I recently read/skimmed much of Anne Rice's autobiography, and have posted some lengthy sections here in this post. I found much of the book a fascinating read. If you were religious as a child, but aren't now, you may see yourself in these excerpts. If you have ever considered leaving the Christian faith, you may also find yourself in here. If you have never had either of these experiences, you may still find Rice's conclusions and theological musings helpful as you seek to serve the Lord in the world. Her story is not unique, and many people probably feel as she does.
Excerpts from Anne Rice Authbiography, “Called Out of Darkness.”
123 My heart and my conscience were telling me to leave the church, to explore. My heart and my conscience wanted information. My heart and my conscience were in love with the wide world. Whether there was true knowledge out there, beyond the pale, I wanted to discover.
124 The church had become for me anti-art and anti-mind. No longer was there a blending of the aesthetic and the religious as there had been through my childhood (growing up in the Catholic church). Desperately I sought to escape the sense of sin that seemed to dominate every choice facing me. I lost faith in Hellfire. Or to put it differently, faith in Hellfire simply did not hold me firmly, as faith in God had once done. I left the church. I quit for thirty-eight years. The real tragedy however was that I quit believing in God. I think about this a great deal People ask me why this happened; sometimes they indicate that my loss of faith must have been precipitated by some emotional or social event.
There was no emotional or social event. This was a catastrophe of the mind and heart.
I could not separate my personal relationship with God and with Jesus Christ, from my relationship with the church. As I mentioned, I’d stopped really talking to God a long time ago. I hadn’t felt entitled to talk to Him in a long while. I’d felt far too demoralized to talk to Him. I just wasn’t the Catholic girl who had a right to talk to Him. I harbored too many profane ambitions. And now faith in Him was giving way. I think I had to stop believing in God in order to quit His church, and the pressure to quit became intolerable. Whatever the case, I left it all.
I think I can safely say I never put my dilemma before God. I never knelt down before Him and said, “Please help me with this.” I failed to perceive Him as a source of creative solutions to one’s personal problems. I failed to see Him as a Personal of Infinite Compassion. My religious mind was an authoritarian mind, and once I found myself at odds with God, I couldn’t speak to Him. I couldn’t question Him. Instead I made decisions about Him. And they amounted to rejection of His existence, and a determination to face the world with a new courage which seemed right.
125 The church, with all its rules about sex, the modern world, and books and matters of dogma, had become absolute proof to me that God didn’t exist. The ideea of God belonged to the utter falsity of Catholicism. If an edifice like that was a pack of lies – and it had to be a lie that one could burn in Hell for all eternity for masturbating or kissing a boy, or reading a novel by Alexandre Dumas, or an essay by Sartre – then there was no God.
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 church, and the 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.
As I lost my faith in God and in this church, these many lies seemed proof to me that I was moving away from falsehood and into truth.
Also I’d come to realize what most Christians realize sooner or later – that millions were born and grew up and died without ever knowing anything of Christianity, and that seemed to prove that Christianity was only one man-made sect making grandiose claims that could not be true.
In my heart of hearts, I believed this finally: there was no God.
127 In sum, outside the Catholic Church, one did not find a sinkhole of depravity. Quite to the contrary, one found articulate people who made complex and refined distinctions about how to be a good human being.
After a few months of dismal grieving for my faith, I began to feel a new relaxation, and a new passion for life. But I felt a new relaxation, and a new passion for life. But I felt a certain bitter darkness too. The world without God was a world in which anything might happen, and there would never be justice for the millions who died at the hands of tyrants, or the poor who suffered in the neglected parts of the world. The world without God was the world of the Cold War in which “the bomb” might drop at any minute – and civilization might be annihilated, leaving behind a polluted and silent earth.
One has to face this. A third world war was likely; the end of civilization was likely. We believed this strongly in the 1960’s. One couldn’t run to an outmoded idea of God for comfort. One had to be strong; one had to construct meaning in the silence in the wake of the departure of God.
140 I wrote twenty-one books before faith returned to me. And in almost all these books, creatures shut out of life, doomed to marginality or darkness, seek for lives of value, even when the world tells them they cannot have such lives.
141 I wrote by instinct. I poured out the darkness and despair of an atheist struggling to establish bonds and hopes in a godless world where anything might, and could, happen, where happiness could be torn away from one in an instant, a world in which the condemned and the despised raised their voices in protest and song.
147 These books transparently reflect a journey through atheism and back to God. It is impossible not to see this. They reflect an attempt to determine what is good and what is evil in an atheistic world. They are about the struggle of brothers and sisters in a world without credible fathers and mothers. They reflect an obsession with the possibility of a new and enlightened moral order.
Did I know this when I wrote them? No.
But the research I did for them, the digging through history, the studying of ancient history in particular, was actually laying the ground for my 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.
In particular, the survival of the Jews, which I had studied so keenly… was talking to me about God. I was seeing patterns in history that I could not account for according to the theories of history I’d inherited in school. I was seeing something in the survival of the Jews in particular for which there was no convincing sociological or economic explanation at all.
And I wanted to know how Christianity had arisen from their religion, and how, above all, had it managed to take the Western world by storm. If any one “thing” in all my studies led me back to Christ, it was His people, the Jews.
172 My faith in atheism was cracking. I went through the motions of being a conscientious atheist, trying to live without religion, but in my heart of hearts, I was losing faith in the “nothingness”, losing faith in the “absurd”.
173 There was a storm in my heart and soul that had little to do with other people and their decisions. I held out against God and I held out against the church because I thought I was holding out for bitter truth. But history was telling me every day there could very well be a God. The story of the survival of the Jews told me that there could veery well be a God. Everything I was reading – and I was reading more than ever before – was telling me in a secret and insistent voice: Anne, you know there is a God.
One afternoon I accosted my son, Christopher, on the staircase and demanded, “ Do you believe in God?”
Here was a young man not yet twenty, brought up to believe in nothing, and in that time of life when beliefs are most easily dismissed. And Christopher, after a moment’s reflection, responded, “Yes, I believe in God.”
How could that have happened? How could our freethinking son believe in God?
The creation was talking to me of God.,,,The world around me was filled to the brim with God.
And the person of Jesus Christ – the mystery of Jesus and how He’d started a worldwide religion – this weighed on my “rational” mind. Who was He really? Who had He been? Why was twenthieth-century America so obsessed with Him?...Why was His name the most common…curse word that I myself spoke?
175 What was the driving force here behind the Jesus who wouldn’t go away? The story of the Incarnation – the story of an absolute and all-powerful God who became Man to be with us – began to obsess me as something unique in the history of ancient religions I constantly studied.
176 Of course I’d read plenty about the ancient mystery cults, the celebrations of the dying vegetation god, and his resurrection each year in the new crops; I’d studied the goddess Isis with the child Horus in her arms – an iconic forerunner of the Virgin and the Baby Jesus which had dominated art for over fifteen years. And I knew the old Catholic arguments – that these religious rituals and ideas and symbols prefigured the Lord Jesus Christ and His entry into history. I saw the logic of that. I also saw that, similar though they were, these ancient religious rituals were only vaguely like the story of the Incarnation. They did not involve the God of All Creation becoming one of us.
181 What happens when faith returns? What happens when one goes back to the church of one’s childhood? When I go back to the very moment – that Sunday afternoon – what I recall most vividly is surrender – a determination to give in to something deeply believed and deeply felt. I loved God. I love Him with my whole heart. I loved Him in the Person of Jesus Christ, and I wanted to go back 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 of my life, missing the entire point.
183 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, 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 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.
He was – after all- the Divine Mind which had made the miracle of the Big Bang, and created the DNA…His was the Divine Mind that had created the sound of the violin in the Beethoven concerto…of course. If He could do all that, naturally He knew the aswer to everything 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 His creation, He knew every plot, every character, every 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.
It was only as I felt this love and this trust, that I realized I believed in Him. It was only in love and trust that belief followed – and all became part of the complete surrender: go to Hi, go with Him. Pass out of resistance into Him. This will not be easy; this will not bring comfort. This is not going to make you feel good. This is going to be hard! But this is where you must go.
191 My return involved complete trust in God, an admission of faith in Him, a faith made evident by love. But it took an iron will to go back to Him. I anticipate grave difficulties. I feared grave obligations. And I was in no way able to turn against the secular humanist friends and teachers and culture which I had for so many years admired. I, who all my adult life had been a member of nothing, had to become a member of this something, and it took all the will that I had.
220 (about the Bible) It wasn’t long at all before I came to see the distinct personality of each Gospel writer, and to reach the inevitable conclusion – in contradiction to much sophisticated scholarship – that the Gospels were indeed first-person wtiness, and that they contained our earliest and most accurate knowledge of Christ Himself. The novelist in me responded to the internal and effortless unity of each Gospel, the kind of unity that emerges in any heartfelt written account. I’m certainly not alone in this conclusion. Much worthy scholarship supports the same view.
However, an entire generation of New Testament scholars and clergymen has obviously come of age believing the Gospels to be “late date documents,” compiled by “communities” of people, who somehow lived in isolation from one another, and apparently made up words for Jesus according to what these communities thought should be made up. Sophisticated explanations are given for this by skeptical critics, but it always comes down to the same thing: they think the Gospels are fictional documents. They think they are collaborative documents. They think they have been heavily edited. They think they must be “edited” again by the modern student as to what is more or less likely to be “historical” if anything in the Gospel is historical at all.
It is sad that the influence of these skeptic critics is so widespread.
Not only do I find no evidence for isolated Gospel communities making up documents for their little groups, but I see no evidence of collaborative writing in the Gospels at all. Collaborative documents would never contain so much that is contradictory and surprising and difficult to explain.
On the contrary, the Gospels, once I plunged into them and let them really talk to me, came across as distinct and fascinating original works. Nowhere does one see the “smoothing” of an editor or a group of collaborators. Too many mysteries are woven into the fabric of the work.
233 (on sin) I am convinced that cruelty and unkindness are deeply sinful, because I know this sin in myself and the willfulness to commit it. And I say again that Our Lord’s words in the Sermon on the Mount demand that we turn from this sin.
To follow Him, I must come to terms with the sin in myself. To write a memoir like this without confessing one’s own capacity for sin is something I cannot do.
Think what a beautiful thing it would be if I could take back every unkind word I ever spoke, or every unkind deed I ever did, either deliberately, or accidentally – if I could take back every moment of pain I ever caused another human being.
How can I do this? Only in surrendering this knowledge, this admission, to the mercy of Christ.
239 (now) my vocation is to write for Christ.
