What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the true sacrifices involved in faith, contrasting superficial comfort with deeper struggles.
Flannery O'Connor's quote reflects on the misconception of religion as a source of ease and comfort, likening it instead to the burdens and sacrifices represented by the cross. It suggests that genuine faith involves trials and a commitment that often goes unrecognized by those who see only the comforting aspects of belief without understanding the challenges it entails.
In practice
In a sermon discussing the true nature of faith and its challenges.
Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
There won't be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.
Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven't the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are
He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery.
The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.
I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.
Uptown is for people who have already done something. Downtown is where they’re doing something now. I live uptown but I love downtown.
We always long for the forbidden things, and desire what is denied us.
In all professions each affects a look and an exterior to appear what he wishes the world to believe that he is. Thus we may say that the whole world is made up of appearances.
Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility.
There are a lot of very brilliant people who believe that the nation-state is fast becoming a relic of the past.
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