Today's reader, if he believes in grace at all, sees it as something which can be separated from nature and served to him raw as Instant Uplift. . . . There is a better sense in which it can be used but seldom is--the sense of being in travail with and for creation in its subjection to vanity. This is a sense which implies a recognition of sin; this is a suffering with, but one which blunts no edges and makes no excuses. When infused into novels, it is often forbidding. Our age doesn't go for it.

Flannery O'Connor, "Novelist and Believer"