Called Out of Darkness Page 0,59

overwhelming desire to go to Communion. But I could not do this. My two friends went to Communion and I sat there in the pew crying because I felt I could not do it. I was crushed and alone, and crying, in the heart of Christendom. I knew the rules too well to simply get up and approach the altar rail. And I did not want to offend my friends, who knew I was not a practicing Catholic, but even if they had not been there, I would not have gone. The pain of this moment was unforgettable. I felt I was not acknowledging something that I knew to be true; God was there.

God was everywhere. God was God.

At home that year, it seemed that no matter when or how I turned on the television, images of the Mass flashed onto the screen. Mother Angelica had by that time created the great Catholic network, EWTN, and I was dimly aware of this, in spite of my aversion to all things Catholic; and in spite of that aversion, I found myself drawn to watching the Mass on EWTN.

Again and again I turned on the television to see the priest lifting the host at the moment of Consecration. I'd stop, sit down, and watch. This seemed to go well beyond coincidence, but it may well have been coincidence. Whatever the case, EWTN during those months became a constant reminder to me of my lost faith. Mother Angelica - whom, in my ignorance then, I regarded as an amusing little nun - was the Apostle who reached me during that year.

All this while, I continued to buy religious statues, to surround myself with the saints who'd once been the mentors of my childhood, and I continued to give support to the parish though I never set foot in the church.

The Vampire Armand and Vittorio, The Vampire are the two novels I wrote during the last year of my official atheism.

Both reflect the conflict I was experiencing - the longing for reconciliation with God, and the inevitable despair that underscored the seeming impossibility of it.

But I should add, before I leave this chapter on the pilgrimages, on the pursuit, on the conflict - that no novel I wrote better reflects my longing for God than Memnoch the Devil, written several years before, in which my hero, the vampire Lestat, actually meets "God Incarnate" and his rebellious angel Memnoch, and is offered an opportunity to become part of the economy of salvation. Lestat rejects the offer, and flees from the purgatorial realm where souls prepare for acceptance into Heaven. But he carries out of this realm and back into the real world a particular article which has come into his hands earlier in the novel, on the road to Golgotha, where Lestat encountered Christ carrying His cross. The article is the legendary veil of Veronica, the veil that supposedly bears the image of Christ's blood-stained face.

The novel ends on a note of ambiguity: Were Lestat's visions of God and the Devil real? Or was Lestat the plaything of capricious spirits for whom Christianity is but one form of game? What is unambiguous at the close of the novel is the existence of Veronica's veil.

At the time I wrote the book, I saw the veil as causing confusion in the "real world" to which Lestat returned, evok-ing devotion and piety from a range of characters, whose actions could be viewed as irrational and hysterical at the worst.

I now feel differently about the veil in that novel. It is not the character of Lestat who rescued it from Time and brought it into the modern world. It is the author who grabbed hold of it, and fled from moral confusion in the novel with the Face of Christ on the veil in her hands. It is the author who held it up for all to see, and then backed away, deep into the fictional matrix, leaving its meaning unresolved.

Now it's time to speak of my conversion, my return to faith, my return to the loving - and eternally outstretched arms of the Lord.
Chapter Eight
As I've expllained earllier, my faith in atheism was cracking. I went through the motions of being a conscientious atheist, trying to live without religion, but in my heart of hearts, I was losing faith in the "nothingness," losing faith in "the absurd."

Understand, we were living contentedly in New Orleans, among secular and Catholic friends and family. There was no pressure from anyone to