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.
Real hunger is when one man regards another man as something to eat.
Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.
I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none.
The government doesn't want you to use YOUR drugs, they want you to use THEIR drugs.
I believe this thought, of the possibility of death - if calmly realised, and steadily faced would be one of the best possible tests as to our going to any scene of amusement being right or wrong.
America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men.
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