{"id":4637,"date":"2008-11-25T00:20:08","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T00:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/jesuscreed\/2008\/11\/the-christhaunted-vampire-nove-1.html"},"modified":"2008-11-25T00:20:08","modified_gmt":"2008-11-25T00:20:08","slug":"the-christhaunted-vampire-nove-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2008\/11\/the-christhaunted-vampire-nove-1.html","title":{"rendered":"The Christ-Haunted Vampire Novelist 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anne Rice’s vampire novels have sold 100 million copies. She now
\nwrites, as she tells us so candidly in her memoir of conversion, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession<\/a>\"\"
\n<\/strong><\/em>, solely for God. This is our second post on Anne Rice’s conversion.<\/p>\n

One thing that fascinated me in reading this conversion memoir is the significance of place, as in sacred place or sacred space<\/i>.<\/p>\n


\n
Anne Rice’s
\nsensory, aesthetic faith emerged from and found its anchor in sacred
\nspace<\/i>. Without a word of reflection, she tells a story of being
\nnurtured into the faith in New Orleans, leaving not only New Orleans
\nbut also her faith when she moved to California, and then returning to New Orleans later where she
\nrediscovered her faith. Faith and New Orleans are connected in the
\ntapestry of Anne Rice’s journey. As a child, she observes, “I was as
\ncertain that Jesus was there as I was that the streetcars passed our
\nhouse” (11). On neighborhood walks in New Orleans she
\n“talked all the time … to The Little Flower” (St. Therese) and “I
\ntalked to St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus. I talked to the
\nBlessed Mother unendingly, and I talked to Jesus all the time” (13).<\/p>\n

Then
\nin 1957 she moved to Dallas. Then to college and it was there that she
\nlost her faith and it seemed to have very little connection to her life
\nin the days of her vampire-writing fame in San Francisco, in the
\nHaight-Ashbury district in its heydays. It was the return to New
\nOrleans that she came face-to-face once again with her former faith,
\nbut what she saw was friends and family and familiar religious sites.
\nBack home she began to support the Redemptorist Fathers and collect
\nreligious artifacts and she bought Our Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel.
\nShe began to seek God in geography so off to Europe and the Holy Land
\nshe went. <\/p>\n

But it was in Rio Brazil that her faith came back to life –
\nat the foot of the massive Jesus at Corcovado. Her experience there,
\ndescribed in sensory detail, led to this: “I had come thousands of
\nmiles to stand here. And here was the Lord” (163).  She admits, “I
\ndidn’t acknowledge faith in these moments at the foot of the statue.
\nBut something greater than a creedal formulation took hold of me, a
\nsense that this Lord of Lords belonged to me in all His beauty and
\ngrandeur. He belonged to me in the grandeur of this symbol if He did
\nnot belong to me in any other way” (163-164). The sensory all converged
\nupon her in Rio: “But this is such a potent symbol that your whole life
\nis suddenly pervaded with Him. You belong to Him in the guise of art”
\n(164).  A providential accident, too, but this time in Salvador da
\nBahia: a giant size version of the St. Francis icon she kept at her
\nside found her eyes in a church. “It was as if someone was whispering
\nto me. … This is a figure of the love of Jesus Christ that is waiting
\nfor you” (167). “I became convinced that I was being pursued by the
\nLord” (167-168).<\/p>\n

What makes Anne Rice’s story so delightful is
\nthe rugged sincerity<\/i> of her story. She has not adorned this memoir to
\nfit anyone’s theology, not even her own.  Her novels dwelt in the
\nnetherworlds and supernatural worlds of darkness but, she claims, “I
\nfeel no guilt whatsoever for anything I ever wrote. The sincerity of my
\nwritings removes them completely from what I hold to be sin. I also
\nfeel no real contrition for years as an atheist, because my departure
\nfrom the church was not only painful, but also completely sincere”
\n(232). In college, already an atheist, she missed the May Crowning so
\nmuch she bought her own flowers, found a grassy slope, sang hymns to
\nthe Virgin and cried and cried. It was the bohemian beat generation
\nthat attracted her affections from the church – “For me, they held
\nspiritual values. They did great things” (107). In an observation that
\nretains revelatory value about the significance of prayer: “I think I
\nlost my intimate conversation with God during this period. I think I
\nstopped talking to Him and looking to Him to help me – long before I
\nlost my faith” (116).  And one that reveals what is involved at the
\nvery heart of the Christian faith and one that she could no longer
\ntolerate: “My religious mind was an authoritarian mind, and once I
\nfound myself at odds with God, I couldn’t speak to Him” (125).<\/p>\n

Why
\ndid she leave her faith? “I wanted full existence” (117). She thought
\nshe had found it in San Francisco among the beat generation: “I saw
\nsecular humanism as something beautiful and vigorous and brave” (135).
\nBut her atheistic, secular humanism couldn’t contain what was brewing
\ninside Anne Rice.<\/p>\n

What got her sensory, aesthetic brew going and
\nwhat led to her surrender  was the Jewish people, their steadfastness
\nand the seeming faithfulness of God to them. The brew was strengthened
\nwhen, upon returning to New Orleans, she found that her Catholic
\nfriends embraced her and her poet husband, Stan. Next comes her
\nrelentless fascination with Jesus, with whom she was “secretly
\nobsessed” (161). Her trips, especially the one to Rio and the
\nprovidential accidents and she learned that she was “Christ haunted” 
\n(177). Two miracles led her back into communion with the Church of
\nRome. The second was a diabetic attack, but the first one can be summed
\nup in one word: “surrender” (181). “I let go of all the theological or
\nsocial questions which had kept me from Him for countless years” (183).
\nShe could do this because she reasoned that God knew the answers and
\nshe could trust God. She can’t properly describe her surrender: “it is
\na transcendent moment when one senses with all one’s faculties that the
\nlove of God is the air we breathe. It was only as I felt this love and
\nthis trust, that I realized I believed in Him” (185).  She wonders how
\nshe was to become a “card-carrying member of a church that condemned my
\ngay son,” himself a successful novelist,  but she comes to this
\nconclusion: “It didn’t really matter how wretched it was going to be. I
\nhad to go! I wasn’t going to deny Him any longer. I was going home”
\n(186).<\/p>\n

But for four years, from the year of her
\nsurrender (1998) until 2002, she was a participant again the faith but her life was not
\ndevoted to Christ in the ordinary. She continued to write vampire
\nnovels, but with themes that were deconstructing that world. She began
\nto be haunted by a Christ-shaped question: How much of her did God
\nwant? The question would not let her go and one Saturday afternoon
\npromptings overwhelmed her soul and mind: “Write for God. Write for
\nHim. Write only for Him” (206). First came Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt: A Novel<\/a>\"\"
\n<\/strong><\/em> (2005) and then came Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (Christ the Lord)<\/a>\"\" <\/strong>(2007)<\/i><\/em>.<\/p>\n

She
\nhas come full sensory circle: “My vocation is to write for Jesus
\nChrist. It is to belong completely to the Man at the Top. That means a
\nfidelity to the Jesus of Scripture.” And, “The Lord Jesus Christ is
\nwhere my focus belongs. And my commitment to Christ must remain
\nunchanged” (239).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anne Rice’s vampire novels have sold 100 million copies. She now writes, as she tells us so candidly in her memoir of conversion, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession , solely for God. This is our second post on Anne Rice’s conversion. One thing that fascinated me in reading this conversion memoir is the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":297,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conversion"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Christ-Haunted Vampire Novelist 2 - Jesus Creed<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/jesuscreed\/2008\/11\/the-christhaunted-vampire-nove-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Christ-Haunted Vampire Novelist 2 - Jesus Creed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Anne Rice’s vampire novels have sold 100 million copies. 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