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Title: Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession
ISBN: 0307268276
Author:
Anne Rice
Publicate Date: 2008-10-07
Publish: 2008-10-07
List Price: $24.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $13.75
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1: Takes a while to get there,
but is an interesting spiritual journey Anne was on, even in her darker writings. The Lord never gave up on her, and now, she really does know the Lord. PTL!
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2: "The Path to Christ is the Path I Wanted to Travel from the Very Beginning."
Anne Rice is the best selling popular fiction author of 26 gothic (The Vampire Chronicles) and spiritual novels which have sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Once tabbed as the "Queen of the Occult," Rice, as part of spiritual transformation that began in the 1990s, realized that the greatest thing she could do would be to show her love for our Lord by consecrating her work to Him..."to use any talent I had acquired as a writer, as a storyteller, as a novelist - for Him and for Him alone."
"Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession" tells the story of Rice's life journey from being a determined and committed Catholic with a strong spiritual purpose, the rejection of her faith, and years of atheism to a spiritual transformation which led her to abandon a life of otherworldly subjects to one in which she vowed to "write only for the Lord." In looking back, Rice feels her earlier novels about good and evil, love and alienation, pageantry and ritual, where rooted in her search for God - a search for Truth.
Rice opens her spiritual autobiography with Psalm 130, providing insight into the internal conflict she wrestled with throughout her life journey:
"Out of the depths have I cried for thee, O LORD.....but there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his words do I hope."
Rice has now come to realize that while she yielded to the glamour of evil, "The path to Christ is the path I wanted to travel from the very beginning." "The path to Christ, this attempt to grasp the multiple meanings of His life and death on earth, had led me to other truths, too. It had led me to unspeakable happiness and a sense of longing for the first time in my life."
"Called Out of Darkness" will resonate to those of faith, those struggling with their faith, and those dissatisfied with life and are searching for Truth. Rice writes openly and honestly about her journey and her love of God.
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3: Fascinating Read
This page-turner is a fulfilling read.
At length, Anne describes her spiritual childhood. To me, this drove home the point of her departure from the Church and God. It also explained what I've been reading into her work over the years. Some people are dismayed that Anne doesn't go into more detail about her 38 years in Atheism. Interestingly, this is a spiritual memoir, so one shouldn't expect too much on the many years Anne spent outside of spirituality. If she would have written any more on those years in Atheism, I feel it could have diluted what matters most to her in this book. I might be completely wrong on this, but it's just my interpretation!
I really enjoyed Anne's considerable detail on how she came back to God and the Catholic church. Equally enjoyable was her thoughts on various social issues affecting her church.
Though not a church-goer, I consider myself a spiritual person. Reading Anne's memoir has not only been a fascinating experience, but has propelled a certain spiritual interest in me I'd like to further explore.
Thank you, Anne, for your candid and very personal book.
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4: Her "true story"
The publication of Anne Rice's (b. 1941) memoir coincides with the tenth anniversary of her return to faith and the Catholic church on December 6, 1998. Rice's twenty-five novels of fantasy, vampires, witches and the occult, not to mention homoeroticism and sadomasochism, have sold upwards of 100 million books, so many of her fans were stunned to read a Newsweek article (October 31, 2005) in which she vowed that henceforth she would "write only for the Lord. Ready to do violence to my career. . . I consecrated myself and my work to Christ." She's made good on her promise, having published two books of a trilogy about Jesus -- Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2005) and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (2008). Some diehard fans have wondered if Rice will ever return to the books that made her famous and famously wealthy. In May 2008, she posted an unequivocal five-minute response on YouTube [....] -- no, never again.
The first half of Rice's "confession" describes her childhood in New Orleans, where she grew up in a third generation Irish Catholic family. Her father went to seminary but never became a priest; two aunts were nuns. Until age seventeen, she went to daily Mass and weekly confession. She never met anyone who was not Catholic, or any blacks. Rice has "the deepest respect" for the nuns and parish priests who shaped her world, a world that she describes as "interesting, vast and immensely satisfying." Her college years at Texas Women's University and San Francisco State also revealed her upbringing to be tragically insular, and so her faith "cracked apart" when it encountered "the modern world." She quit the Catholic Church and faith in God for thirty-eight years, until her return in 1998.
Many parts of Rice's story are inherently interesting but left unexamined. She struggled learning to read. Her mother died of alcoholism at the age of forty-eight the summer after Rice finished the ninth grade, her daughter Michele died of leukemia at age six, and her husband of forty-one years, Stan Rice (an ardent atheist), died of a brain tumor in 2002. Rice was not radicalized living in San Francisco and Berkeley during the sixties and seventies; she describes herself as a "square" that was uninvolved and unaware of the political and cultural turmoil of those days. Gender confusion plagued her childhood, and her son Christopher (b. 1978) is gay. Rice made millions as a "nationally famous pornographer" (128), but says that she has "no guilt whatsoever for anything I ever wrote" (232). She fell "prey to long periods of depression and morbidity which seemed as much a part of my personality as type 1 diabetes was a part of my physical life" (199). Her publishing empire employees forty-nine people.
This is a story with a happy ending for a woman who has lived "an unusual public and private life." Anne Rice has "found the Transcendent God both intellectually and emotionally. And complete belief in Him and devotion to Him, no matter how interwoven with occasional fear and constant personal failure and imperfection, has become the true story of my life" (4).
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5: Interesting
First, let me say how happy I am that Anne has found Christ again, or as I think she would say, that He has refound her.
This was an interesting book on several counts. The first part, about her childhood, seemed overly detailed, and I found myself skipping forward. But two points were worth retaining. First, Anne was a poor reader, and her information came to her via visual stimuli or the spoken word. I found it amazingly ironic that so colorful a wordsmith would start out life that way. The importance of the visual in Anne's life probably accounts for the level of detail in her descriptions.
Second, young Anne perceived her all-encompassing Catholicism to be at perfect peace with the world's scientific, intellectual, and cultural pursuits. I'm not sure I fully agree with that, considering the Legion of Decency, which she mentions, never mind the RCC's dealings with the Galileos of history. But I do see much of contemporary Catholicism, anyway, embracing man's search for knowledge.
Once Anne began being drawn back to Christ the pages turned faster. I think my big takeaway here was that her conversion mirrored the dynamics of her childhood experience, in that it was initially driven by the visual rather than by the word. No one reasoned with her regarding the claims of Christ. No sermon convicted her. She didn't repent. Her wooing came via visual impressions of the religious statues to which she became addicted. Later it came via the spoken word of the masses she would watch on TV.
The impression I have is a deeper-than-words yearning of the soul for its lover. Words come only afterward, to describe the relationship. And their ability to describe must be, as she admits, imperfect.
The Body of Christ is diverse, as Scripture tells us. There are different gifts and callings, there are different perspectives on received truth. There are, Anne writes, Christmas Christians and Passion Christians. And each of us is at different stages of our growth in the reality of Christ. Yet the paradox is that Christians have the central unity of Christ in us, even as we work out our salvation.
Anne's tells her story differently from the way I would tell mine, but there were enough touchpoints that it gave me some things to think about.
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