StriperAddict
Senior Member
I thought this might be a refreshing read outside the doctrinal discussions of late. No put down intended, please read to the end. Perhaps some might understand better the "heart of the matter". 
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An atheist returns to Christ
Marcia Segelstein - OneNewsNow Columnist - 1/27/2009
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If you've ever wondered how people make the journey from Christianity to atheism and back again, Anne Rice offers some insights based on her own experience. She also has some powerful and moving things to say about what it means to be a Christian in her most recent book, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession (Knopf, 2008).
Probably most famous for writing about vampires, these days she is still a writer, but her subject matter has changed.</STORYLEAD>
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In 1988 Rice moved with her husband and son back to the city where she grew up, New Orleans. She writes about the significance of her acceptance there by her large extended Catholic family. "They didn't question my disconnection from Catholicism....They simply welcomed us into their homes and into their arms." In fact, her return to New Orleans and into the unquestioning arms of her extended family marked the beginning of the end of her atheism. As she writes, "I was losing my faith in the nonexistence of God. I was, however, being doggedly and religiously faithful to an atheism in which I no longer believed."
Then on December 6, 1998, her faith returned. Her life changed. She calls it a miracle. She remembers a feeling of surrender, of giving in to something. "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 my life, missing the point....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 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." She describes sensing with her entire being that she was surrounded by God's love.
The next day she went to Mass for the first time in 38 years.
Her re-commitment to Christianity began with that miracle shortly before Christmas of 1998, but was not completed until 2002. Up until that point, she was committed to her faith, and felt a love for God, but the expression of her faith was in attending weekly Mass. Other than that, she didn't feel that her life was very different, even though now she was a Christian again. She continued to write – she needed to make a living – but felt ambivalent about it. One Saturday afternoon another dramatic change occurred. Sitting in church she talked to God about it, and the answer came to her: she was to write for God. She was to write solely for God. And at that moment, she felt a veil was lifted from her eyes.
Her first book written for God was Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, followed by Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. And then this one, of course.
But even as she wrote Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Rice admits that she didn't focus on her personal behavior and attitudes, and how they should be affected by her faith.
She had a moment of realization about that while being interviewed about the book, when she was asked how her life had been influenced by her return to Christ. After thinking about it she replied, "It demands of me that I love people." It was a turning point, this moment of understanding that loving Christ meant loving others, both friends and enemies – no small or simple thing. In fact, Rice believes it's the most difficult of Christ's demands, because it's almost impossible. She writes, "One has to love the rude salesclerk, and the foreign enemy of one's country; one has to love those who are 'patently wrong' in their judgments of us. One has to love those who despise us openly...." It was a revelation.
It is the most basic tenet of Christianity, yet it is the most brilliant of insights. Rice realized what is often lost in the practice of the Christian faith: that Christians must love others, must look for Christ in others, must not condemn others. That to be a Christian is not simply to go to church every Sunday. It is to be a changed human being. It is to act differently.
And listen to this passage, so reminiscent of Timothy Keller's books The Reason for God, and The Prodigal God: "The more I study this...the more I realize as well that what drives people away from Christ is the Christian who does not know how to love." (Read Marcia Segelstein's column on Timothy Keller)
There is much to learn from Anne Rice's journey, and much to contemplate regarding what she calls "the complexity of simply loving."</STORYBODY>
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An atheist returns to Christ
Marcia Segelstein - OneNewsNow Columnist - 1/27/2009
http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php<SCRIPT type=text/javascript>var addthis_pub = 'onenewsnow';</SCRIPT><SCRIPT src="http://s9.addthis.com/js/widget.php?v=10" type=text/javascript></SCRIPT>
<STORYLEAD>
Probably most famous for writing about vampires, these days she is still a writer, but her subject matter has changed.
<STORYBODY>
Rice was raised in New Orleans as a Roman Catholic, and during her childhood often thought of becoming a nun. She attended Catholic schools and recounts vivid memories of religious observances during her childhood. But the modern world beckoned, and during her first year in college she lost her faith.
"I harbored too many profane ambitions," she recalls, and stopped feeling entitled to talk to God. Because she "failed to see Him as a Person of Infinite Compassion," she never put the problem before Him in prayer. Her religious sensibilities were authoritarian, by her own description, and she believed she'd lost the right to pray.
The Catholic world of her childhood was separate from the world at large, and she was desperately interested in learning all she could about what she'd missed. She recalls meeting with a priest as a college freshman to discuss her doubts. When he discovered that she had been brought up "going to daily Mass and Communion, and had gone to Catholic schools almost all my life," he told her that for someone like her, raised as she was, "there is no life outside the Catholic Church." Rice does not criticize or condemn him for having said this, and believes he meant well. But when she walked out of that meeting, she was no longer a Catholic.
She became what she calls a "committed atheist." She and her husband had a daughter who died just before reaching her sixth birthday. Two years later, Rice wrote Interview with a Vampire which she describes as "an obvious lament for my lost faith." It was the launching of a highly successful and lucrative writing career. Before her return to faith, she would write 21 books which she now believes "reflect a journey through atheism and back to God...." She didn't know that at the time.
<HR>"I harbored too many profane ambitions," she recalls, and stopped feeling entitled to talk to God. Because she "failed to see Him as a Person of Infinite Compassion," she never put the problem before Him in prayer. Her religious sensibilities were authoritarian, by her own description, and she believed she'd lost the right to pray.
She became what she calls a "committed atheist." She and her husband had a daughter who died just before reaching her sixth birthday. Two years later, Rice wrote Interview with a Vampire which she describes as "an obvious lament for my lost faith." It was the launching of a highly successful and lucrative writing career. Before her return to faith, she would write 21 books which she now believes "reflect a journey through atheism and back to God...." She didn't know that at the time.
Visit Marcia Segelstein's blog -- she values your comments and ideas!
<HR>In 1988 Rice moved with her husband and son back to the city where she grew up, New Orleans. She writes about the significance of her acceptance there by her large extended Catholic family. "They didn't question my disconnection from Catholicism....They simply welcomed us into their homes and into their arms." In fact, her return to New Orleans and into the unquestioning arms of her extended family marked the beginning of the end of her atheism. As she writes, "I was losing my faith in the nonexistence of God. I was, however, being doggedly and religiously faithful to an atheism in which I no longer believed."
Then on December 6, 1998, her faith returned. Her life changed. She calls it a miracle. She remembers a feeling of surrender, of giving in to something. "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 my life, missing the point....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 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." She describes sensing with her entire being that she was surrounded by God's love.
The next day she went to Mass for the first time in 38 years.
Her re-commitment to Christianity began with that miracle shortly before Christmas of 1998, but was not completed until 2002. Up until that point, she was committed to her faith, and felt a love for God, but the expression of her faith was in attending weekly Mass. Other than that, she didn't feel that her life was very different, even though now she was a Christian again. She continued to write – she needed to make a living – but felt ambivalent about it. One Saturday afternoon another dramatic change occurred. Sitting in church she talked to God about it, and the answer came to her: she was to write for God. She was to write solely for God. And at that moment, she felt a veil was lifted from her eyes.
Her first book written for God was Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, followed by Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. And then this one, of course.
She had a moment of realization about that while being interviewed about the book, when she was asked how her life had been influenced by her return to Christ. After thinking about it she replied, "It demands of me that I love people." It was a turning point, this moment of understanding that loving Christ meant loving others, both friends and enemies – no small or simple thing. In fact, Rice believes it's the most difficult of Christ's demands, because it's almost impossible. She writes, "One has to love the rude salesclerk, and the foreign enemy of one's country; one has to love those who are 'patently wrong' in their judgments of us. One has to love those who despise us openly...." It was a revelation.
It is the most basic tenet of Christianity, yet it is the most brilliant of insights. Rice realized what is often lost in the practice of the Christian faith: that Christians must love others, must look for Christ in others, must not condemn others. That to be a Christian is not simply to go to church every Sunday. It is to be a changed human being. It is to act differently.
And listen to this passage, so reminiscent of Timothy Keller's books The Reason for God, and The Prodigal God: "The more I study this...the more I realize as well that what drives people away from Christ is the Christian who does not know how to love." (Read Marcia Segelstein's column on Timothy Keller)
There is much to learn from Anne Rice's journey, and much to contemplate regarding what she calls "the complexity of simply loving."
<SMALL><EDITORSNOTE>After ten years as a producer for CBS News, forty-something years as an Episcopalian, and fifteen years as a mother, Marcia Segelstein (mvsegelstein@optonline.net) considers herself a reluctant rebel against the mainstream media, the Episcopal Church (and others which make up the rules instead of obeying them), and the decaying culture her children witness every day. Her pieces have been published in "First Things," "Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity," and "BreakpointOnline," and she is a contributing editor for Salvo magazine.
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but the fact there is some food for thought for all Christians in this article.
