Anne Rice's Memoir

I just finished reading Anne Rice's memoir Called Out of Darkness.  I was interested in reading it primarily because I love her writings; all of them.  I wanted to see how she justified leaving her vampires behind to write about Jesus.  Or at least, how she reconciled her past with her change of heart.

It took me a while to slog through the first half of the book as she recalls her childhood and the beauty of the Catholic church of her youth.  It got interesting when she began to talk about losing her faith, and finally became intriguing as she talked about her writings and her eventual return to God.

Anne Rice left God behind for a lot of the same reasons I did.  It is difficult to reconcile the inclusive nature of "God Is Love" with the constrictive and exclusive Church and its doctrine.  It is also difficult to maintain a belief in God when that belief is wrapped up in the church and experiences of childhood.

Returning to God is even harder.  Returning requires admitting you needed the very thing you left behind.  Returning requires faith in something you can neither see nor prove.  Returning requires surrender.

In retrospect I can see that it was important for her to describe the beauty she saw in the Catholic church and its rituals and the effect they had on her, in order to explain her yearning for that beauty apart from the church.  I can understand the draw of nostalgia.  I can understand revisiting and reliving the happy moments of childhood, and being drawn back to that which made it happy.

Still, the most interesting part of the book was her explanation of her writings.  Although she identifies herself briefly as a pornographer for her erotic writings, she talks about her vampires as an expression of her confusion as she identifies with a world without gender or soul, as she reconciles her guilt and longing with the beauty in the world.  She makes no apology for these books.

I enjoyed her fictional stories about Jesus, but I loved Lestat.  I loved his struggle with making the most of the life he was given.  I would have hated to hear that she regretted this character.  I understand her explanation of leaving the vampires behind, since she is no longer struggling with the same issues.  I understand her new focus as an expression of what she can do now, with her new passion for Christ.

Most of all, I respect her suggestion that Christianity be about love; loving everyone equally, without judgement or the need to evangelize.  I believe in an inclusive, loving God.  I find it hard to affiliate myself with a church for fear that I will be associated with that same feeling of being part of an exclusive club only the self-righteous can join.  She has reconciled herself to not giving up on church, but rather to educating herself on what she believes and how she chooses to live those beliefs.  I respect that too.  

Most of all, I love that she believes that Love transcends gender or sexuality.  I love that she correlates the bickering between Christian groups with the bickering between Jewish sects of Jesus' time.  

All in all, reading the book was worth the time.  It has given me ideas on how to reconcile my own malcontent with religion.