Called Out of Darkness Page 13

  For just about thirty years, I’d suffered such an aversion to Catholicism that I avoided any mention of it anywhere, including any sustained contact with anyone who was Catholic. I’d heard rumblings of big changes in the Catholic Church, horror stories of the loss of the Latin liturgy, of 1 5 1

  an English Mass. I’d heard that the great church council Vatican II was responsible for this artistic disaster. I’d heard that thousands of priests and nuns had left the church. But I didn’t really know what was happening in contemporary Catholicism any more than I’d known the latest church history in 1960.

  In fact, during all these years away from the church, there had been only one film about Catholicism that I had watched over and over again.

  This was a film that I deeply and painfully loved. It was called The Nun’s Story and it was made in 1959. It starred Audrey Hepburn in an exceptional and subdued performance as a Catholic woman in Belgium who enters a semi-cloistered order of nuns in the hopes of becoming a missionary in the Belgian Congo. It is an austere and pure film to an exceptional degree.

  It is entirely about the inner spiritual struggle of this one person, and her failure to become the religious she had hoped to become. It is devoid of cheap romance, or distracting subplots that might have appealed to a commercial audience. In fact, it is such a pure film that it is almost impossible to understand how it ever got made. But it did get made, and time and again, I watched it, sometimes crying, grieving for my lost Catholic faith.

  I felt I understood the struggle of Sister Luke in this film completely.

  She was guilty of the sin we had imputed to Martin Luther. Because she could not be perfect according to the system, she left the system. In Luther’s case it had been the C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s church. In Sister Luke’s case, it was the convent. Her tragedy was entirely a spiritual tragedy, and I never watched this film without realizing that it could have been my own story, and that perhaps it should have been my own story, that I should have tried to be a nun as I had once dreamed of doing. I loved everything about this film. I loved the shots of the convent with its broad corridors and high doors. I loved the soft, dignified grace of Sister Luke as she accepted the penance of wearing the ornate habit of her order. I loved that she cared above all about being a good person with her entire heart. I loved even perhaps that she failed, failed as I had failed. She’d left the convent. I’d left God.

  I should point out that this film is genderless. The story could easily have been about a monk. In being about a religious person, it transcends gender obsessions and concerns completely, and that is no doubt the reason that it spoke so purely to me about faith, about the love of God, and about the kind of life that is possible when one offers everything to God.

  In 1974, I actually read the book on which the film was based. I found that the film had been true to the book. And Sister Luke’s story was my way of visiting my old church, my magnificent and timeless church, and being there, in sorrow, for a little while. The story was set in World War II. That was long before the great church council of Vatican II which supposedly changed my church, and so I felt a special refuge in the film. It was the way things had been, and perhaps were not, for anyone, anymore.

  In 1998, I actually didn’t know how things were in the Catholic Church. I had no idea at all.

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  Now for ten years, I’d been living in New Orleans. Stan and Christopher and I had come there to live in 1988. And one most significant development in those years had been the complete acceptance of us by our huge extended Catholic family, including the revered Murphy cousins whom I mentioned early in this book. In 1988, my father had been still living, and he’d come to join me in New Orleans, and there amid huge family parties he had connected me with his surviving brothers and sisters, and aunts and uncles, and all the cousins he so cherished and loved. This was my father’s last great gift to me—that he brought me into contact with this “lost” family. And my father’s happiness at this time was also a gift. To my amazement, these churchgoing people completely embraced Stan and Christopher and me. They didn’t question my disconnection from Catholicism. They said nothing about the transgressive books I’d written. They simply welcomed us into their homes and into their arms. This was as shocking as it was wonderful. The Catholics of my time had been bound to shun people who left the faith. Indeed one reason I stayed clear of all Catholics for three decades was that I expected to be rejected and shunned. In my childhood, one couldn’t enter a non-Catholic church. If a cousin married “out of the church,” not only must one shun the ceremony, one had to shun the cousin forever after. An entire branch of our family had been lost to us in the 1950s because they became Protestants. So, returning to New Orleans, I more or less expected to be shunned. But the world of my Catholic cousins in New Orleans was a loving world. And these were indeed people who went to C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s Mass and Communion on Sunday, who participated in their church, who visibly and actively supported it. These were the ones who had stayed.

  This acceptance puzzled me and interested me. How could they be Catholics and put their arms around a woman who wrote Interview with the Vampire? How could they come into my home so cheerfully when they knew Stan and I were not married “in the church”? Surely they knew Christopher was being brought up with no religious affiliation. True, he went to Trinity Episcopal School, but that was because Trinity was a fine school. I never asked them these questions. I felt an overwhelming love for them, and my return to New Orleans became a return to their acceptance as much as a return to the church buildings and the venerable houses I so loved. As I met more and more churchgoing friends, I was intrigued by the way they managed to live in the world as Catholics. Again, I asked no questions. I simply observed. No harsh mental break had ever forced itself upon these people. They had found a way to live faithfully with absolutes, and above all they had found a way to continue day in and day out believing in God.

  When my great-aunt, Sister Mary Liguori, died, my elevenyear-old son, Christopher, was a pallbearer at her funeral. We stood with all the other Catholic mourners, and from memory, I followed the prayers. Of course I believed that I could never really be one of these people again. I couldn’t believe in God!

  But the simple fact was: I did. The world of atheism was cracking apart for me, just as once the world of Catholic faith 1 5 5

  had cracked apart. I was losing my faith in the nonexistence of God.

  I was, however, being doggedly and religiously faithful to an atheism in which I no longer believed. There was a fatalism to it. You can’t go back to God! Why do you dream of this? You know too much, you’ve seen too much, you just can’t accept all the social things these people obviously believe. Besides, you know there is no God. The world’s meaningless. People have to provide the meaning. You’ve been writing about this for thirty years!

  At some point I began to contribute to the local church—

  the parish church of my childhood—though I never set foot inside. Through that support I became friends with the local Redemptorist Fathers, one of whom was my cousin, though I wasn’t a member of the faith.

  As I’ve described, I have a deep devotion to the Redemptorist Fathers. I had never forgotten that my father’s seminary education had set him apart from his sisters and brothers, and given him a love of literature and music as well as a spiritual intensity that few around him possessed. I also became a great collector of religious artifacts, of the life-size statues of the saints that were falling into the hands of antique dealers as old inner-city churches closed across the United States.

  I had a perfect place to put all this art. It was a building called St. Elizabeth’s Orphanage which I had bought from the Daughters of Charity in the mid-1990s—a vast brick building built between the 1860s and the 1880s that bore a heartbreaking resemblance to the old home of the Little Sis-C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s ters of the Poor in which I’d wanted so much to be a nun some forty years before. />
  What was I doing when I bought that building? I lovingly restored its chapel. I bought any plaster saint or virgin or angel anyone offered me. I even discovered, in a French Quarter antique shop, a whole set of the Stations of the Cross which had once hung in St. Alphonsus Church, my very church, and I bought them and ranged them up the main staircase. Yet another ornate set, offered by a country priest, was bought, restored, and ranged along the chapel walls. In addition to the beautiful Garden District home I’d acquired soon after my arrival, I bought the very house on St. Charles Avenue where our family had lived for a short while before my mother’s death. This house had once belonged to the Redemptorist church parish. We’d rented it from them for a short while. It had been before that a priest house, and before that the convent of the Mercy Sisters. It was adjacent to the mansion on Prytania Street that held the Our Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel where I’d first prayed to God. I bought that building too.

  Think of it. Think of buying the building in which you first went to pray, the building that contained your mother’s old high school classrooms, the building that contained the chapel in which your mother’s Requiem Mass had been said. From that chapel, my mother’s remains had been taken to the graveyard.

  I guess I would have bought the graveyard if it had been for sale, as well.

  Bit by bit I was picking up the pieces of a Catholic child-1 5 7 hood with these significant purchases. I was forming alliances with those still within the fold. I was keeping company with their loving kindness and their daily faith. Yet every step was marked with pessimism, sadness, and a grief on the edge of despair. Every step was marked by darkness—by a tragic certainty that belief in God Himself was quite beyond my conscience and my heart. There was no returning to any church without faith in God.

  Beyond the matrix of gilded plaster, stone, and image, there loomed the threat—the ominous and dreadful threat—

  of the love of Almighty God.

  Still with unhurrying chase,

  And unperturbed pace,

  Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, Came on the following Feet,

  And a Voice above their beat—

  “Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.”

  —Francis Thompson,

  “The Hound of Heaven”

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  Be f o re I m ove o n to the actual moment that my faith came back to me, let me say a few words about pilgrimages, because by the 1990s, I was making them all the time. Emotional lives have landscapes. Interior journeys have an exterior geography. The geography of my life has always been intense and dramatic. I knew this when I was growing up. St. Charles Avenue was a great historic artery of New Orleans. On the far side of that street, the Garden District began, enclosing the finest and most significant antebellum houses in the city, outside of the French Quarter downtown. That I had to walk from St. Charles Avenue, through that eerie and enchanting neighborhood, in order to get to the Irish Channel and its two enormous churches was significant. I passed from a world of wealth and charm into a world of work and economy, yet the journey ended in a vast 1 5 9

  Romanesque church, St. Alphonsus, which is even now a jaw-dropping wonder to those who visit it.

  My later writing always sought to recapture the harmony, the lushness, and the timeless loveliness of the Garden District, whether I was writing literally about the neighborhood itself, or about Venice, or Vienna, or Haiti, or Rome. And my novels always sought to express the intensity and the high-pitched allegory and symbol of the church. The noisy and narrow streets of the Irish Channel were the map of the world that I feared—the world without art, the world without timeless beauty, the world of necessity and raw experience, and random suffering, into which anyone at any time might suddenly drop, the world in which someone by circumstance might be completely trapped. I didn’t grow up in the Garden District. I didn’t grow up in the Irish Channel. I grew up on the margins of the world that included both.

  I don’t belong anywhere. I don’t come from any particular milieu. No group embraced my eccentric family. My mother’s dreams of raising four perfectly healthy children and four geniuses probably died with her. Her death was a catastrophe. She was forty-eight and beautiful. She was brilliant, perhaps the most brilliant person I’ve ever known. She died of the drink. We didn’t save her.

  By the time I came home to buy a mansion in the Garden District, indeed to buy the very house in which she had been living when she died, well, she had been gone for over thirty years.

  But I get ahead of my story.

  Let me drop back.

  C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s Geography is important.

  At the beginning of my career as a novelist, I began to seek God in geography rather consciously though with no expressed hope of ever finding Him in the journeys and pilgrimages I made. As soon as the money flowed in from Interview with the Vampire, Stan and I went to Europe. What interested me above all were churches. The Cathedral of Chartres and Notre Dame de Paris were what I wanted to see in France. The Louvre, the Jeu de Paume, those were extra experiences, wonderful though they were.

  In Rome, it was St. Peter’s that drew me, and then all the other magnificent churches of the Eternal City, as well as the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel.

  Within a year of that first trip to Europe, I went back to Italy with my father and stepmother and younger sister. We journeyed to Rome, Florence, and Venice. And we also went to Assisi, where I stood in a long line of pilgrims, waiting for a few moments to press my hands to the tomb of St. Francis, whom I’d loved so much as a child.

  Again, I found myself wandering through St. Peter’s Basilica, gazing on the crypts of popes, and on the wondrously colored marble work, and staring at the varied monuments of my ancient Catholic faith.

  In the town of Siena, it was the cathedral that drew me. In Venice, I sat in San Marco staring at the walls of tessellated gold.

  Art, yes, art, that’s what I was seeking, but what else was I looking for as I wandered silent—refusing to pray, refusing to believe in God—through all those houses of worship? I told 1 6 1

  myself I was grieving for St. Francis, grieving for the church, grieving for belief which was inaccessible and unrecoverable. The journey went on.

  As mentioned above, I had returned to New Orleans with Stan and with our son, Christopher (note the name), in 1988, and I moved right back into the Redemptorist parish in which I’d been brought up. I moved onto the very block where my Murphy cousins, the Catholic exemplars of our childhood, still maintained their family home. As already mentioned, I soon purchased the dream houses of my childhood, the huge pre–Civil War Greek Revival

  “mansions” that had been completely beyond my family’s wildest dreams.

  Okay. This was a key part of my search for home, for mother, for lost faith.

  Other geography underlies the journey as well. In the mid-1990s I decided, against the advice and inclinations of everyone else, to go to Israel. I wanted to see the Holy Land. I told myself no faith in God was driving me there. I wanted only to see the geography which had meant so much to other people’s faith. I was secretly obsessed with Jesus Christ, but I didn’t tell anyone, and I didn’t tell myself. Stan went with me along with two devoted assistants, and for a little over a week, we wandered all over Jerusalem, through its most famous and wonderful churches, we visited Nazareth and we visited Bethlehem, and we stood before ancient altars, and in ancient crypts, and wandered ancient terrain.

  What was I looking for? Why did I insist that we remain in the church at the Garden of Gethsemane, as three priests C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s said the Mass in three different languages all at the same time? What did it mean to me to be staring at the Garden of Olives where just possibly Our Lord and Savior experienced His agony before Judas and the soldiers came to make the arrest that changed the history of the world? During those years, I began to collect books on Jesus, and there were a great many being published. The “historical Jesus” was a
hot topic in the 1990s. I picked up books wherever I saw them, and simply put them on my shelves to read at some later time. My publisher sent me Paula Fredriksen’s Jesus of Nazareth. I took the time to read it and was fascinated by it.

  I continued to deny faith in God. I truly didn’t think faith was possible again for me. Atheism was reality, and one could not turn away from that reality into a cowardly embrace of religion which one knew to be false. I was just “interested in Jesus,” because Jesus was an extremely interesting man. I determined to go to Brazil. At some time in my childhood I’d seen in a film the harbor of Rio de Janeiro; and what I most vividly associated with the harbor was the great statue of Jesus Christ with His arms outstretched that rises from the summit of the mountain in the middle of the city. I’d always wanted to go to that spot.

  Again, I told myself I believed in nothing. I was fulfilling childhood fantasies. I was looking for adventure. I was, as a writer and a traveler, living the life I’d dreamed of as a child. But the compulsion to go to Rio was overwhelming, and we soon made the climb up Corcovado to the foot of the statue of Our Lord.

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  We took the tram up the steep mountain, which is some 710 meters in height. Then we made the final ascent on foot with hundreds of other tourists, stage by stage, until we reached the statue’s base.

  The statue is concrete and is 38 meters tall. That means it’s about one hundred feet high. It weighs 1,145 tons. As we approached the base of it, the soaring figure was covered completely in clouds.

  Imagine, if you can, how enormous this statue was, how inherently impressive, and what it was like to stand at the foot of it, with all of Rio spreading out beyond the stone balustrades of the cliff. Clouds formed and fragmented and came together again over the city of Rio.

  I had the feeling we were at the top of the world. Suddenly the clouds broke, revealing the giant figure of Jesus Christ above us, with His outstretched arms. The moment was beyond any rational description. It didn’t matter to me what anyone else felt or wanted from this journey. I had come thousands of miles to stand here. And here was the Lord.