Illumination and Darkness

She looked me in the eye. “Well, it certainly has to be personal experience, but I did read myself back in to faith. It was history, reading the story of the Jews in time and realizing that there was no rational explanation for the survival of the Jewish people. It was the biggest mystery history ever offered me - how did these people survive? That was the beginning. And then the second big mystery was this: how in the world did Christianity spread the way it did, to become an international religion by 110 AD? How did that happen? In trying to answer those two questions, I read myself back into belief. And then belief came.”

“So your questions propelled you,” I offered.

“Yes. I laid the ground…I was looking.”

Her compassion for the Jewish people comes out in their richly detailed and sympathetic depiction in Christ the Lord. Even so, there are points of tension for some “outsiders” to the Christian faith. Rabbi Jonathan Miller, spiritual guide for 750 Reform Jewish families in the Birmingham area, expressed some of the dissonance he felt.
“My perspective in reading the book was a little different [than some] since, as a Jew, I don’t accept the concept of the virgin birth, the magi, or the shepherds seeing the angels. These things for me are not history, or historical fact. I appreciated the opportunity enter into the life of first century Jews - they were portrayed wonderfully. But when it came back to some of the storyline that I expect my Christian friends to embrace and to be affirming, to me was challenging, which you would expect.”

Rice was aware of this challenge; she wanted to pay homage to the faith and people that nourished the man Jesus of Nazareth. “I had already been kind of swept off my feet by the whole story of the Jewish people in history,” she said, recounting her research of ancient Hebrew culture for her 1996 novel Servant of the Bones, “I was enchanted with that material. “We don’t do any service to the story of our Lord if we don’t show where He came from. What shaped Christianity in the beginning was Judaism without question. A great deal of what we have in the New Testament is already in the Old Testament. We’re just told it in a completely new way, with a whole different set of possibilities attached.”

Midrash as Art

Rabbi Miller wasn’t through yet. “I wanted to share with you something that I appreciated,” he told Rice from the podium. “I see [your book] as a work of [Christian] Midrash. Midrash is the playfulness - and I say this in a loving way - with which the Rabbis embraced biblical texts and filled in some of the blanks and missing pieces, and tried to seek God through the stories they told. The Bible itself is a very sparse account, and it needs us to be able to read it and make it come alive for us - it requires an imagination. One of the reasons that Judaism has persevered through all the hardships it has, is that Jews have always had an imagination. We may not have had power in the world, but we’ve always had imagination, and this imagination has kept our Scripture alive.

“I think what you’ve done with the Christian scripture - which is not my scripture - and the Christian story - which is not my story - is something Jewish; you’ve filled in the pieces with Midrash. I didn’t know that Christians were allowed to do that,” he said as the audience laughed.

What is art, and how can people of faith go about creating art that honors every aspect of who they are? Rice has no problem making her expression of faith in art overt, as her latest offering readily attests. “I think good Christian art has always tried to bring people closer to God,” she says. “If you look at a painting by Caravaggio, or Rembrandt, and you see Jesus painted in a certain way with a certain expression on His face, that is a subjective statement and that is a fiction, but the idea is to make you aware for just even a few seconds of what Jesus might have felt, or how he might have felt it.”

Father Ray Dunmyer (yeah, the priest) thinks that plunging oneself into God is a catalyst for authentic creativity. “One of things that strikes me is that you’re taking on the person of Christ and writing in the first person,” he told Rice during the roundtable conversation. “One of my favorite lines of Scripture is Paul writing in Galatians 2:20: ‘I live now - not I, it is Christ living in me.’ I think that’s the challenge of every Christian, that sense of identifying with Jesus and being one with Christ. In terms of writing your novel, it must have been a wonderful religious experience for you: putting yourself into the shoes of Jesus, walking with Christ, and having that sense of being one with him, which I think is the call of every Christian.”

Rice suggested that this was indeed the case. “I didn’t know what I was getting into. When you start a book, I think you should leave room to be surprised by a lot of things that are going to happen along the way. As I got deeper and deeper into it, I was united in a way I have never been as a person. Religiously, creatively, spiritually, materially…every way. It all came together for me. And I’m just thankful for this. I’m in awe of it. I’m in awe of this feeling of unity, of this lack of any kind of conflict. And it is a great, great adventure.”