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Anne Rice’s Return to the Light
By Kent d Curry
Everyone knows about Anne Rice’s stories, but not many people know Anne Rice’s story.
The celebrated author of Interview with the Vampire carved out her niche in popular culture with a series of novels covering the un-lives of the vampire Lestat, Louis, and other supernatural creatures, yet they were actually stories of a woman trying to find her way back to God, a God she had deserted back in college, but a God who never stopped pursuing her.
Pentecostal Similarities
Rice grew up in 1950s New Orleans, a city she describes as being
burdened with an old style Catholicism in her memoir, Called Out of
Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. The child Rice embraced the rituals and
the Scripture, yet found herself staggering under the inconsistencies of her
church when she arrived at college. She found herself ignorant of so much of
the world, especially literature and art, while sinners around her were often
thoughtful, well-read, and kind—exactly the opposite from what she’d been
taught. It drove her from the church. Except, she made a bigger mistake than
that.
“The real tragedy however was that I quit believing in God. I could not
separate my personal relationship with God, and with Jesus Christ, from my
relationship with the church,” she writes. “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.’”
She remained an atheist for 38 years. She was married for 41 years (until
her husband, Stan, died in 2002), a mother, and a world-famous author with
nearly 100 million copies in print, except now she sees “these books
transparently reflect a journey through atheism and back to God.”
A Martyr’s Determination
Rice doesn’t hesitate to share how each vampire title reflected her
departure from atheism, even though she admits, “I clung to my atheism; I clung
with a martyr’s determination.” She admits to feeling shock when her son
Christopher admits to believing in God despite no interaction with Him while
growing up, to ignoring God despite the repeated tragedies in her life, to
feeding a growing doubt in the fatalism of atheism. Rice explains some overwhelming
experiences of Christ reemerging in her life, yet no road to Damascus epiphanies.
She left quickly, yet returned gradually to her Catholic faith.
She repeatedly mentions that belief is the hardest road, not the crutch
that skeptics call Christianity, because “it demands of me that I love people.
The mystery was that loving my friends was sometimes harder than loving my
enemies.”
She clarifies how she researched her latest novels about the life of
Christ (thus solidifying the reality of a real man named Jesus), the struggles
she experiences as a “baby Christian,” and her only calling in life: “My
vocation is to write for Jesus Christ.”
Open to Everyone
She’s an interesting mix. While her politics are decidedly liberal (an
area she only lightly traces), her theology is definitely conservative. Her
latest books—Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord:
Road to Cana—have been candid journeys to understand Christ and Him
crucified.
While I’d certainly love for her to pursue her love for God into a deeper, fuller biblical understanding, I see parallels between her road back to belief and many of the Pentecostals I grew up with who no longer live for God. We all want the lightning from heaven to strike, but more often it is through the patient application of love that non-believers (and past believers) are won.
Like the parable of the prodigal, this time Anne Rice’s story has a
happy ending, and a gentle reminder that so too can the stories of the
backslider’s we pray for daily.
© 2009, ninetyandnine.com
------- Kent Curry is an executive editor at ninetyandnine.com.
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