Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession Read online

  I came to be in awe of the unique power of the story of the Incarnation. To hell with all I’d studied. I began to sense that I was being blinded day in and day out by an inexplicable light. I lived my life as if it weren’t shining down on me, but it was shining down. It was breaking forth out of the shadows of every matrix of ideas or images that I examined. It was searing my shivering heart.

  My own writings took me again and again and again to God. In The Vampire Armand, the talk of the Incarnation of Christ is relentless. Blood and Gold was obsessed with the tension between kinds of religious fervor. The broken heart of Pandora has to do with that character’s loss of all sense of the religious—her capitulation, under pressure, to living in a godless world.

  Talk of God was the private feverish sound of my own mind.

  I drifted through the contemporary world, blind as usual 1 7 7

  to whatever was happening politically or religiously, thinking about these seemingly timeless ideas. If readers didn’t see or value the focus on this in my novels, well, that was no surprise. So much else was going on in the books; my methods were those of submersion and surrender. I’d always been willing to subject myself to a book to the degree that the writing of it could drive me almost out of my mind. I was Christ haunted.

  I was thinking again and again of the famous lines of the poet Francis Thompson:

  I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter. Up vistaed hopes I sped;

  And shot, precipitated,

  Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after. But with unhurrying chase,

  And unperturbèd pace,

  Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, They beat—and a Voice beat

  More instant than the Feet—

  “All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.” Long years ago, in high school, I’d memorized this poem. It had been my father’s favorite poem, my father who had C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s spent his youth in the Redemptorist Seminary at Kirkwood, Missouri. Now it was part of a deafening chorus of voices singing the songs of God to me as I struggled with myriad doubts, myriad fears, and, seemingly, alone. Yet I clung to my atheism; I clung with a martyr’s determination. Why? Because I still believed it was “the truth.”

  And I lacked any systematic approach to the problems that were tearing me apart.

  Finally in December of 1998, on the afternoon of Sunday, the sixth, everything—for me—changed. It was the first of two small miracles I was to experience before the anniversary of Our Lord’s birth.

  My diary doesn’t give me much help as to what happened on that day. My notes are factual and simple: This is a happy day for me—my reconciliation to the Church. . . . I read a lot of St. Augustine last night. What poetry. I’m also reading on purgatory. Jacques Le Goff . . . I feel peace and quiet in my soul. I feel happiness. I think—I know—Stan is happy for me. He told me. The note for December 7 reads:

  Went to Mass and Holy Communion. Received Our Lord into my body and heart for the first time in thirty-eight years. . . . I went to the side altar of the Giant Crucifix and said my special prayers of thanks to God for giving me the Gift of Faith and the strength to do this. . . . I was so nervous. When the priest put the host in my hand, I didn’t 1 7 9

  know whether he had finished speaking or not. Then to put it in my mouth was easy. Only in the pew did I find a private moment to feel Christ inside me and to cry a little, spontaneously. I didn’t want to make a scene. Several paragraphs later:

  My mind was on Mass and Communion. I love the story of the Incarnation so much—the idea of a God who becomes a man for love.

  The entry for Saturday, December 12, 1998, includes this: I am married in the church. We married at the altar of St. Mary’s Assumption Church on Constance and Josephine.

  Scribbled in the back of the diary, only a few pages later, are these words that I must have written some time before: My heart is good but I am a monster. . . . I’m not without a soul.

  —Le Bête. Beauty and the Beast.

  Cocteau

  The diary ends there.

  The second small miracle—which occurred on December 14, 1998, is not described in the diary at all. That day was a Monday on which I slipped into a diabetic C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s coma and was rushed to the hospital, with a blood sugar level of over eight hundred, and a heart that was ceasing to beat. I was unconscious as a team of doctors tried to save my life. And save my life they somehow did. That miracle is simple to explain. Without knowing it, I had become a type 1 diabetic. At some point—probably around September of that year—

  my pancreas had all but shut down its production of insulin. For months I’d been sick with diabetes. Without knowing it, I’d almost died.

  The first of the small miracles—how I managed to approach the Lord through the doors of the Roman Catholic Church—is a great deal more complex and will take a good many more words to describe.

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  W h at h a p pe n s w h e n fa i t h re t u r n s ? What happens when one goes back to the church of one’s childhood? I’ve described part of the first miracle of December 6, 1998, before—in print, and many a time in interviews, and sometimes to those who have casually asked: How did you come to believe in God again? What caused you to do this? It’s important to try now to describe this “conversion” or

  “return” once again, perhaps in a fresh way. When I go back to the very moment—that Sunday afternoon—what I recall most vividly is surrender—a determination to give in to something deeply believed and deeply felt. I loved God. I loved Him with my whole heart. I loved Him in the Person of Jesus Christ, and I wanted to go back to Him. I remember vaguely that I was sitting at my desk in a dreadfully cluttered office, hemmed in on all sides by rows C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s and stacks of books, and that I had little sense of anything but the desire to surrender to that overwhelming love. I knew that the German church of my childhood, St. Mary’s Assumption, was perhaps six blocks away from where I was sitting. And perhaps I remembered my mother’s words of decades ago. “He is on that altar. Get up and go.” I know now when I think of those moments in 1998, I hear her voice. I see her dimly, rousing us, telling us to get up and get dressed and “go to Mass.”

  What confounded me and silenced me in 1998 was that I believed that what she’d said so many years ago was precisely the truth. He was in that church. He was on that altar. And I wanted to go to Him, and the impelling emotion was love. Only dimly did I care about the doctrine of the Transubstantiation, the Catholic teaching as to how Our Blessed Lord is present Body and Blood in the small wafers kept in the Catholic tabernacle. Only dimly did I reflect on it, because truly I had a sense of something so much greater than the verbal expression of any one doctrine that it didn’t matter to me how superstitious such a belief might seem to a skeptical mind. And my mind was still, to some extent, a skeptical mind.

  I didn’t care about the framing of the doctrine. I cared about Him. And He was calling me back through His Presence on the altar. He might have used the falling rain to call me back; He might have used the music of Vivaldi. He might have used the statue of Christ and Francis that was on my desk. But, no, He used the doctrine of the Real Presence. And I surrendered to that doctrine because it was the way 1 8 3

  to Him, and He was what I wanted, with my heart and soul. Go to Him, I thought. Go to the Christ who is under the roof of your church. He’s waiting there for you. Get up from the desk and go. Go to the Christ who is Real and Present in every Catholic tabernacle throughout the world. Go to Him. In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from Him for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I�
�d been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul.

  He wasn’t going to let anything happen by accident!

  Nobody was going to go to Hell by mistake. This was His world, all this! He had complete control of it; His justice, His mercy—were not our justice or our mercy. What folly to even imagine such a thing.

  I didn’t have to know how He was going to save the unlettered and the unbaptized, or how He would redeem the conscientious heathen who had never spoken His name. I didn’t have to know how my gay friends would find their way to Redemption; or how my hardworking secular humanist C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s friends could or would receive the power of His Saving Grace. I didn’t have to know why good people suffered agony or died in pain. He knew.

  And it was His knowing that overwhelmed me, His know- ing that became completely real to me, His knowing that became the warp and woof of the Universe which He had made.

  His was—after all—the Divine Mind which had made the miracle of the Big Bang, and created the DNA only lately discovered in every physical cell. His was the Divine Mind that had created the sound of the violin in the Beethoven concerto; His was the Divine Mind that made snowflakes, candle flames, birds soaring upwards, the unfolding mystery of gender, and the gravity that seemingly held the Universe together—as our planet, our single little planet, hurtled through space.

  Of course. If He could do all that, naturally He knew the answer to every conceivable question before it was formulated. He knew the worst suffering that a human soul could feel. Nothing was wasted with Him because He was the author of all of it. He was the Creator of creatures who felt anger, alienation, rage, despair. In this great novel that was His creation, He knew every plot, every character, every action, every voice, every syllable, and every jot of ink. And why should I remain apart from Him just because I couldn’t grasp all this? He could grasp it. Of course!

  It was love that brought me to this awareness, love that brought me into a complete trust in Him, a trust that God who made us could not ever abandon us—that the seeming 1 8 5

  meaninglessness of our world was the limit of our understanding, but never, never the limit of His. Words fail. They have to fail. How can I describe this trust and this abandon, this realization that He was capable of righting every wrong? Ah, I have to say more than that. How can I describe the realization that He was the Divine Safety Net through which nothing could accidentally fall? This is a mystical thing that I’m trying to analyze; it is a transcendent moment when one senses with all one’s faculties that the love of God is the air we breathe. It was only as I felt this love and this trust, that I realized I believed in Him. It was only in love and trust that belief followed—and all became part of the complete surrender: go to Him, go with Him. Pass out of resistance into Him. This will not be easy; this will not bring comfort. This is not going to make you feel good. This is going to be hard! But this is where you must go.

  I mean how in the world was I to live with Roman Catholicism again and all of its many rules? I wasn’t even sure anymore what those rules were. How was I going to go back to a religion that my sophisticated friends despised and denigrated, that some of the finer minds I’d known regarded with blatant contempt? How was I to become a card-carrying member of a church that condemned my gay son? No, it was not the path of least resistance; it was not a falling into simple happiness. And no irresistible surge of emotional triumph carried me through this decision. If anything it took a draining stamina, to get up from the desk and to move towards Him. It certainly took an act of faith that C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s He would somehow make this return possible for me, He would show me how to live once more with creeds and codes that had once driven me half out of my mind. It didn’t really matter how wretched it was going to be. I had to go! I wasn’t going to deny Him any longer. I was going home.

  And here is where the first “miracle” of that year comes into play. Bear with me. This I have never described before and it deserves describing.

  I wanted Him! I wanted to be with Him, and talk to Him, and kneel before Him, and open my soul to Him, and the place that I sought Him was indeed that ancient Roman Catholic Church.

  But, as I have said, I didn’t know anything about the recent history of that church. And, as a result, I was sublimely ignorant of a multitude of things the knowledge of which just might have crippled me and confused me at this crucial moment and left me stunned and unable to proceed. It was a beautiful ignorance. It was the true miracle of which I speak.

  Had I known, for example, of the church’s firm stand against the ordination of women, of the documents in which its teachings have been worked out and the degree to which these statements have been declared unchangeable, I might have been far too disheartened to proceed. Had I known of the extent of the annulment process and how elaborate it had become, and how common, and how often Catholic marriages of ten to twenty years were being declared null and void, and never to have existed, I would 1 8 7

  probably have been too perplexed to know which way to turn.

  Had I known the extent of the ever broadening pedophilia scandal in my church, I might have been too saddened and discouraged to take a step.

  Had I read any of the Theology of the Body, with its strong emphasis on gender roles and gender complementarity, I might have been utterly brokenhearted and unable to move on.

  Had I known of the bitter polarization between the right and left in my church after Vatican II, I might have been repelled and wounded, and unable to draw close to the church doors.

  But the miracle was: I didn’t know any of these things!

  Not a single one of them.

  And I didn’t even know the name of the present pope. All I knew—thankfully and with tears—was that the great and ancient Roman Catholic Church of my childhood was still there! And that seemed the miracle for the moment, not what I didn’t know.

  And so I went back to God through the doors of that church, returning to Him through the sacrament of Confession, with the kind understanding of a brilliant and thoroughly Catholic priest who spoke the mother tongue of my religion with beauty that I could hear and receive and comprehend.

  I went back to the ancient Roman Catholic Church of Christ Our Lord who was crucified, died and buried, and rose on the Third Day. I went back to the Catholic Church of C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s St. Paul and the Apostles, and the angels Gabriel, Michael, Raphael. I went back to the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, first among the saved. I went back to the church of St. Augustine and his mother, St. Monica; of St. Jerome and St. Patrick. I went back to the church of St. Francis of Assisi and the painter Giotto; back to the church of St. Teresa of Avila and the music of Palestrina; back to the church of St. Joan of Arc and the music of Andrea Gabrieli; back to the church of Michelangelo and Antonio Vivaldi, the church of Ignatius Loyola and St. Alphonsus, the church of sweet St. Thérèse, The Little Flower, with the bouquet of roses in her arms. And above all, I went back to the ancient Roman Catholic Church of the Apostolic Succession which held as solemn truth that Christ was Real and Present in the Blessed Sacrament on the altar. This was “the rock pitched into space” that Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen had once described. This was the Eternal Church of the Lord.

  And so it was a return to the Romanesque dome and the Gothic arch, to the stained-glass windows, to plainsong and Verdi’s Requiem, to the priest with the white wafer in his hands, and to the beaming Christ Child in his crib of straw. Yes, this was the way home through the doors of the Eternal Church, with its marble floors, and painted saints, its solemn icon of Our Mother of Perp
etual Help, and its unmistakable incense, its ever faithful candles, its soft and fragrant flowers, its draped altars, its golden tabernacle doors. Lord, I’m here.

  That was the first and foremost miracle of 1998 for me—

  the miracle of knowing and unknowing, the miracle of trust, 1 8 9

  the miracle of love, the miracle of what didn’t matter, the miracle of faith, and the miracle of surrender and the miracle of return.

  Halts by me that footfall—

  Is my gloom, after all,

  Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

  “Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

  I am He Whom thou seekest!

  Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.”

  —Francis Thompson,

  “The Hound of Heaven”

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  It wa s n’t u n t i l t h e s u m m e r o f 2002 that my commitment to Jesus Christ became complete. From December 1998 on, however, my commitment to believing in Him, to worshipping Him, and to keeping to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church was strong. I have already stated that my return to Christ, my return to Him through the doors of the Roman Catholic Church, was not something simple. It was not a collapsing into consolation or happiness. And I want to stress this again.

  It seems to me that many people think a Christian conversion is exactly that—a falling into simplicity; a falling from intellect into an emotional refuge; an attempt to feel good. There are even writers today who see Christian conversion as a form of empowerment, and books are written that 1 9 1

  promise born-again Christians not only complete peace of mind, but even monetary gain.

  My return involved complete trust in God, an admission of faith in Him, a faith made evident by love. But it took an iron will to go back to Him. I anticipated grave difficulties. I feared grave obligations. And I was in no way able to turn against the secular humanist friends and teachers and culture which I had for so many years admired.