Called Out of Darkness

Subtitled A Spiritual Confession, author Anne Rice relates her growing up with, rejection of and return to God.

Rice made her mark in the vanguard of transgressive genre fiction, primarily vampire fiction. In typical postmodern fashion her work forgoes questions of morality, dealing with themes of spiritual and emotional alienation. Stylistically Called Out of Darkness draws you in with the same atmospheric, sensuous prose of her pagan corpus, but here, she who was once alienated from God has been reconciled by Christ’s physical body through death.

The book is fascinating and definitely worth the time to read if you like spiritual biography. But keep in mind, her conversion is recent and some of her views fall outside of what we consider evangelical orthodoxy. It’s difficult to know exactly how to relate to her.

On the one hand, we could say that she doesn’t seem to return to God so much as she seems to return to the Catholic Church. Her conceptions of Christian spirituality have much in common with the Medieval Catholic mystics – she has an admirable desire for intimacy with God, but also a near obsession with the Stigmata. (Catholic tradition holds that certain saints achieved such an intimate union with Christ that they were branded with the Stigmata, the five wounds of Jesus’ crucifixion.) Unfortunately, her worldview also holds a sharp secular / sacred divide, which isn’t really consistent with her otherwise firm commitment to conservative Roman Catholicism.

On the other hand, soon after her return to church she recognized that true conversion meant more than just faithful churchgoing. She knew that she was still holding something back from God and felt a deep need to be born again into a distinctively Christian life. Eventually she decided that she would never write another word unless it had to with Jesus. As a result, she steeped herself in the New Testament and NT scholarship and came out of it with a staunchly conservative view of Scripture. In her own words:

It isn't simply a matter of finding skeptical New Testament scholarship so poor, so shallow, so irresponsibly speculative, or so biased. That has indeed been the case. But something else, something infinitely more positive, has been at work in my spiritual journey since 2002 --

That "something else" is the profound implications that flow out of the Incarnation. Rice finds New Testament skeptics helpful in the questions that they ask, but she utterly rejects the idea that a projected mythos and church tradition grew up around a great teacher. Instead, she’s convinced that the Jesus of Scripture and the Jesus of history are one and the same.

Rice grew up in a blue-collar New Orleans neighborhood. The memories attached to her childhood make for the richest descriptions in the book, and clearly these early, unfiltered experiences of life with God cultivate her later spiritual conceptions. She remained faithful through her school years, though it was during this time that the seeds of her crisis were sown.

The edges began to crack as Rice entered college. In her interactions with people outside the church, outside the faith, she recognized that her sanitized, Catholic education left her far behind her peers. They were well-versed in the advances of the modern world, but having grown in a controlled environment that banned certain books and movies, that curtailed behavior with the threat of Hell -- She realized that the Catholic Church refused to enter into or interact with the world outside the church. Her upbringing hadn’t prepared her to live in the modern world. Her church, and therefore she, didn’t belong in the world they lived in.

Her abandoning of the church was not precipitated by a traumatic event or a spiritual or emotional crisis. Hers was an intellectual crisis. She says:

The church had become for me anti-art and anti-mind. No longer was there the blending of the aesthetic and the religious as there had been throughout my childhood. . . .

There just couldn't be a God. A God would never have made a church so unnatural and so narrow, and so seemingly fragile -- vulnerable to information, that is -- as the Catholic Church. People who believed in God believed in churches, and churches told you lies. Not only did they tell you lies, they made you tell lies. They taught you how to tell those lies when you were a little child.

I had grown up telling lies for the Catholic Church. Let me give one example. If those outside the church criticized the Inquisition and its torture of heretics or Jews, we had a standard Catholic answer, and it was this: The Inquisition was only going along with the times. Indeed the Inquisition never really executed anyone. It was the secular state that did the executing.

That, I think, is a first-rate Catholic lie.

But Catholics of my time were taught quite a number, and there goal was always the same -- to gloss over the failings or corruption of the church and bring the subject of the discussion back to the church's perfection.

As I lost faith in God and his church, these many lies seemed proof to me that I was moving away from falsehood and into truth.

Her Christian education failed to give her an honest assessment of history and served as a kind of ecclesial propaganda. As a result, she felt that athieism was more intellectually honest and a more courageous way to face the world.

Rice’s return to faith follows a path marked by the kinds of “coincidences” that could only have been Providentially ordered. The story itself is hers to tell so here I’ll only point out that her conversion resulted from a growing sense of estrangement, a deep sense of spiritual alienation (remember the themes of her work – 28 books’ worth) that came to a head 38 years after she left the church and God.

Finally, I’d mention that the last chapter of the book is the most disappointing. Here Rice illustrates her unfortunate commitment to a secular / sacred divide. When I closed the book I felt a great desire to write her a letter (and I still may) rejoicing with her in her new life in Christ, commending her for her courage to be so public with her faith, and gently asking her to reexamine the basis for this dichotomy that she supposes.

If God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1-2), if “heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it” belongs to God (Deut 10:14), if the Word that became flesh was with God and was God and all things were made through him (John 1:1-3, 14), if all the earth is his (Ex 19:5, Ps 24:1-3, Ps 50:10-12) and all things were created through him and for him (Col 1:16) and he is the heir of all things (Heb 1:2-4), if he is appointed judge of the living and the dead (Acts 10:42, 2 Tim 4:1, Heb 13:4, Rev 19:11), if every knee shall bow to him as sovereign Lord (Is 45:23, Rom 14:11, Phil 2:10) – if all this is true, does it not follow that the whole creation falls under the authority of its Creator? The witness of Scripture seems to indicate that there is no secular / sacred divide. If God created it, he has a claim on it, the right to define its purpose and the authority to pronounce judgment on its conformity to that purpose.