Called Out of Darkness Page 0,68

almost entirely shaped by awe - by the continuous song from my heart of gratitude that I'd been invited back to the banquet, that I was once again receiving Christ as He had told us to receive Him at the Last Supper. The words from the Gospels that best characterize the emotions I felt are those from the Gospel of John, which Jesus speaks to His Apostles:

Remain in Me, as I remain in you.

Time spent at Mass during these years of learning the new ways was blissful time, no matter how dry I felt, no matter how estranged from consolation. I had discovered vital and unshakable connections between the new English Mass and the old Latin Mass, and there was never any feeling in me that I was not in my church.

I felt united with God again; I felt empowered to talk to Him, to discuss with Him the difficulties of my day-to-day existence, and to put before Him in intimate conversation my confusion about the novels I wrote, and how little they reflected my new change in faith.

My life wasn't easy, by any means, during the years 1999, 2000, and 2001. The novels I wrote reflected the gradual fragmentation of my old alienated vision. I no longer felt complete writing supernatural fiction about metaphorical beings shut out of salvation. I wanted to talk more about my relationship with God.

As for my life day in and day out, I'm not sure it reflected by any means my complete devotion to God. I lived, pretty much as I'd lived before, an unusual public and private life in New Orleans, writing and reading for long hours in my study, breaking for publicity tours to support my new novels, and presiding over huge family reunions at Mardi Gras and at Christmas, seeking to play some meaningful role in the lives of my family members, and yet confused as to what my new novels meant.

No special demand was made on me by my newfound faith. When anyone tried to argue with me about it, I simply refused to discuss it. So I was no evangelist among the unconverted. And I was still prey to long periods of depres-sion and morbidity which seemed as much a part of my personality as type diabetes was a part of my physical life.

The novel Blackwood Farm was my principal accomplish-ment during this period, and it proved to be a strange novel indeed. It involved my vampire heroes and heroines, and even some of the characters from my earlier novels about the Mayfair Witches, but there was a strange blending of the old elements with new religious sentiments. Indeed I think the book can be seen as two novels trying to break apart from each other: one about the real world of the South as I knew it, with its big families and its unique characters; and the other a supernatural novel about the old themes of being ripped out of the world of grace into the world of darkness against one's will.

Blackwood Farm, the place itself - a fabulous bed-and-breakfast mansion in rural Mississippi - clearly represented a redemptive world that was almost a state of mind. The vampire characters impinged on it, seeking to destroy it. But Blackwood Farm persevered as a household where people could and did love in a Christian spirit. Idealized human characters dominated the book at the expense of the super-natural predators. The forces of good, personified by the family of Quinn Blackwood, gain a power they lacked in any of my previous work.

In sum, I was pulling away from my old writing because I didn't identify anymore with the theologically marginalized and the alienated; and I didn't know quite what to do about this change in myself. And so the book reflects the dilemma, the wrestling, the confusion, and the strong insistence that we do live in a world where redemption is possible and where Christian values can supplant the compromises of despair.

In spite of all this, the glamorous forces of evil do overtake Quinn Blackwood. I did not succeed in creating a world for him in which the vampires and witches of my past work would be banished for his sake. So it is a book about an aesthetic war and a spiritual war which I lost.
Chapter Eleven
As the year 2002 began , I wasn't aware of living a particularly Christian life for God. I didn't live an unchristian life. But I had not truly been transformed in Christ. I was