“Thank You for the Light” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, at the New Yorker.

While the New Yorker paywall is still down, you may want to check out “Thank You for the Light,” a previously unpublished short-short story of Fitzgerald’s. Though he wasn’t practicing for most of his career, the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald occasionally shows gleams and glimmers of his Catholic upbringing and early devotion. (The short story “Absolution” is one example, which has elements that are Catholic in sensibility if not in drift; there’s another about a young woman who faints during Eucharistic Adoration, though I can’t remember the title now. Daniel McInerny further unpacks the extent of Fitzgerald’s Catholicity here.)

While “Thank You for the Light” has a hint of the surreal and maybe of gentle miracle-story parody about it, it’s also strangely reverent. When Fitzgerald first submitted it to the New Yorker in 1936, the editors who rejected it are said to have called the story “absolutely out of the question . . . unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic.” For a certain type of reader, those words may function as a backhanded endorsement. I thought the piece would have been right at home in the pages of Dappled Things. If you read the story, do let us know what you think in the comments.

(photo: pre-Vatican II interior of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City, MO, the setting of the second half of “Thank You for the Light”)