him, “Listen to me, Asa and all Judah and Benjamin. The Lord is with you when you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you. For a long time Israel was without the true God, without a priest to teach and without the law. But in their distress they turned to the Lord, the God of Israel, and sought him, and he was found by them. In those days it was not safe to travel about, for all the inhabitants of the lands were in great turmoil. One nation was being crushed by another and one city by another, because God was troubling them with every kind of distress. But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded.” — 2 Chronicles 15:1-7

All about Johnny Cash (1932-2003)

John R. “Johnny” Cash born February 26, 1932. He is widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century and is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 90 million records worldwide. Although primarily remembered as a country music icon, his genre-spanning songs and sound embraced rock and roll, rockabilly, blues, folk, and gospel. This crossover appeal won Cash the rare honor of multiple inductions in the Country Music, Rock and Roll, and Gospel Music Halls of Fame.

Cash was known for his deep, calm bass-baritone voice, a rebelliousness coupled with an increasingly somber and humble demeanor, free prison concerts, and his trademark attire, which earned him the nickname “The Man in Black.” He traditionally began his concerts with the simple “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” followed by his signature Folsom Prison Blues.

Much of Cash’s music echoed themes of sorrow, moral tribulation and redemption, especially in later life. During the last stage of his career, Cash covered songs by several late 20th century rock artists, most notably Hurt by Nine Inch Nails (video below).

Cash was raised by his parents as a Southern Baptist. He was baptized in 1944 in the Tyronza River as a member of the Central Baptist Church of Dyess, Arkansas.

A troubled but devout Christian, Cash has been characterized as a “lens through which to view American contradictions and challenges.” He wrote a Christian novel, Man in White, which showcases his theological studies. It is is a portrait of six pivotal years in the life of the apostle, Paul. In the introduction Cash writes about a reporter who, once tried to paint him into a corner, baiting him to acknowledge a single denominational persuasion at the center of his heart. Finally, Cash laid down the law: “I—as a believer that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, the Christ of the Greeks, was the Anointed One of God (born of the seed of David, upon faith as Abraham has faith, and it was accounted to him for righteousness)—am grafted onto the true vine, and am one of the heirs of God’s covenant with Israel….I’m a Christian. Don’t put me in another box.”

He made a spoken word recording of the entire New King James Version of the New Testament. Cash declared he was “the biggest sinner of them all”, and viewed himself overall as a complicated and contradictory man. Accordingly, Cash is said to have “contained multitudes,” and has been deemed “the philosopher-prince of American country music.”

Cash’s daughter, singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, once pointed out that “My father was raised a Baptist, but he has the soul of a mystic. He’s a profoundly spiritual man, but he readily admits to a continual attraction for all seven deadly sins.”

“There’s nothing hypocritical about it,” Johnny Cash told Rolling Stone author Anthony DeCurtis. “There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I’m the biggest sinner of them all.” To Cash, even his near deadly bout with drug addiction contained a crucial spiritual element. “I used drugs to escape, and they worked pretty well when I was younger. But they devastated me physically and emotionally—and spiritually … [they put me] in such a low state that I couldn’t communicate with God. There’s no lonelier place to be. I was separated from God, and I wasn’t even trying to call on him. I knew that there was no line of communication. But he came back. And I came back.”

“Being a Christian isn’t for sissies,” Cash said once. “It takes a real man to live for God—a lot more man than to live for the devil, you know? If you really want to live right these days, you gotta be tough.”

What’s more, he was intimately aware of the hard truths about living God’s way: “If you’re going to be a Christian, you’re going to change. You’re going to lose some old friends, not because you want to, but because you need to.”

”I’m thrilled to death with life,” he told Larry King during an interview. “Life is—the way God has given it to me—was just a platter. A golden platter of life laid out there for me. It’s been beautiful.”

“I don’t give up … and it’s not out of frustration and desperation that I say ‘I don’t give up.’ I don’t give up because I don’t give up. I don’t believe in it.”

What do we do with this?

Johnny Cash was a celebrity, which usually equals trouble. He had plenty of trouble. But he also had plenty of conviction that lasted his whole life. In many ways he is an “everyman” who stubbornly tried to do his best, often standing with the downtrodden. Notably, he risked his career early on to speak out on behalf of Native Americans. He used his capabilities and his notoriety for more than his own pleasure and profit.

Cash sang these words in one of his last songs, “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” recorded in 2003 in the final months of his life and released posthumously in 2010: “When I hear that trumpet sound, I’m gonna rise right out of the ground. Ain’t no grave can hold my body down. … Well, meet me, Jesus, meet me. Meet me in the middle of the air. And if these wings don’t fail me, I will meet You anywhere.”

Can you sing that?

If you can’t be held down, what can you do?

Madeleine L’Engle — September 6

North America, This century (1937-2025)

Image result for madeleine l'engle

Bible connection

Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
    nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. — 1 Corinthians 2:6-13

All about Madeleine L’Engle (1918 – 2007)

“If we are willing to live by Scripture, we must be willing to live by paradox and contradiction and surprise.” Madeleine L’Engle said it, and she certainly lived by it.

Formidable in personality and far-ranging in accomplishments, L’Engle wrote more than 60 books, including novels, poetry, memoir, essays, sermons, commentaries, and creative nonfiction. She is best known for A Wrinkle in Time, the first novel in the Time Quintet, but she may be best loved for Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, her breathtaking opus on the creative process. In it, she writes, “We live by revelation, as Christians, as artists, which means we must be careful never to get set into rigid molds. The minute we begin to think we know all the answers, we forget the questions.”

L’Engle refused to be “forced into either/or.” Her life and work reflect her determination: Icon and Iconoclast, Sacred and Secular, Truth and Story, Faith and Science, Religion and Art, Fact and Fiction. She showed a clear preference for risk over certainty, narrative over affirmation, and questions over answers.

L’Engle’s refusal to be pigeonholed had a tumultuous effect on her life and career. The mixed reception of A Wrinkle in Time is one example. Wrinkle is clearly, unequivocally Christian, enough to make non-religious readers squirm. Lois Lowry, a celebrated children’s author, has expressed doubt that the book would even be published today. “In the world of literature, Christianity is no longer respectable,” wrote L’Engle. “When I am referred to in an article or a review as a ‘practicing Christian,’ it is seldom meant as a compliment.”

But censorship of her work from Christian critics has been just as ferocious. A Wrinkle in Time has been labeled “spiritual poison” and banned by believers who accuse her of promoting witchcraft, goddess worship, divination, and a host of similar heresies. Similar criticism was aimed at C. S. Lewis. Both have been denounced by people of faith, scorned by the literati, and banned from libraries. Both worked as lay evangelists and apologists. Both reclaimed myth and championed the arts. Both wrote in multiple genres, and both remain notoriously difficult to categorize. One more comparison worth sharing: Both Lewis and L’Engle wrote in reaction to the prevailing assumptions of modernism. Biographer Sarah Arthur observes:

To combat [modernist assumptions], Lewis mined back into the riches of tradition—the ancient myth of Cupid and Psyche for his novel Till We Have Faces, for instance, or from Plato and Aristotle’s universal moral law in The Abolition of Man—in order to glean insights about God and human nature that had been dismissed or forgotten. L’Engle, by contrast, pressed forward into the mysteries of scientific discovery. …She engaged science to show just how small, how relative, how limited our view of God has been in light of the wonders of an astonishing universe.

Although she once considered herself an atheist, after L’Engle became a Christian she had a daily practice of reading the Bible and praying. Her granddaughter said L’Engle’s coming to her faith was slower “acceptance of what she had always known to be true,” rather than a sudden conversion moment. “She was a Christian because she was deeply rooted in its traditions and language, and she was moved by and trusted in its stories,” Although L’Engle did not like denominational labels, she mostly attended Episcopal churches, serving for four decades as a librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

Quotes:

  • Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.
  • The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.
  • You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
  • Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.
  • Some things have to be believed to be seen.
  • I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.

More

Interesting PBS show on L’Engle [link]

A video (one of a set) on L’Engle talking about faith and doubt. [link]

Hollywood made sure there was little God and certainly no Jesus in the movie:

What do we do with this?

L’Engle loved the childlike qualities, still resident in all of us, that could be called upon to meet the wonder of being creatures of a loving God. Our church often quoted her during Advent, even making art from the quote: This is the irrational season, when love blooms bright and wild. / Had Mary been filled with reason, there’d have been no room for the child.

As you explore her work, even the little snippets on this page, let yourself be full of the child, both child and Child. She spent her life meditating for us and provides a wonderful resource for our own deeper journey. Slow down with her and let yourself go deeper.

Nicholas Black Elk — August 19

North America, This century (1937-2025)
Black Elk teaching a student to pray the Rosary.

Bible Connection

Read Acts 15:5-11

Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.”

The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”

All about Black Elk (1863-1950)

On this day in 1950, Oglala Lakota medicine man Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa) died. He was 87. He lived, along with his cousin Crazy Horse, during the last days of the U.S. Indian Wars. He participated, at about age 12, in the defeat of Custer at Little Big Horn in 1876. He was wounded during the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Black Elk was part of the first generation of Lakotas to be confined to reservations.

Black Elk (L) and Elk of the Oglala Lakota in London in their grass dance regalia while touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 1887

Extreme poverty and communal responsibility were factors that led him to both join Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1886, travel internationally, and to agree to be interviewed for the book for which he is best remembered, the much debated Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt in 1930. One of the major controversies with the book is the exclusion of Black Elk’s faith in Jesus and mission—as well as the withholding of payment for participation in the work.

As a medicine man, Black Elk had prepared to visit a dying boy in the village, only to encounter a Jesuit priest praying there first. He encountered a power greater than his own, and accepted an invitation to spend time at the mission. He was baptized and took the name Nicholas shortly after. As a Catholic Catechist (an often downplayed aspect of his life), he was widely considered an apostle to the plains Indians. Thousands of people were brought to faith—both Indian and non-native, through his work and famous preaching.

His primary work was with new converts and as an evangelist alongside the priests—when priests were not available his duties included baptizing and burials. His passion for Christ as the Creator and fulfiller of things drove him to vigorous and passionate study. Nick thought that many of the Lakota spiritual traditions had come from God to teach them to live in a good way and that Christ made sense of all of it. Many experts agree that his practice of the Christian faith, life, and mission were well-integrated with his worldview and practice as a Lakota. Others say that when Black Elk provides the details of seven traditional rituals of the Oglala people in John Epes Brown’s, The Sacred Pipe, it shows that the tribal traditions concerning Wakan Tanka (The Great Spirit) were more important to him than his Catholicism.

John Neihardt’s interpretation of Black Elk put into a prayer:

One integration Black Elk accomplished is the change in the symbolism for the sun dance ceremony. Traditionally, it was a time of fasting, prayer, and suffering in order to attain personal power for victory in battle. It has become, and many credit Nicholas Black Elk for this shift, a ceremony of prayer and fasting on behalf of all the people—including enemies. For Black Elk, it was a ceremony to remind the people of the suffering and death of Christ for all of creation.

More

Black Elk: Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism by Damian Costello

Short Article on his life and faith by Pat McNamera

Black Elk, Woke — book review by Ann Neumann that explores meaning and integration.

Bio from Akta Lakota Center.

Bio from the Roman Catholics

What do we do with this?

Pray for all people. List the people you consider your enemies first, as you pray. Consider the depth of faith it took for Black Elk to be confined to a reservation prison and reorient the sun dance to intercession.

Consider again how you may benefit from the domination system, or how, in essence, your prayers may be mostly for power in battle, not strength in suffering love.

Black Elk’s faith was “indigenized,” it was enculturated into the ways of the Lakota. He saw how the wisdom of his people also led to faith in Jesus. The famous book about Black Elk’s wisdom left out his integration of traditional wisdom with his faith. Are you living by some wisdom that is not integrated or even at odds with your faith?

Charles Finney — August 16

North America, The Modern Era (1227-1936)

Bible connection

Read 1 Thessalonians 5:16-22

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.

All about Charles Finney (1792-1875)

One time someone brought a shotgun to one of Charles Finney’s revival meetings, intending to kill him. May you cause that kind of trouble as you defy the powers!

Some people might not think Finney fits into the “cloud of witnesses” that make up our respected spiritual ancestors. He was the “father of modern revivalism.” He was the forerunner of Billy Graham in the sense that he popularized the “altar call” and other tactics many find a bit too coercive or manipulative. But his demands for living a truly Christian life, his determination to get something going, and his presumption that people could live up to their radical calling, is right up our alley. He was also among the first to have women and African Americans participating in his meetings as equals with white men. One story is that the altar call’s original purpose was to come forward to sign petitions to abolish slavery.

The zenith of Finney’s evangelistic career was in the 1830′s during the Second Great Awakening. In Rochester, New York, he preached 98 sermons that caused a ruckus.  Shopkeepers closed their businesses, posting notices urging people to attend Finney’s meetings. Reportedly, the population of the town increased by two-thirds during the revival, and crime dropped by two-thirds over the same period. In 1900 church historian Susan Hayes Ward wrote “The hearer at the time felt that Mr. Finney was talking to him personally rather than preaching before an audience…He did not speak about sinners in the abstract, but he talked to the individual sinners before him.”

In 1832 he began an almost continuous revival in New York City as minister of the Second Free Presbyterian Church, organized especially for him. In the middle of his installation service he became ill with cholera. Others who caught the disease that day died. Finney almost died, as well, and it was months before he could take up his full duties.

From its inception the church embraced Finney’s passionate anti-slavery stance.  Black worshipers were welcomed (albeit in a separated section) –- a policy which, coupled with Finney’s outspoken abolitionist sermons, did not sit well with many outsiders and newspapers.  During the riots of 1833, a mob broke into the church and attacked black members.  On July 8 the Courier and Enquirer spat “Another of those disgraceful negro-outrages &c., occurred last night at that common focus of pollution, Chatham Street Chapel” (Susan Hayes Ward).

In 1834 after further anti-abolitionist riots, Finney moved into the huge Broadway Tabernacle his followers built for him. He stayed there for only a year, leaving to pastor Oberlin Congregational Church in Ohio, and to teach theology at Oberlin College. In 1851, he was appointed president of the college, which gave him a new forum to advocate the social reforms he championed, especially the abolition of slavery. Oberlin College, under his leadership, was the first college to admit woman and black/brown people to be educated with white men.

Finney married evangelism to social reform, New Testament evangelism with Old Testament prophecy, piety with radicalism, and conversion with action. He got people talking and acting. He was not content with them simply receiving or consuming. His commitment to Jesus meant taking care of the poor and the needy, and his deep commitment to social reform was seen in the radicalism of Oberlin College and in his major push to end slavery. Those he inspired continued to take risks in order to relate to each other and change the world.

Finney quotes:

Nothing tends more to cement the hearts of Christians than praying together. Never do they love one another so well as when they witness the outpouring of each other’s hearts in prayer.

No government is lawful or innocent that does not recognize the moral law as the only universal law, and God as the Supreme Lawgiver and Judge, to whom nations in their national capacity, as well as individuals, are amenable.

When there are dissensions, and jealousies, and evil speakings among professors of religion, then there is great need of a revival. These things show that Christians have got far from God, and it is time to think earnestly of a revival.

More

Oberlin College remembers Finney.

Questioning Finney’s legacy: Michael Horton, Christian History, PBS.

What do we do with this?

Don’t get yourself shot unless you have to, but how should you stir up enough trouble being a Christian that you arouse opposition? Ever think of doing that? Ever make a plan?

Pray for revival to break out. It would be great if people shut their business down (or turned off the TV) to come meet with Jesus followers and experience the presence of God!

Flannery O’Connor — August 3

North America, This century (1937-2025)
A snapshot of Flannery O’Connor beside her self-portrait at her Georgia home, 1953.

Bible connection

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,  and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. – Romans 5:1-11

All about Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)

Mary Flannery O’Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and thirty-two short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. Many think of her as one of America’s greatest fiction writers. Others add that she was one of the strongest apologists for Christian faith in the 20th century (especially the Roman Catholic branch of the faith). Her small but impressive body of fiction presents the soul’s struggle with what she called the “stinking mad shadow of Jesus.”

O’Connor was the only daughter of a marriage between two of Georgia’s oldest Catholic families. She was born on March 25, 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. She grew up under live oaks and Spanish moss, across the square from the cathedral where she was immersed in ritual, sacraments, and daily mass, all sheltered by the Sisters of Mercy. It was a coherent cosmos of faith. Even when her family moved from Savannah to a Milledgeville, Georgia, dairy farm so isolated that it was reached only “by bus or buzzard,” Flannery’s life centered around God.

After graduating from a nearby women’s college, Flannery went to the renowned Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Although she claimed that she didn’t know a short story from an ad in the newspaper, she quickly became a sensation. Though Flannery hardly looked the part, the fiction editor of Esquire put her at the red-hot center of his Literary Establishment chart of 1963.

As Flannery’s cultural star was on the rise, she was stricken by lupus, an incurable, debilitating disease that sapped her energy and forced her return to the “very muddy and manurey” farm back in Georgia. Confined there, dependent on her mother’s care, she wrote only as her diminishing strength permitted—for two hours every morning.

Before her death at 39, Flannery predicted that nobody would write her biography, since lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy. Yet her outsized spiritual dramas enacted on a Southern stage—told through short stories, novels, and many letters—ensure her place among the greatest American writers.

The body of O’Connor’s work resists conventional description. Although many of her narratives begin in a familiar world—on a family vacation or in a doctor’s waiting room, for example—they are not, finally, realistic. Furthermore, although O’Connor’s work was written during a time of great social change in the South, those changes—and the relationships among blacks and whites—were not at the center of her fiction. O’Connor made frequent use of violence and shock tactics. She argued that she wrote for an audience who, for all its Sunday piety, did not share her belief in the fall of humanity and its need for redemption. “To the hard of hearing,” she explained, “[Christian writers] shout, and for the… almost-blind [they] draw large and startling figures.” That thought has become a popular explanation of O’Connor’s intent as a writer.

One cannot get through a Flannery O’Connor story without encountering the strangeness of God. As she said, the greatest dramas involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Her short story “Revelation” startles with its final vision of a field of living fire. The vast hordes of souls rumbling toward heaven, the battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs, are a strange, beautiful sight. And then the words, “In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

Flannery lamented that our secular society understands the religious mind less and less, that people who believe vigorously in Christ are wholly odd to most readers. It becomes more and more difficult in America to make belief believable, yet this is what she wanted to do. Flannery insisted that she was not a mystic and did not lead a holy life, yet she unapologetically displayed her faith: a life of continually turning away from egocentricity and toward God.

O’Connor’s letters are full of sin and grace, fall and redemption, and the ultimate reality, God revealed in the Incarnation. She calls for the abandonment of the self: “I measure God by everything I’m not.” She embraces suffering, insisting that before grace can heal “it cuts with the sword Christ said he came to bring.” While many casual believers think that faith is a big electric blanket, she says, of course it is a cross. Her Christian faith is a demanding one.

The word mystery is one of her favorites. She never tosses it around in the way of fuzzy spirituality. Flannery’s mystery is a rich and complex thing; it’s the ground of her spiritual life, and it explains everything. People often strip the cosmos of religious meaning these days. O’Connor aims to return us to mystery, where the unseen ordering of the world speaks of God the Creator. “This is the central Christian mystery,” Flannery says. “Life has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.”

In her journal we can find this prayer: “Help me get down under things and find where you are.” This may be the meaning of mystery for Flannery. She once said that fiction is the concrete expression of mystery—mystery that is lived. For O’Connor, mystery is about getting down under things to find where God is, illuminating the divine foundation of all that is, seen and unseen. Elsewhere in the journals there is the yearning, young Flannery, the wavering believer who wrote, “I don’t want to be doomed to mediocrity in my feeling for Christ. I want to feel. I want to love. Take me, dear Lord, and set me in the direction I am to go.”

An early 1964 surgery for a fibroid tumor reactivated O’Connor’s lupus, which had been in remission, and her health worsened during the following months. On August 3, 1964, after several days in a coma, she died in the Baldwin County Hospital. She is buried beside her father in Memory Hill Cemetery in Milledgeville. At the time of her death, the Atlanta Journal observed that O’Connor’s “deep spirituality qualified her to speak with a forcefulness not often matched in American literature.”

More

PBS bio

Flannery O’Connor reads “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Commentary at a fan site.

How Racist was Flannery O’Connor? from the New Yorker.

What do we do with this?

Even stricken with lupus, Flannery O’Connor kept digging down under her normality to get in touch with the mystery occluded by an oppressive secular world. We present these great examples of faith to help us stop and ponder and imitate. So is that the suggestion? Stop and dig down.

Harriet Beecher Stowe — July 1

North America, The Modern Era (1227-1936)
Harriet Beecher Stowe by Francis Holl (ca. 1855)

Bible connection

No, that’s not your experience at all. You’ve come to Mount Zion, the city where the living God resides. The invisible Jerusalem is populated by throngs of festive angels and Christian citizens. It is the city where God is Judge, with judgments that make us just. You’ve come to Jesus, who presents us with a new covenant, a fresh charter from God. He is the Mediator of this covenant. The murder of Jesus, unlike Abel’s—a homicide that cried out for vengeance—became a proclamation of grace. — Hebrews 12:22-4 (Message)

All about Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

When President Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1863, he is reported to have said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin may not have caused the Civil War, but it shook both North and South. It declared the profound value of a human soul and pictured emancipation as inevitable. Susan Bradford Eppes wrote, after her state of Florida seceded, “If Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had died before she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this would never have happened … Isn’t it strange how much harm a pack of lies can do?”

Harriet was the seventh of 12 children born to Lyman Beecher, the Congregationalist minister, noted revivalist and reformer. When Harriet’s mother lay dying, Lyman repeatedly spoke words to her that the family embraced as their life text, often repeating it to one another:

“… Ye are come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, … and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.”

The essence of those words energized the unanswerable argument in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: if a slave can come to Mount Sion and to Jesus and to the company of saints in the New Jerusalem, how can you set him up on an auction block and trade him from one white man to another?

In 1832 her father moved the family to the frontier city of Cincinnati, where he became president of Lane Seminary, soon a center for abolitionists. At 25 Harriet married Calvin Ellis Stowe, professor of Biblical literature at Lane.

Harriet was often morbid while growing up as she struggled with issues of faith. But when she was fourteen, she told her father she had given herself to Christ. Later in her marriage to Calvin Stowe, she would plead with him to seek Christ with the same burning devotion with which he sought knowledge. “If you had studied Christ with half the energy that you have studied Luther … then would he be formed in you … ” When he turned to spiritualism, she pleaded with him, the Biblical scholar, that it was unbiblical.

During her child-rearing years, she read to her seven children two hours each evening and, for a time, ran a small school in her home. She described herself as “a little bit of a woman, just as thin and dry as a pinch of snuff; never very much to look at in my best days and very much used-up by now, a mere drudge with few ideas beyond babies and housekeeping.”

But she was not a mere drudge. She found time to write, partially to bolster the meager family income. An early literary success at age 32 (for a collection of short stories) encouraged her, but she still worried about the conflict between writing and mothering. Despite privation and anxiety, due largely to her husband’s poor health, she wrote continually and in 1843 published The Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters Among the Descendants of the Pilgrims. Her husband urged her on, predicting she could mold “the mind of the West for the coming generation.” That she did with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly at 40.

She had lived for 18 years in Cincinnati, separated only by the Ohio River from a slave-holding community in Kentucky. She gained firsthand knowledge of fugitive slaves and about life in the South from friends and through her contact with the “Underground Railroad” there. The railroad was a secret network started in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act mandating severe measures for the return of runaway slaves without trial. It helped  escaped slaves reach safety in the North or in Canada. Stowe herself helped some slaves escape. (If you his the link above, you’ll see that it was a victim of website editors scrubbing out DEI from Government sites. Here’s a look at the act from elsewhere).

Even though she had dipped her toes in abolition, Stowe still brooded over how she could further respond. Then, during a church communion service, the scene of the triumphant death of Tom flashed before her. She soon formed the story that preceded Tom’s death.

In 1850 her husband became professor at Bowdoin College and moved his family to Brunswick, Maine. In Brunswick, Stowe wrote the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for serial publication in the National Era, an antislavery paper from Washington, D.C., in 1851 and 1852 in 40 installments, each with a cliffhanger ending. Her name became anathema in the South. But elsewhere the book had an unparalleled popularity; it was translated into at least 23 languages. When it appeared in book form, it sold 1,000,000 copies before the Civil War. The dramatic adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin played to capacity audiences. Stowe reinforced her story with The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), in which she accumulated a large number of documents and testimonies against slavery.

Its publication also inspired a reaction from the South: critical reviews and the publication of some 30 anti-abolitionist Uncle Tom novels within three years.

Illustration from original.

By literary standards, the novel’s situations are contrived, the dialogue unreal, and the slaves romanticized. Still, Stowe communicated the absurdity of slavery through Tom’s triumph over the brutal evil of Simon Legree.

“‘How would ye like to be tied to a tree, and have a slow fire lit up around ye?’ asked Legree. ‘Wouldn’t that be pleasant, eh, Tom?’

“‘Mas’r,’ said Tom, ‘I know ye can do dreadful things, but’—he stretched himself upward and clasped his hands—’but after ye’ve killed the body, there ain’t no more ye can do. And oh! there’s all eternity to come after that!’”

Until her death in July 1896, Stowe averaged nearly a book a year, but Uncle Tom’s Cabin was her legacy. Even one of her harshest critics acknowledged that it was “perhaps the most influential novel ever published, a verbal earthquake, an ink-and-paper tidal wave.”

She thereafter led the life of a woman of letters, writing novels, of which The Minister’s Wooing (1859) is best known, and many studies of social life in both fiction and essay. Stowe published also a small volume of religious poems and toward the end of her career gave some public readings from her writings.

Harriet Beecher Stowe quotes:

  • Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
  • The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
  • Women are the real architects of society.
  • Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.
  • It’s a matter of taking the side of the weak against the strong, something the best people have always done.
  • Human nature is above all things lazy.
  • The truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end.

More

Read Uncle Tom’s Cabin for free.

“The Small House of Uncle Thomas” ballet portion of The King and I in which a young Siamese women confronts the King with his resemblance to Simon of Legree.

What do we do with this?

Stowe came from a skilled and disciplined family, but even then she was still a woman trapped in the day-to-day life of a patriarchal society. Her life suggests that conviction counts, if it is followed up by deeds, no matter the circumstance.

What is God moving you to do? What should you be sticking with until it is done?

Uncle Tom’s Cabin would make an interesting group reading as a family or small group.

Antonio de Montesinos — June 27

North America, South America, The Modern Era (1227-1936)
Antonio de Montesinos shouts against slavery. Sculpture by Antonio Castellanos (1982), Santo Domingo harbor, Dominican Republic

Bible connection

I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night: ye that make mention of the Lord, keep not silence,

And give him no rest, till he establish, and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.

The Lord hath sworn by his right hand, and by the arm of his strength, Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies; and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast laboured:

But they that have gathered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord; and they that have brought it together shall drink it in the courts of my holiness. — Isaiah 62:6-9 (KJV)

All about Antonio de Montesinos (1475-1540)

The Spaniards who conquered the Caribbean and operated plantations with Native American labor were wanton in their destruction of human life, and perpetrated terrible cruelties to get gold or to exact revenge for the slightest indignities. Most priests were silent to these abuses but a few Dominican friars were outraged.

Antonio de Montesinos was among the outraged. Very little is known about Montesinos’ early life. He joined the Dominican order at the convent of St. Stephen in Salamanca, Spain. While he was there, he may have received an education. He was a member of the first group of Dominican missionaries to go to Hispaniola (now divided into the Dominican Republic and Haiti) in September 1510, under the leadership of of his prior, Pedro de Córdoba.

With the backing of Córdoba and his Dominican community in Santo Domingo, Montesinos was the first European to publicly denounce the enslavement and harsh treatment of the indigenous peoples of the island. He initiated an ongoing struggle to resist and reform the colonizers’ treatment of the people in the “New World.” Montesinos’ outspoken criticism influenced Bartolomé de las Casas to head up a movement for the humane treatment of the native people.

Montesinos is famous for his sermon on December 21, 1511, in which he warned his listeners of their spiritual peril. His listeners demanded a retraction. Instead, the Prior Cordoba responded with the threat of excommunication for all plantation operators who did not free their Indians. Here is part of Montesinos’ sermon:

I have climbed to this pulpit to let you know of your sins, for I am the voice of Christ crying in the desert of this island, and therefore, you must not listen to me indifferently, but with all your heart and all your senses…. This voice tells you that you are in mortal sin; that you not only are in it, but live in it and die in it, and this because of the cruelty and tyranny that you bring to bear on these innocent people.
Pray tell, by what right do you wage your odious wars on people who dwelt in quiet and peace on their own lands? [By what right have you] destroyed countless numbers of them with unparalleled murders and destruction? Why do you oppress and exploit them, without even giving them enough to eat, or caring for them when they become ill as a result of your exploitation? They die, or rather, you kill them, so that you may extract and obtain more and more gold every day….
Are they not human? Have they no souls? Are you not required to love them as you love yourselves? How can you remain in such profound moral lethargy? I assure you, in your present state you can no more be saved than Moors or Turks who do not have and even reject the faith of Jesus Christ!” [Justo González, “Lights in the Darkness.”]
As a result of the friars’ protests at Santo Domingo, King Ferdinand II of Spain initially ordered that Montesinos be shipped back to the homeland along with other Dominicans who supported him. Ferdinand, at first, referred to the preaching of Montesinos as “a novel and groundless attitude” and a “dangerous opinion [that] would do much harm to all the affairs of that land.” After returning to Spain, Montesinos and his supporters were able to persuade the king of their righteous cause and principles.

As a result, the king convened a commission that promulgated the Laws of Burgos, the first code of ordinances to protect the indigenous people. The laws regulated the treatment and conversion of the indigenous people, and also limited the demands of the Spanish colonizers upon them.

Montesinos returned to the Caribbean. In July 1526, under the leadership of Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón, Montesinos, two other Dominicans, and 600 colonists established San Miguel de Gualdape, the first European settlement in what would later become the United States. It was founded near Sapelo Sound on the coast of Georgia, but the colony only lasted about four months before it succumbed to disease, starvation, and a hostile Indian population. After the death of Ayllón, the settlement was abandoned. Montesinos was among the 150 survivors who returned to San Domingo. It is presumed Montesinos and the other Dominicans were the first priests to celebrate Mass in the present-day United States.

When Montesinos returned to Hispaniola, he continued to play a prominent role in the region. In 1528, he accompanied Fray Tomás de Berlanga to Spain to see King Charles V on matters of “great importance.” While in Spain, he was appointed protector of the Indians in the Province of Venezuela. Charles V then granted that province to Ambrosio Alfinger and Bartolome Sayller, representatives of the Welser banking family, German creditors of the emperor. Montesinos accompanied the German expedition to Venezuela in 1529. 

In 1537 Pope Paul III issued the Papal bull Sublimus Deus which finally declared West Indians to be fully human. It forbade the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and all other indigenous people who could be discovered later or were previously known. It states the Indians are fully rational human beings who have rights to freedom and property, even if they are heathen.
On June 27, 1540 Antonio de Montesinos was murdered in Venezuela by an officer of the Welser expedition due to his strong opposition to the exploitation of the Indians.
More

An excerpt from Bartolomé de Las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542):

A Voice Crying in the Wilderness. A nice bio with further details.

What do we do with this?

As much as we might despair over the impact colonizers had on the world, we have to admire the courage and ingenuity they demonstrate! Many of the missionaries were true believers hitchhiking on the ships bringing devastation to new lands. Many were tools of the system, of course, but not Montesinos. His statue in Santo Domingo is a monument to the gospel that eventually got him killed. Maybe someone will remember your faith, too.

If you hit some of the links scattered through this history, you will get a quick lesson about and era and place about which you know very little. The study might give you some insight about places you’ve heard about (like the Dominican Republic and Venezuela) which have provided many new citizens of the U.S. in the last 20 years (like a million Dominicans and 500K Venezuelans). If you met some of them, they might end up thinking you cared enough to find out about them. (If we have readers from there, you can verify if that is true).