Wednesday, December 10, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Anne Rice, Christmas Christian
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
The Creator of the ends of the earth.
They that wait upon the Lord
Will renew their strength,
They will rise up on wings like eagles!
They will run and not be weary,
They will walk and not faint.
I haven’t read the vampire books that lavished riches and reputation on Anne Rice. But I’ve read and re-read the two books she crafted from Jesus’ point of view about the world around him. Inspired by those books I discovered her “spiritual confession,” Called Out of Darkness.
A cradle Catholic who grew up in New Orleans, went to parochial schools and attended Mass every day with her parents or her friends, Anne left for college and soon she left her church. She married a devout atheist and they didn’t look back for decades.
Being an atheist required discipline very like that of being Catholic. One could never yield to the idea of a supernatural authority, no matter how often one might be tempted. To think that a personal God had made the world was to yield to a demonic and superstitious and destructive belief.
Anne’s return to Jesus emptied her of everything except the certainty that she was loved in spite of herself. In spite of her sin.
I know what sin is. I learned very young. When I was little, maybe seven, I was with a group of children playing in the side yard of a house with an open basement window. The basement must have been eight feet deep. I turned to a little boy crouching at the edge of the window, and I pushed him so that he fell all the way down to the basement floor. I felt it was an interesting thing to do.
I will never forget all my life that little boy’s scream as he fell, or the utter astonishment as he looked at me, his sheer disbelief that I could have done such a dreadful and cruel thing to him. I knew instantly that it was wrong, yet I had done it. And I had done it for the pure thrill of seeing what would happen if I did. I think I knew evil in that moment.
What do you remember from childhood? My friend John pinched a baby and knew instantly that this was wrong. He has never forgotten. In sixth grade my friend held the arms of a scorned classmate while I punched him in the stomach. Sixty plus years later I see the whole scene vividly in my mind’s eye. It was evil, and I was wrong. I knew sin, and sin knew me. That day I knew in an instant of breath-taking insight what Anne calls the “glamour of evil” (p. 232).
But denial is the devil’s playground, and I have lived there off and on all my life, turning away from the relentless gaze of God, who made me. Instead I spent lots of energy shoring up the image I created of myself, so much so that I often forgot to love others.
But that’s not just a story written in the past tense. I am kin to evil now, and I cry out to Jesus to save me from it. So did Anne. And as she devoured books by John A. T. Robinson, N. T. Wright, Raymond Brown and many Jewish scholars as well, she discovered the friendship and endless love of Jesus her brother.
I find myself confounded that the Lord surrendered Himself to the weakness and inevitable frustrations of a developing little boy. This is an overwhelming affirmation of the human condition. “You have been a child, so I became a child.” That seems to be what the infant in Mary’s arms is saying to me. It’s a stark and chilling mystery, this helpless God cradled among animals and fearful humans, a deposit of infinite power in a stable where man and beast, in the dark dead of winter have so long found common rest.
The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness grasps it not.
Anne thought of herself as a “Christmas Christian,” the bleak mid-winter longing for a glimpse of her Savior reaching out his arms.
He died for our sins, yes. But He was also born for them, nurtured for them, held in his Mother’s arms for them, held up by His Mother for us. Only the God who made the vast reaches of space could have made Himself so small. What is the word for something so splendid, and so mundane? No wonder that Christmas remains irrepressible. Everywhere on December 24 and 25, the Child is born again in the inevitable winter darkness. He reaches out for us with warm, delicate, curling fingers.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious dawn.
This is the mystery that rivets me to the heart of Christ.
Anne wrote of Jesus as a young boy, called with his family Out of Egypt. And she wrote of him as a young man on The Road to Cana. She passed away 80 years old in 2021, a few days before what would have been her 80th Christmas. I have no doubt she spent that Christmas at Home.
Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened,
and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am meek and humble of heart;
and you will find rest for your souls.
(Isaiah 40, Psalm 103, Matthew 11)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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