Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession Page 16

  I, who all my adult life had been a member of nothing, had to become a member of this something, and it took all the will that I had.

  When I recovered from the diabetic coma that almost killed me, when I gradually worked my way back to health, I experienced a dry period in which faith for the moment did not make sense. I did not cease to believe in God. Rather, recovering as I was from the severe mental effects of ketoacidosis—in which the brain actually shrinks and gradually has to restore itself—I felt frightened by my new commitment, and it was only with great difficulty that I went back to Mass.

  The first task that confronted me was to learn the Mass in English, to learn to participate in it aloud as Catholics of our time now do.

  The idea of the English Mass was distasteful. I grieved inordinately for the old Latin—the beautiful Tridentine Mass on which I’d been brought up—and it seemed an immense tragedy to me that the service was so changed, and that the magnificent hymns of my childhood were apparently almost entirely gone. C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s But I was determined to learn the new Mass. I was there for the Lord, and I was there as a Catholic. And I was bound and determined to do what was required.

  I soon settled into a weekly regimen of attending the Saturday Vigil Mass rather than the Sunday morning Mass—

  something easier for me during my physical recovery—and I took my place in the front pew of the church, not because I wanted to be seen, or to feel important, but because I wanted no distractions as I followed the movements and gestures of the priest and the altar server in front of me. St. Mary’s Church, as I believe I mentioned earlier, had been built by the German immigrants of our parish. And during my childhood it had operated right alongside St. Alphonsus, the church built by the Irish. But now St. Alphonsus was no longer a consecrated church at all but a prized historical monument being used for other purposes, and so St. Mary’s was the parish church to which I had to go. Whereas St. Alphonsus is in the Romanesque style, St. Mary’s is Gothic, but certainly no less magnificent than St. Alphonsus, and in fact it houses an altar of uncommon intricacy and beauty because it is made up of so many statues of so many Apostles, angels, and saints. The altar even includes a huge and ornate depiction in plaster of God the Father, seated on His Heavenly Throne, with Christ sitting beside Him, and beneath them the Virgin Mary being crowned as Queen of Heaven.

  Before Mass and even in moments after it, the contemplation of the details of this altar gave me a supreme pleasure. I was home, yes, home, amid images I understood, and let me 1 9 3

  say once again—because it’s so important—I never confused these images with the entities that they represented. Rather I gazed on them to be reminded of things eternal, and things which I now felt “free” to study and experience to the full. But the most vital part of my reeducation was hearing the Mass spoken aloud by the priest and by those of us in the pews, indeed hearing words of it spoken aloud by me—and focusing for the first time on words which decades ago had been buried in the printed missal.

  In other words, prayer was once again acoustic for me rather than something read. Reeducation in Christ was acoustic and gave my mind an immediate and powerful sequence of impressions of the sort I’d never really been able to gain so easily from books.

  Also this weekly Mass involved singing. And though the congregation was small, and mostly made up of elderly people, there was a gifted cantor, a soprano named Sheila, who sang with operatic power and grace.

  My first full participation came through singing the “Gloria” with Sheila—the hymn I described earlier in this book. Whatever grief I felt for the old Latin was soon burnt away by the power of this hymn, guided as it was by the soprano’s clear and soaring voice.

  The most moving verse of the “Gloria” for me, as we sung it, was:

  For You alone are the Holy One,

  You alone are the Lord,

  You alone are the Most High,

  C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s Jesus Christ,

  With the Holy Spirit,

  In the glory of God the Father.

  Amen.

  It was possible to look up, as I sang these words, and look at the statues of God the Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, hovering above them.

  I wish I could convey what it meant to sing this hymn because I wasn’t just singing it with my voice; I was singing it with my will. I was abandoning my will, no matter how bitter my fears, to the sentiments expressed in this hymn. Week after week as I sang the words “You alone are the Lord,” I would feel chills over my entire body. It seemed I had come home to something of incalculable power. And there was the opportunity, the opportunity, after decades of silence to pour out in song the love I felt.

  My education involved another extraordinary prayer which we spoke aloud, a prayer I’d never noticed in my childhood: the Nicene Creed. As we stood to recite this—after the sermon and before the Liturgy of the Eucharist—I found myself speaking the most fascinating and evocative words, words written in a.d. 325 as the result of the first church council convened by the Emperor Constantine, a council at which Christians reached a consensus on their Christological beliefs. But I didn’t care about that history. I didn’t care about all the arguments as to how consensus was achieved, and whether or not 1 9 5

  it was valid, or what it meant that hundreds of men would come together to hammer out a litany of beliefs in contradiction to other men. What struck me was the profundity of the words we had, from those early times, received and preserved. The very first verse ended in a line of shocking beauty: We believe in one God,

  The Father, the Almighty,

  Maker of heaven and earth,

  Of all that is seen and unseen.

  “Of all that is seen and unseen.” The simplicity of this hit me with great force. But the next and longer verse was equally mesmerizing and exalting:

  We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, The only Son of God,

  Eternally begotten of the Father,

  God from God, Light from Light,

  True God from true God,

  Begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father. Through Him all things were made.

  These words alone gave me enough to think about for the rest of my life. Of course I knew they represented controversy and accommodation, men arguing with men. So what? They represented a grappling with the Absolute which perfectly reflected my own intellectual struggles for nearly forty years. C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s I loved these words. I loved that every week we were going to say them aloud, that we were going to stand there in communion, all of us in the church, and speak these words aloud together.

  It’s conceivable that the Apostles’ Creed, known so well to me from childhood, had become dead to me, and that this Nicene Creed was giving me a fresh immersion in what I truly did believe.

  The English Mass went on to yield other treasures. The experience of the Consecration of the Eucharist was far more vital and wondrous than it had ever been for me in the old Latin days. The Memorial Acclamation that we sang together before the raised Body and Blood had a subtle triumphant power: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Finally when the priest sang the doxology:

  Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever, we answered with the reverent song of the Great Amen. Never before had I recited the Lord’s Prayer with others in such a solemn way. We held hands at Mass as we said it; we spoke it in unison and with a full commitment to every word.

  Our Father, Who art in Heaven,

  hallowed be Thy name;

  Thy kingdom come,

  Thy will be done,

  on earth as it is in Heaven.

  1 9 7

  Give us this day our daily bread;

  and forgive us our trespasses,

  as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation,

  but deliver us from
evil.

  In sum, this prayer, which I had rushed through a million times in childhood, now unfolded for me, on my own lips, as utterly splendid and richly meaningful.

  Afterwards, to turn to others, to clasp their hands, to wish them “the peace of Christ,” to embrace them—this was hard for an old guard Catholic who had never done such a thing during Mass; but it too was immensely powerful. And a palpable love spread throughout the church, an undeniable warmth and sense of true community.

  Along with these new experiences there came the old ones as well, including the singing of what we’d called the Agnus Dei:

  Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world: have mercy on us.

  Communion itself was a bit of a shock. Instead of receiving the host on our tongues from the consecrated fingers of the priest, we received the wafer in our hands, and placed it in our mouths on our own. But even this had an intimate beauty to it, a new dignity. It was also possible to drink the consecrated wine from the chalice, something quite new for me, but this I chose not to do.

  When I returned to the pew, after receiving Communion, my prayers were almost entirely shaped by awe—by the con-C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s tinuous song from my heart of gratitude that I’d been invited back to the banquet, that I was once again receiving Christ as He had told us to receive Him at the Last Supper. The words from the Gospels that best characterize the emotions I felt are those from the Gospel of John, which Jesus speaks to His Apostles:

  Remain in Me, as I remain in you.

  Time spent at Mass during these years of learning the new ways was blissful time, no matter how dry I felt, no matter how estranged from consolation. I had discovered vital and unshakable connections between the new English Mass and the old Latin Mass, and there was never any feeling in me that I was not in my church.

  I felt united with God again; I felt empowered to talk to Him, to discuss with Him the difficulties of my day-to-day existence, and to put before Him in intimate conversation my confusion about the novels I wrote, and how little they reflected my new change in faith.

  My life wasn’t easy, by any means, during the years 1999, 2000, and 2001. The novels I wrote reflected the gradual fragmentation of my old alienated vision. I no longer felt complete writing supernatural fiction about metaphorical beings shut out of salvation. I wanted to talk more about my relationship with God. As for my life day in and day out, I’m not sure it reflected by any means my complete devotion to God. I lived, pretty much as I’d lived before, an unusual public and private life in New Orleans, writing and reading for long hours in my study, breaking for publicity tours to support my new novels, 1 9 9

  and presiding over huge family reunions at Mardi Gras and at Christmas, seeking to play some meaningful role in the lives of my family members, and yet confused as to what my new novels meant.

  No special demand was made on me by my newfound faith. When anyone tried to argue with me about it, I simply refused to discuss it. So I was no evangelist among the unconverted. And I was still 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. The novel Blackwood Farm was my principal accomplishment during this period, and it proved to be a strange novel indeed. It involved my vampire heroes and heroines, and even some of the characters from my earlier novels about the Mayfair Witches, but there was a strange blending of the old elements with new religious sentiments. Indeed I think the book can be seen as two novels trying to break apart from each other: one about the real world of the South as I knew it, with its big families and its unique characters; and the other a supernatural novel about the old themes of being ripped out of the world of grace into the world of darkness against one’s will.

  Blackwood Farm, the place itself—a fabulous bed-andbreakfast mansion in rural Mississippi—clearly represented a redemptive world that was almost a state of mind. The vampire characters impinged on it, seeking to destroy it. But Blackwood Farm persevered as a household where people could and did love in a Christian spirit. Idealized human characters dominated the book at the expense of the super-C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s natural predators. The forces of good, personified by the family of Quinn Blackwood, gain a power they lacked in any of my previous work.

  In sum, I was pulling away from my old writing because I didn’t identify anymore with the theologically marginalized and the alienated; and I didn’t know quite what to do about this change in myself. And so the book reflects the dilemma, the wrestling, the confusion, and the strong insistence that we do live in a world where redemption is possible and where Christian values can supplant the compromises of despair. In spite of all this, the glamorous forces of evil do overtake Quinn Blackwood. I did not succeed in creating a world for him in which the vampires and witches of my past work would be banished for his sake. So it is a book about an aesthetic war and a spiritual war which I lost. 1 1

  A s t h e ye a r 2 0 0 2 b e g a n , I wasn’t aware of living a particularly Christian life for God. I didn’t live an unchristian life. But I had not truly been transformed in Christ. I was a churchgoer for God. I was a committed Catholic. Nothing kept me from weekly Mass and Communion, but my participation in the age-old ritual of the Mass was still the fullest expression of my Catholic life.

  I should say here that I was keenly aware that my age had made my conversion easy for me. I was past the age of childbearing. I was married to my childhood sweetheart, who had graciously consented to marrying me in my church. Therefore I faced no agonizing questions as to how to be a Catholic day in and day out. I didn’t confront the church’s teachings on birth control or abortion. I didn’t confront the church’s teachings on any particular form of excess because mine was C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s a fairly conventional life. I didn’t smoke, drink, or gamble. I spent some time—and I hesitate to mention this for obvious reasons but I think it is germane here—I spent some time trying to give away some of the money I made to others for whom it might make a difference, and I contributed to the support of my church. But these things I’d done before my conversion.

  Secular humanist values had always prompted me to try to share some of the benefits I received as the result of my writing. I was a committed Democrat, and it was part of my Democratic Party consciousness that I provide medical insurance for my employees and that I pay the premium for them and for their dependents. I can’t claim any of this was specifically Christian.

  I wasn’t really “born again” in Christ, so much as I was home again and safe in Christ, and the only subject really weighing on my mind was that of my writing, that it reflect more my current beliefs.

  The pedophilia scandal began to make national news. Catholic priests were accused of molesting teenagers and sometimes children.

  This was an ugly and demoralizing matter for Catholics. I didn’t want to believe this had happened. I didn’t want to believe the scope of the problem. In sum, I didn’t want to face that such a pattern of behavior could have existed among our clergy. And it prompted me, for the first time, to do some reading about the present church.

  I chose not to read about the scandal itself, though there were no doubt responsible books in circulation about the priests accused of molesting children. I wasn’t ready to con-2 0 3 front the material. I chose rather to read something of the recent history of Catholicism—a subject I’d always avoided in the past.

  My approach was historical to the point of being musty. I wanted to know what sort of men ran the church today, as opposed, say, to the type of men who’d run it in the Middle Ages, or the eleventh century.

  So I read a big thick biography of the present pope. I read the biographies of the popes before him. And I took away from this reading the simple conclusion that these were pious and dedicated men. Pope John Paul II, Pope Paul VI, and Pope John XXIII were men of unquestioned holiness. All right. Things were good at the top. That is what I wanted to know. The church would weather this pedophilia scandal
as it had weathered other scandals. The church would reform itself. It had to reform itself. Even as a little Catholic girl, I’d known the church was constantly reforming itself. It was “the rock pitched into space” and nothing would halt its progress. Of course, these books took me through some of the recent moral controversies that had affected the church—the birth control crisis under Pope Paul VI; the ordination of women rejected by John Paul II—but I didn’t pay much attention to these issues, and I did not have the theological preparation necessary to tackle the entire question of Vatican II and its many documents and what these documents had meant for the church.

  But reading about the piety of the popes had a particular personal effect on me. It tended to remind me of my own early inclinations as a Catholic, to give my life totally to God. As I read about the vocation and dedication of Paul VI, I C a l l e d O u t o f D a r k n e s s revisited my own childhood desire to be a priest, and then to be a nun.

  My reading began to include more devotional books; and I became fascinated with the Stigmata: the means by which a saint or holy person receives the wounds of Christ. Of course I still had my lovely and much cherished statue of St. Francis of Assisi reaching up to embrace the Crucified Lord. And I knew well the story of how Francis had received, in a vision, the wounds in his own hands and feet. I remembered palpably a time in my youth when I had said to God, “Thy will be done.” I knew now how limited had been my sense of humility; sanctity had been connected in my mind with adventure and great achievement, and even fame.

  Yet the softer, more richly colored aspects of that childhood fervor came back to me. There had been a time when truly I had wanted to give everything to the Lord. There had been a time when I thought nothing less than this was acceptable.

  How could I do this now? How could I say to the Lord,

  “Thy will be done” when I had forty-nine employees and a family? What was this negotiation that was going on between me and my Blessed Lord?