Called Out of Darkness, a Spiritual Confession, by Anne Rice
This is Anne Rice's description of how she experienced a deep religious conversion at the age of 57, entering into the Roman Catholic Church. Many people experience religious conversions in their lives, but hers is interesting due to her long writing career, her life writing novels using images of supernatural seductive evil to write allegorical stories set in the past. How does a writer of vampires and witches and erotic fiction suddenly become religious late in life? Is this a change in her outlook, or is it a natural progression?
In this book she looks back on her many books, including both her vampire series and her intensely erotic fiction from the 1980's, and she refuses to denounce any of it. She says that she has written everything throughout her life with deep sincerity, never for exploitation. She compares herself to Dante, who wrote of Hell in very realistic terms, then wrote of Purgatory, and then of Heaven, all with equal intensity. She compares the change in her writing since her embracing of religious faith to Dante's exploration of both dark and light themes, with her going through a similar journey through spiritual imagery, from darkness to light. Her journey has never been anything other than sincere and with conviction, so she is proud of her entire oeuvre.
I liked hearing her say this. I have heard far too many artists, especially musicians, experience a similar religious conversion and suddenly will denounce everything they have created prior to this event in their life. As if somehow creativity in the absence of religious conviction is not worthy.
In the first part of the book she describes her experiences of the Catholic Church as a young child. She emphasises that everything she learned of God and the Church at this young age was purely through sights and sounds, never through reading. Despite being based in the written word, the Church for her was originally a sensory experience. Growing up in New Orleans filled this experience with that city's unique blend of French and Caribbean imagery, and it created a world full of color and sounds and impressions that were very rich. This was her introduction to the spiritual world, through her senses.
But she was also insulated from the rest of the world as a child, growing up surrounded only by other Catholics. As she became an adult and attended university she encountered people of other, or of no, religious faith and she was unprepared for how to deal with these challenges to her spiritual heritage and intellectual assumptions about life. She was thirsty for knowledge and art of the entire world, not just of the church, and she says that she "read her way out of Faith." She left her religion behind her, and she became an atheist, but a "conscientious atheist", as she puts it. She did not feel like she was committing any sin by leaving the Church behind, but was simply being intellectually and artistically honest at the time.
She claims that all of her own novels dealing with the supernatural were her attempt to deal with spiritual issues in a world without God. Vampires are a good metaphor for creatures who live outside of the grace of God, and in her novels these un-dead creatures are expressing her "grief for a lost faith". Vampires are doomed to roam the earth in a spiritual void, and they compensate for this with art and sensuality, but the void is never filled.
Then in the late 1990's she experiences what is basically a wave of emotion. She describes feeling an intense sense of Love flooding her heart, and she feels an overwhelming desire to look for God, and to look for him in the rich artistic expression of the Catholic Church.
She experiences what is basically an artistic crisis and longing, a deep feeling of Love that she needs to express as intensely as possible. She simply drops all of her intellectual questions, and submits to this powerful emotion that fills her soul. She surrenders, as she says. She simply surrenders and submits, totally. Her description of her emotional state in this process reminded me a bit of how she describes Sleeping Beauty in her trilogy of books by the same name, when Sleeping Beauty submits fully in a sexual context. People sometimes describe profound spiritual submission to God, and strong sexual submission to a dominant lover, using similar language and images.
She knows about the different doctrines of the church, and the many objections to them, but she simply lets it all goes. She describes the key point in her conversion like this:
Only dimly did I care about the doctrine of the Transubstantiation.... Only dimly did I reflect on it, because truly I had a sense of something so much greater than the verbal expression of any one doctrine that it didn't matter to me how superstitious such a belief might seem to a skeptical mind. Any my mind was still, to some extent, a skeptical mind.
I didn't care about the framing of the doctrine. I cared about Him. And He was calling me back through His Presence on the altar. He might have used the falling rain to call me back. He might have used the music of Vivaldi. He might have used the statue of Christ and Saint Francis that was on my desk. But, no, He used the doctrine of the Real Presence.
And I surrendered to that doctrine because it was the way to Him, and He was what I wanted, with my heart and my soul. Go to Him, I thought. Go to the Christ who is under the roof of your church. He's waiting there for you. Get up from the desk and go. Go to the Christ who is Real and Present in every Catholic tabernacle throughout the world. Go to Him.
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 my life, missing the entire point.
Other writers have described their embracing of religious Faith in similar ways. They usually have a long list of questions, but then they simply silence these questions for a while and submit to the mystical and emotional experience of approaching God. Then, after a while, they pick up the same questions again, but they look at them from a different perspective. No one thinks their way to Faith, they approach Faith in a way that words aren't adequate to describe.
I think it is significant that she chose the Catholic Church as the way to express her new Christian faith. She could have chosen many other church traditions, but the Catholic Church has a very rich "palette" of artistic expression to reflect the spiritual life. Many Protestant traditions are very focused on the "word" of God, but the Catholic tradition uses all of the senses to express this same faith. Her artistic crisis is healed by the deep sensory experience of Catholic spiritual expression.
She expresses this beautifully towards the end of her book, like this:
I went back to the Catholic Church of St. Paul and the Apostles, and the angels Gabriel, Michael, Raphael. I went back to the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, first amongst the saved. I went back to the church of St. Augustine and his mother, St. Monica, of St. Jerome and St. Patrick. I went back to the church of St. Francis of Assisi and the painter Giotto, back to the church of St. Teresa of Avila and the music of Palestrina, back to the church of St. Joan of Arc and the music of Andrea Gabrieli, back to the church of Michelangelo and Antonio Vivaldi, the church of Ignatius Loyola and St. Alphonsus, the church of sweet St. Therese, The Little Flower, with the bouquet of roses in her arms. And above all, I went back to the ancient Roman Catholic Church of the Apostolic Succession which held as solemn truth that Christ was Real and Present in the Blessed Sacrament on the altar.
She apparently wrote one final book about her main Vampire alter-ego, Lestat, after her religious conversion, where he wants to enter the grace of God but is forever banished. At this point, Rice decided to write a 4-book series of the life of Jesus, told from a first-person perspective. This is an interesting idea. The woman who once wrote of vampires and witches and bondage is now writing of Jesus. This is probably as good a reason as any to read her new books...!
I found a recent interview of Anne Rice on the Internet, and when she's asked why she has changed topics in her writing she answers:
I've made vampires believable to grown women. Now, if I can do that, I can make our Lord Jesus Christ believable to people who've never believed in him."
I hope she hasn't forever abandoned the vampire genre. I can imagine a future book where one of her vampires is somehow redeemed, and experiences a similar Dante-like emergence from Hell into Purgatory. Not necessarily heaven, but a vampire in Purgatory, atoning for his centuries of sin, would be an interesting pretext for a new Anne Rice novel...
With all of that said, in August of 2010 Anne Rice publically announced that she suddenly had a change of heart, and was leaving Christianity. She did not simply leave the Catholic Church, she left "the fray of the entire debate". Despite everything she wrote in her spiritual confession, she suddenly seemed to discover that the Church has some views which aren't exactly modern. She stated that she did not want to be "Anti-gay, anti-feminist, and anti-artificial birth birth control." She wrote "In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen".
Generally speaking, it sounds like she embraced the Church for largely asthetic reasons. He descriptions are full of sensory input, artistic reactions to worship, and the beauty of symbolic ritual. She says little about doctrine and the tensions that goes with doctrine. Apparently it took her around 12 years to figure this out. And her solution was to bow out of the entire enterprise. Presumably she still maintained her religious faith, but she was vague on this.
Oh well, perhaps she will write a sequel to her spiritual confession, called "Called back into Darkness"... ;-)