Waiting for Godot to Leave

I am reading Flannery's O'Connor's letters.  I was bored until her correspondence from 1955.  Before then, she was writing to friends about money, book deals, things she was reading.  But in 1955, she took up a correspondence with a woman from Atlanta, a Pagan pantheist / agnostic who is referred to as "Miss A."  Suddenly Flannery confronts the Big Questions and the result is awesome.  Here are some selections from Flannery O'Connor's correspondence with "Miss A."  ... ... our salvation is worked out on earth according as we love one another, see Christ in one another, etc., by works.  This is one reason I am chary of using the word, love, loosely.  I prefer to use it in its practical forms, such as prayer, almsgiving, visiting the sick and burying the dead and so forth. ... the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed.  It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as muc...

What is the soul?  It is not the ghost in the machine of our bodies. This is the soul.  Read on.  It's dense, but I paraphrase after.  From  Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History   by Eugene Webb ,,,  If we consider that human existence is constituted as a tension of longing or striving toward conscious participation in reality and that this striving proceeds through reflective mediation in consciousness, we might diagram the total pattern in the following way: The line with the arrowhead in this picture represents the tension of existence both as experienced on the level of immediacy and as articulated in consciousness through the medium of symbolization. “R” stands for reality, in which the inquirer is immediately involved through his participation in existence and which he also comes to know reflectively. As such it is intended to embrace all that is, including the entire process represented in the diagram. The figure in the middle marked with “S” i...