Called Out of Darkness Page 0,79

me to other truths too. It had led me to unspeakable happiness and a sense of belonging for the first time in my life.

But unfortunately, I traveled another path from 2002 to the present and I think it necessary to describe it in brief.

Before I describe that Other Path, I feel I have to say something specific here about sin. I have talked about the Sermon on the Mount, about the great challenge to love, but I have not talked about my own sin.

I know what sin is. I learned very young.

When I was very little, maybe seven years old, I did something that was a sin. I was with a group of children, on our block, playing in the side yard of a house that had a basement and an open basement window. At one point we crowded to the edge of the basement window and looked down into the empty room. The room must have been over eight feet deep.

Perhaps it was deeper. There was a little boy crouching next to me at the edge of the window, and I turned to him, and pushed him so that he fell all the way down to the basement floor. I did it for no other reason than to see what would happen. I did it because 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 on his face 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, what I had done, very wrong. Yet I had done it, and I had done it for the pure thrill of seeing what would happen if I did.

I don't remember any consequences from this. The little boy didn't die, which he might have. He didn't break any bones, which certainly might have happened. And I don't recall anyone calling me to account for it in any way. The boy's brother doubled his fist and threatened me, uttering the words, "If my brother is hurt . . ." but nothing happened after that, as far as I can recall.

I mention it now because I think I knew evil and wrong in that moment. And during my childhood there were other times when I did things that I knew to be clearly wrong.

What I took away from two of those experiences was an understanding of cruelty and meanness.

A third experience, in which I broke into a florist hot-house with two other little children, and stole many valuable orchids, ripping them off their stems, taught me the exhilara-tion and false sense of power in breaking the law. That

"crime" we confessed. My mother called the florist and told him what had happened. He was a kindly man. He came to confront us and found two sobbing little girls clinging to their mother. He did not press our family for restitution, for which I'm grateful to this day.

These acts were wrong. I knew they were wrong almost immediately after they happened, and I made up my mind -

for the most part - not to do things like that again.

But these acts revealed to me my own capacity for cruelty and complete disregard of what belongs to others. They reveal to me now the glamour of evil because I have yielded to it in myself.

From them I know sin. I know what it is.

But the sins I committed in far greater number, in frightening number, and for which I feel equal contrition, have mostly involved verbal cruelty - gossip, ridicule, and mean statements made directly to people to hurt their feelings, year in and year out throughout my life. I regret all these sins with my whole soul.

When people refer to me as a "prodigal daughter" because I have given up writing "about vampires and witches," I am confused. I feel no guilt whatsoever for anything I ever wrote.

The sincerity of my writings removes them completely from what I hold to be sin. I also feel no real contrition for my years as an atheist, because my departure from the church was not only painful, but also completely sincere.

Sin for me resides in those acts of cruelty both spectacular and small, both deliberate and careless, and always involving the hurt - the real hurt - of another human being.

I myself am haunted by destructive things that were said to me when I