Called out of darkness

Called Out of Darkness
A Spiritual Confession
Anne Rice

Ps3568.i265z4626 2008
813′.54 – dc22
[b] 2008020192
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rice, Anne, [date]
Called out of darkness : a spiritual confession / Anne Rice.
1. Rice, Anne, 1941- – Religion. 2. Novelists, American – 20th century –
For The boys of the Redemptorist Seminary of Kirkwood including my father
Howard James O’Brien

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD.
Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the
Voice of my supplications.
If thou, LORD, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who
Shall stand?
But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be
Feared.
I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his
Word do I hope.
My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that
Watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch
For the morning.
– From Psalm 130
The King James Version

Called Out of Darkness

1
This book is about faith in God.
For more than twenty centuries, Christianity has given us
Dazzling works of theology, yet it remains a religion in which
The heart is absolutely essential to faith.
The appeal of Jesus Christ was first and foremost to the
Heart.
The man knocked on his back on the Road to Damascus
Experienced a transformation of the heart. St. Francis of
Assisi, giving away all of his clothes as he turned to follow
Christ, was reflecting a decision of the heart. Mother Teresa
Founded her world-famous order of nuns because of a deci-
Sion of the heart.
The immensity of these figures finds an imperfect student
In me, but not an inattentive one.
I want to tell, as simply as I can – and nothing with me as

Called Out of Darkness
A writer has ever really been simple – the story of how I made
My decision of the heart.
So here is the story of one path to God.
The story has a happy ending because I have found the
Transcendent God both intellectually and emotionally. And
Complete belief in Him and devotion to Him, no matter how
Interwoven with occasional fear and constant personal failure
And imperfection, has become the true story of my life.
If this path to God is an illusion, then the story is worth-
Less. If the path is real, then we have something here that may
Matter to you as well as to me. 2
Before I can describe how I returned to faith, at the
Age of fifty-seven, I want to describe how I learned about
God as a child.
What strikes me now as most important about this
Experience is that it preceded reading books. Christians are
People of the Book, and our religion is often described as a
Religion of the Book. And for two thousand years, all that we
Believe has been handed down in texts.
But no doubt many children learned about God as I
Did – from my mother and from the experience of church
Which had little or nothing directly to do with knowing how
To read.
Over the years, I turned out to be a consistently poor
Reader, and I don’t think I ever read a novel for pleasure until
I was in the sixth grade. Even in my college years, I was a Called Out of Darkness
Poor reader and, in fact, couldn’t major in English because I
Could not read the amounts of Chaucer or Shakespeare
Assigned in the classes. I graduated with a bachelor of arts
Degree in political science, principally because I could under-
Stand the historic background I received for political ideas
Through good lectures.