From her spiritual memoir, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, some will be surprised to learn that the atheist novelist Anne Rice (Interview With the Vampire) spent her childhood and teenage years as a committed Catholic in New Orleans. She writes that her faith in God was formed before ever reading a word of the (Catholic) catechism. She credits the development of her faith and her concept of God to “the spoken words of my mother, and also the intensely beautiful experiences I had in church.”

She speaks of being “assaulted by the sensuous and the atmospheric, and the beautiful,” so much so that she can describe a drainage ditch as “the lovliest of streams.” Her recollection of the celebration of the Mass in her childhood is vivid and moving, detailing the reverance she felt for the Host as it is consecrated by the priest, a compelling description even for this Reformed Protestant. She describes vividly the ceremonies of the Mass which she attended as a child, characterizing them as inducing “trancelike quiet,” leaving her “intoxicated by the experience.” These experiences caused her to see “a profound connection between narrative, art, music, and faith.”

At the age of twelve she was so taken by her Catholic faith she was certain she wanted to become a priest. When told she couldn’t become a priest, she settled on becoming a nun. Between fifth and sixth grades she spent an entire summer working (volunteering) twelve hours a day at a home for elderly people run by Little Sisters of the Poor.

She writes lovingly of the influence her mother had on her education, particularly her reading of poetry to her. She writes candidly of her struggle with reading, even into college, and her disdain for school, for childhood, and for adolescence, though she is thankful for school exposing her to the printed words of the catechism which she credits with shaping “the learning that sparked my attention and my imagination.”

It seems to this point that Anne’s faith is in her experiences – what she can feel and see. She struggles with  reading, pointing out that most of what she learned came to her “audibly and not shaped by printed words.” “Learning was visual and acoustic but it was not through books. I felt frustrated and shut out of books.”

And that seems to have included the Bible:

The knowledge of God, His Divine Son, and His saints was entirely iconic…My faith in God was strong before I ever saw a page of catechism, and certainly before I ever saw a page of the Bible. It wasn’t as yet connected with stories from the Bible.

But no document I ever read, including the Bible, really changed my concept of God, or my trust in Him, or how much I liked to think about Him. [italics mine]

. . . . . . . .

It is true that Catholics of this period did not learn the Bible. And I don’t ever recall seeing a Bible in our house. We weren’t forbidden to study it; we simply didn’t do it.

. . . . . . . .

What strikes me as I look at the books now [her Catholic school text books for Bible history] is that the stories of the Bible are detached from the voice or name of any particular book of the Bible, and though much biblical language is used, there are also sections of teaching which do not come directly from Scripture…[t]hough they gave me an immersion in biblical literature, I did not come out of it really knowing Scripture itself.

. . . . . . . .

With regard to the Bible, I continued to hear it in the readings at Mass, and the words were deeply poetic and impressive. Surely I became acquainted that way with many incidents in the life of Christ, but again, I had no sense of the overall flow.

Whatever the case, I came out of Catholic school knowing all the important people and incidents of the Bible, without a sense of its distinctiveness, its idiosyncrasies, or its poetic qualities. I had little sense at all of the Bible’s voice.

Yet, “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” During her childhood and adolescence Anne has no foundation in the word of God. All of her experiences are, as she describes them, “iconic.” Her faith seems to rest on the flimsy foundation of what she can feel. Even her limited exposure to God’s word is reduced to “poetic qualities.” And her faith soon crumbles.

During her first year in college she became an atheist. She lost her faith not because of any calamity in her life she could not reconcile with a loving God, nor because of any doctrinal truth she struggled to reconcile with reason. She lost her faith, she says, because of “the modern world” and her belief that her Catholic faith was at odds with her love of “the life of the mind, and the life of the artist.” “The Church had become for me anti-art and anti-mind.”

The decision to leave the Church, and with it her faith, came after a priest told her, “You’ll never be happy outside the Catholic Church.” “When he said it,” writes Anne, “something in me revolted…I was no longer a Catholic when I left the room.”

So she quit the church. “I quit for thirty-eight years,” a momentous decision she describes as “a catastrophe of the mind and heart.”

To be continued…