Flannery O'Connor and the Dark Night of the Soul

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In her Prayer Journal, Flannery O'Connor pleaded with God, "Please help me to get down under things and find where you are," and later, "make me a mystic, immediately." Throughout her remaining years, O'Connor recounted the spiritual journeys of unlikely mystics in her most famous fictions: the irritating Grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the abandoned boy Harry Ashfield in "The River," the self-righteous Ruby Turpin in "Revelation," and the subject of my essay, Mrs. May in "Greenleaf." Mrs. May is a Christian in name only, but her divine Lover comes courting anyway in the form of an escaped scrub bull. He pursues his Beloved over the course of the narrative, in league with O'Connor's disembodied, third-person narrative voice. God meets Mrs. May where she is and insists on an ultimate, violent union. She personifies an answer to O'Connor's early prayer; the story of "Greenleaf" makes the unwitting Mrs. May a mystic, immediately.

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