Illumination and Darkness

“I honestly think those people are looking,” she told me. “They want to transcend. They are really not satisfied with secular materialism, and they turn to the occult in the romantic hope that they’re going to find something that transcends materialism. Unfortunately they’ve been alienated from their churches in many cases. And whether that’s their fault, or the church’s fault, or nobody’s fault, I don’t know. But [these people] are left feeling that they can’t find what they want to find in the church, so they go to these alternative systems. What they want is something beautiful and enduring, and sometimes something exotic, eccentric, or extreme.”

“It’s just not enough for them, having material possessions and going through the motions of an American materialistic lifestyle. That’s why they dress up in dramatic black clothes, sometimes wear antique lace and go to jewelry stores to find old 19th century jewelry. It’s an effort to get something ineffable.”

Encounters with the presence of God in ways that could be considered ‘transcendent’ or ‘ineffable’ seem to be in short supply today. Astonishment and adoration often do seem more at home in some woodsy Wiccan ritual than in a Christian church. “When you look at Christianity as it’s believed and practiced in America today,” I asked Rice, “is there anything that makes you concerned?”

“Oh, you must be kidding,” she shoots back. This breaks the entourage’s code of silence, as they can’t help but laugh. “Well, I think the thing that concerns me more than anything else is that so many people associate us with hatred and intolerance. They don’t think of us as people who know how to love, and that is tragic. We need to do something to change their opinion.”

I agreed, and thought that surely the way to know love is to embark on a path of knowing God that inculcates love. “For those of us who are spiritual seekers, people longing for something transcendent and ineffable,” I ask Rice, “do you think that there is enough in contemporary Christianity to support this search?”

“I really do. I do, because of the way I’ve been accepted with these books. I’m getting dozens of emails every day - more than I could possibly answer - and people are saying ‘I’ve heard about your new book, I never read you before, I never cared for [your previous] subject matter, but I’m going to read this book.’ There are people ready to embrace you at every minute. I’m getting some that simply say, ‘welcome back to the church.’ I’m getting positive ones from Catholics, Protestants, all different kinds of people.”

Anne Rice is not ignorant of the pitfalls and shortcomings inherent in many expressions of her relatively newfound faith. But at the end of the day, she is hopeful. She strikes me as a walking anachronism, a Victorian-lace preacher forged in the fires of the 1st century and the 21st. She generates more light than heat, her enthusiasm contagious:
“We need to stop being so afraid that the devil is winning. The devil’s not winning - we are winning. Jesus is winning. God is winning. We have the strength and the time to open our arms to absolutely everyone. Rushing to judgment, condemning whole classes and groups of people - that is not in the spirit of Christ that I see in the Gospel. I can’t find that spirit. I see the spirit of love, taking the message to absolutely everyone.”

Michael Morrell is the mastermind and connector behind zoecarnate.com.