In Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession the novelist Anne Rice, the author of Interview with the Vampire, tells the story about her path to God.
Anne writes extensively of growing up Catholic. She admits that most of what she learned about God as a child came "from my mother and from the experience of church which had little or nothing directly to do with knowing how to read" (5). She emphasizes this she believes "that what we learn through reading is essentially different from what we learn in other ways. And my concept of God came through the spoken words of my mother, and also the intensely beautiful experiences I had in church" (6).
As an adult she abandoned her faith and declared herself an atheist. She comments on how her book, Interview with the Vampire, was "an obvious lament for my loss of faith" (137).
Researching history for her novels began to lay the ground for her return to faith: "The more I read of history--any history--the more my atheism became shaky. History, as well as Creation, was talking to me about God. The great personalities of history were talking to me about God" (148).
Another breakthrough occurred when she realized that she didn't need to have all the answers to come to God - she simply needed to trust that God had the answers. This is worth quoting extensively:
In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from Him for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I'd been, all of my life, missing the entire point.
No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul.
He wasn't going to let anything happen by accident! Nobody was going to go to Hell by mistake. This was His world, all this! He had complete control of it; His justice. His mercy--were not our justice or our mercy. What folly to even imagine such a thing.
I didn't have to know how He was going to save the unlettered and the unbaptized, or how He would redeem the conscientious heathen who had never spoken His name. I didn't have to know how my gay friends would find their way to Redemption; or how my hardworking secular humanist friends could or would receive the power of His Saving Grace. I didn't have to know why good people suffered agony or died in pain. He knew.
And it was His knowing that overwhelmed me. His knowing that became completely real to me, His knowing that became the warp and woof of the Universe which He had made.
His was--after all--the Divine Mind which had made the miracle of the Big Bang, and created the DNA only lately discovered in every physical cell. His was the Divine Mind that had created the sound of the violin in the Beethoven concerto; His was the Divine Mind that made snowflakes, idle flames, birds soaring upwards, the unfolding mystery of gender, and the gravity that seemingly held the Universe together--as our planet, our single little planet, hurtled through space.
Of course. If He could do all that, naturally He knew the answer to every conceivable question before it was formulated. He knew the worst suffering that a human soul could feel. Nothing was wasted with Him because He was the author of all of it. He was the Creator of creatures who felt anger, alienation, rage, despair. In this great novel that was action, every voice, every syllable, and every jot of ink.
And why should I remain apart from Him just because I couldn't grasp all this? He could grasp it. Of course!
It was love that brought me to this awareness, love that brought me into a complete trust in Him, a trust that God who made us could not ever abandon us--that the seeming meaninglessness of our world was the limit of our understanding, but never, never the limit of His. (183-185)
Having made peace with God, Anne then tells the story behind her recent Christ the Lord novels. As with previous novels, she did extensive background and historical research. However, she freely admits that "my commitment was to the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation, the magnificent love story of God and man which had drawn me back to religion in the first place, the great and beautiful tale of Jesus becoming one of us" (210). She confesses that "the 'hero' of my new Christian novels is God and Man in the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, Jesus Christ" (211). She laments on "finding skeptical New Testament scholarship so poor, so shallow, so irresponsibly speculative, or so biased" (211). She seeks "something infinitely more positive... a deepening love of the Incarnation, a deepening meditation on what the whole thing seems to mean" (211).
In her personal life, Anne seeks to follow in Christ's way of love because she realizes "that what drives people away from Christ is the Christian who does not know how to love. A string of cruel words from a Christian can destroy another Christian." (227). She reflects on how this tendency remains in her:
Sin for me resides in those acts of cruelty both spectacular and small, both deliberate and careless, and always involving the hurt--the real hurt--of another human being.
I myself am haunted by destructive things that were said to me when I was a child, and over the course of my adult life. I can think of something said to me when I was ten years old and feel exquisite pain remembering how humiliated or hurt I felt.
What that means to me, however, is not only that I must forgive each and every instance in which such things happened, but that I must admit that my own words and actions may still be hurting people who can remember them from numberless incidents over sixty-six years. All that gossip, all that criticism, all that spitefulness, all that meanness, all that verbal sparring, all that anger--all that failure to love. (232-233)
She holds to the paradox of sainthood with the awareness that she is "broken, flawed, [yet] committed" (245). She longs to walk in the way of Jesus: "a Christmas Christian searching for that Stigmata, for the imprint of those Wounds on my heart and my soul, and my daily life" (245).
Of her own life story she concludes: "The story has a happy ending because I have found the Transcendent God both intellectually and emotionally. And complete belief in Him and devotion to Him, no matter how interwoven with occasional fear and constant personal failure and imperfection, has become the true story of my life" (4).
Quotes excerpted from Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Anne Rice
Leave a comment