To Alfred Corn, 30 May '62
I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith...I don't know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief...
As a freshman in college you are bombarded with new ideas...After a year of this, you think you cannot believe. You are just beginning to realize how difficult it is to have faith and the measure of a commitment to it, but you are too young to decide you don't have faith just because you feel you can't believe. About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do, and I think from your letter that you will not take the path of least resistance in this matter and simply decide that you have lost your faith and that there is nothing you can do about it.
One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life...The intellectual difficulties have to be met, however, and you will be meeting them for the rest of your life...If you want your faith, you have to work for it. It is a gift, but for very few is it a gift given without any demand for equal time devoted to its cultivation. For every book you read that is anti-Christian, make it your business to read one that presents the other side of the picture.
-Flannery O'Connor
2 comments:
Hi Beth,
I liked this quote. It is especially relevant to me now that I am in college.
B.Hammer
Yeah...This is a quote Mike found, and I'm delighted that it's by Flannery O'Connor, whose essays I just finished.
When I was at college, it seemed like everyone was questioning their faith and struggling with doubt. And this was at a Christian college! In part, this quote is saying that those doubts and struggles aren't necessarily evidences of unbelief. In fact, they may be evidences of the opposite. The faithful struggle. It is harder to believe than not to.
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