I've Never Read "Interview With The Vampire"

I’ve never read Interview with the Vampire or any other of the twenty-eight-plus books written by Anne Rice. (Her books have sold about 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history.) But I was intrigued a few weeks ago when, by chance, I heard about a 2008 non-fiction, autobiographical release entitled, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession.

Rice grew up in the Catholic church, but spent most of her adult life (thirty-eight years) as an avowed atheist. Her book recounts her story from Catholic-school girl to atheist to Christian again.

I want to quote a few chunks of the chapter where she began moving from atheist to adult Christian, because I find it most fascinating and great food for thought and discussion.

Hope you enjoy…

"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….”

I’d ask a few questions here and there, but in general this aspect of things didn’t much matter. 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 very 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.

Even my time among the skeptics, present and past, sang to me of God. In California, as I’d listened to the passionate stories of civil rights workers or war protestors, I’d heard the voice of conscience, the commitment to high principles, the deep-rooted need to do “good.” No one I ever met was indifferent to conscience or to acute moral responsibility. I saw no evidence even in the most strident anti-religious talk of people who didn’t believe in something, who didn’t suffer inwardly for those beliefs.

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…..”

The creation was talking to me of God. My visceral responses to the purple evening sky, to the canopy of oak branches that sheltered our front steps, to the flowers blooming beyond garden fences—my most cherished memories of the beauty of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, or Rio de Janeiro, or Venice, Italy—all this was speaking to me of God.

The music of a violin sang to me of God. The great painting of Giotto and Rembrandt spoke to me of God. An intense study of the lives of various composers spoke 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 twentieth-century America so obsessed with Him?....What was the driving force here behind the Jesus who wouldn’t go away?"