Called Out of Darkness Page 0,61

a host of modern thinkers had declared that religion had no validity, or to put it more poetically: God was dead. My skeptical friends had long ago declared that religion hadn't a particle of energy left to it. I'd agreed with them. I'd said so in my novels. Didn't my venerable immortal Marius hold forth at length on the demise of "revealed religion" and the marvelous opportunities for the rational world that were to follow this long overdue and ignominious death? I'd said so to anyone who asked me.

I'd said so to myself. Why, religion was dying out in 1998, wasn't it?

So why this nationwide obsession with the Son of God?

What was the driving force here behind the Jesus who wouldn't go away? The story of the Incarnation - the story of an absolute and all-powerful God who became Man to be with us - began to obsess me as something unique in the history of the ancient religions I constantly studied.

Of course, I'd read plenty about the ancient mystery cults, the celebrations of the dying vegetation god, and his resurrection each year in the new crops; I'd studied the goddess Isis with the child Horus in her arms - an iconic forerunner of the Virgin and the Baby Jesus which had dominated art for over fifteen hundred years. And I knew the old Catholic arguments - that these religious rituals and ideas and symbols prefigured the Lord Jesus Christ and His entry into history. I saw the logic of that. I also saw that, similar though they were, these ancient religious rituals were only vaguely like the story of the Incarnation. They did not involve the God of All Creation becoming one of us.

I came to be in awe of the unique power of the story of the Incarnation. To hell with all I'd studied. I began to sense that I was being blinded day in and day out by an inexplicable light. I lived my life as if it weren't shining down on me, but it was shining down. It was breaking forth out of the shadows of every matrix of ideas or images that I examined. It was searing my shivering heart.

My own writings took me again and again and again to God. In The Vampire Armand, the talk of the Incarnation of Christ is relentless. Blood and Gold was obsessed with the tension between kinds of religious fervor. The broken heart of Pandora has to do with that character's loss of all sense of the religious - her capitulation, under pressure, to living in a godless world.

Talk of God was the private feverish sound of my own mind.

I drifted through the contemporary world, blind as usual to whatever was happening politically or religiously, thinking about these seemingly timeless ideas. If readers didn't see or value the focus on this in my novels, well, that was no surprise. So much else was going on in the books; my methods were those of submersion and surrender. I'd always been willing to subject myself to a book to the degree that the writing of it could drive me almost out of my mind.

I was Christ haunted.

I was thinking again and again of the famous lines of the poet Francis Thompson:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbed pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, They beat - and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet -

"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me." Long years ago, in high school, I'd memorized this poem.

It had been my father's favorite poem, my father who had spent his youth in the Redemptorist Seminary at Kirkwood, Missouri. Now it was part of a deafening chorus of voices singing the songs of God to me as I struggled with myriad doubts, myriad fears, and, seemingly, alone.

Yet I clung to my atheism; I clung with a martyr's determination. Why? Because I still believed it was "the truth." And I lacked any systematic approach to the problems that were tearing me apart.

Finally in December of 1998, on the afternoon of Sunday, the sixth, everything - for me - changed. It was the first of two small miracles I was to experience