As a child, Flannery O’Connor dreaded birthdays for fear her mother would throw a surprise party for her. She wrote, “My idea of hell was the door bursting open and a flock of children pouring in yelling SURPRISE!”

If she were alive today, she might be shocked at the crowds around the world who will light candles and sip champagne as they celebrate her 100th birthday on March 25.

In her day, her fiction was widely misunderstood by readers and critics alike. When her novel Wise Blood was published in 1952, the reactions in the small Georgia town where she lived were “grisly,” said a friend. After her death, the tide turned, and she was posthumously honored with the National Book Award in 1972. Ironically, as her publisher was about to accept the honor in her name, an author asked him, “Do you really think Flannery O’Connor was a great writer? She’s such a Roman Catholic.”

This fellow didn’t realize just how correct he was. In fact, O’Connor herself had said, “I write the way I do because and only because I am a Catholic.” Although many readers recoil from her stories due to the shocking elements, the violence is certainly not gratuitous. She artfully used horrifying moments to show “the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.”

For example, in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a deceitful, proud grandmother experiences grace through a radical conversion of heart moments before she is murdered. In Revelation, a smug farmer’s wife awakens to her sins of racism and cruelty after a college girl hits her with a book and brands her a “warthog from hell.”

O’Connor’s own journey reveals how grace can help us endure otherwise unbearable circumstances. She was born in Savannah, Georgia, on the Solemnity of the Annunciation in 1925 and learned the basics of the Baltimore Catechism from the Irish Sisters of Mercy. Tragedy struck the family when she was only 15, and her beloved father died from lupus, an autoimmune disease.

After college, she was living in rural Connecticut and working on Wise Blood when her own health started declining. At first, doctors diagnosed her with arthritis, but, eventually, they realized it was the same disease that had taken her father’s life. At age 25, her dream of living independently was dashed, and she moved to Andalusia, the family farm north of Milledgeville, Georgia. There, she lived with her mother, Regina, who tenderly cared for her until her death at age 39.

The suffering associated with the disease was multiplied by the side effects of the medications O’Connor took. She told friends the medications had rendered her practically “bald-headed on top and with a watermelon face.” Her faith shone through when she said, “I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.” Accepting God’s will for her life with equanimity, she wrote, “It is better to pray than to grieve; and it is greater to be joyful than to grieve.”

O’Connor remained steadfast in her faith, saying the prayers from a breviary, attending daily Mass and reading St. Thomas Aquinas before bed each night. Although she rarely complained, she was experiencing considerable suffering, as the disease slowly handicapped her. She once admitted that sickness was a lonely place, “where there’s no company, where no one can follow.”

However, she also saw sickness before death in a thoroughly Catholic way, as one of God’s mercies, because it gave her time to prepare for eternity. Suffering is something nonbelievers try to avoid at all costs, but she knew Christ’s death on the cross revealed its redemptive nature. Thus, she offered her pain to God as a prayer to help others.

Her illness prevented her from performing the corporal works of mercy, like visiting the sick and feeding the hungry, but she ministered to others in her own distinct fashion. She helped writers with their manuscripts and explained Church doctrine to friends interested in the faith. She also reviewed books for the Bulletin, Atlanta’s diocesan newspaper, telling a friend, “What you do for the Bulletin, you do for God.”

Despite her illness, Flannery did not sink into gloominess and self-pity, but rather remained upbeat. Her joy partly came from her ability to detect God’s hand in nature, including the peafowl and burros at Andalusia.

For example, the markings on the burros’ backs reminded her of Christ’s cross — and despite the birds’ ear-splitting cries, the transformation of a dull peacock into a frenzy of color evoked the transfiguration of Christ. In her story The Displaced Person, a peacock surprises a priest by unfurling its tail feathers, and the man exclaims, “Christ will come like that!”

Far from being a holier-than-thou Christian, Flannery didn’t spare certain practices from her scathing sense of humor. When Latin was replaced by the vernacular at Mass, she said the translation in the missal was “enough to turn your stomach.”

She also found St. Patrick’s Day celebrations grossly exaggerated and showed her disdain for the “great feast” by celebrating Grover Cleveland’s birthday the next day. She was especially outraged when the local pastor placed a statue of St. Patrick “up smack in the front” of Sacred Heart Church. She complained bitterly to a friend: “He has everything about him but the snakes — a purple shirt, a green robe, an orange book … and is holding up as if for sale or edification … a shamrock.”

When she reached 30, her hip bone was deteriorating and she was on crutches, but the jokes continued. “I feel like a large, stiff anthropoid ape,” she told a friend. She added, “My greatest exertion and pleasure … has been throwing garbage to the chickens, and I can still do this, although I am in danger of going with it.”

Five years later, Flannery went for tests at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, where she collected entertaining tidbits for her friends. In one letter, she reported that her aunt had sent her six egg custards, while confiding that her favorite gift was an artificial spider to frighten the nurses. And when Flannery informed the woman in admissions that she was a writer, the woman asked, “How do you spell that?”

Shortly before her death, Flannery told a priest friend she had ideas for another novel. She said, “I figure it all comes in its own good time and I’m not going to worry about it.” She died at age 39 on Aug. 3, 1964. Had she lived longer, she surely would have created more unforgettable characters. However, despite her illness, she wouldn’t have described her own life as tragic. “It all comes in its own good time” are the words of a woman who knows our lives are in bigger hands. She believed life was a journey to God, who makes our suffering endurable with generous outpourings of grace.

She loved her life at Andalusia Farm. She reveled in her birds, even if their cries at night were ear-shattering. She insisted she didn’t live a holy life, but her friends recognized her inner grace.

Happy birthday, Flannery O’Connor! Thank you for being such a faithful Catholic!