Flannery O'Conner on Christians Who Stink at Writing Fiction But Think It's Okay--It's not

'Ever since there have been such things as novels, the world has been flooded with bad fiction for which the religious impulse has been responsible. The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible. His feeling about this may have been made more definite by one of those Manichean-type theologies which sees the natural world as unworthy of penetration. But the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about, knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is.'

from Mystery and Manners, Page 163

Snow Day

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain

‘Rich dreams with we loath to wake from.’

The father in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road had dreams of how life once was but these things are ‘no longer known in the world.’ Life to him had dissolved and digressed and the things which were not are extinct and gone forever themselves. He has a life that looks backwards for happiness. Though the father’s is a drastic change in life, we ourselves cannot escape the optimistic over the shoulder glances. Time after time I have heard, ‘college were by far the best days of my life.’ There is absolutely nothing wrong with having great times in the past and looking back at them with fondness. But when you’re old will you flip through the pages of your life and long to be back in them? Everyone wishes they had done things differently in life; hadn’t aid those words, hadn’t left that opportunity untried; hadn’t done this or that, but few live life now grasping for what has not yet happened. Are the most pleasant dreams about what has already happened or what will happen in the end?
Friend, the reality is that if you are not a follower of Jesus Christ when you are old and dream your last dreams they will all be rich dreams which you loath to wake from because you know they were already realized or that they can never be realized by you. Life for you is it, earth says goodbye and judgment and destruction say hello. This is not to scare but to make aware: if life is spent ignoring God, it is spent running from God and will end not in a long a senseless sleep but in giving account to our Maker we believe about his Son’s work and sacrifice and what we did with it.
The good news is that now is always the best time to have dreams that are true projects, not because we will our way into them but because they are founded on promises and not-yet fulfilled true events. Life now can be very good and that too is a gift from our Maker but more life, after the one on earth, is to be lived but it will only be done by those who know the love of Christ and those who follow him. Followers of Christ are those who can wake from these pleasant dreams and not say that ‘we loath to wake from them,’ rather we can’t wait until they are realized.