Called Out of Darkness Page 0,80

was a child, and over the course of my adult life. I can think of something said to me when I was ten years old and feel exquisite pain remembering how humiliated or hurt I felt.

What that means to me, however, is not only that I must forgive each and every instance in which such things happened, but that I must admit that my own words and actions may still be hurting people who can remember them from numberless incidents over sixty-six years. All that gossip, all that criticism, all that spitefulness, all that meanness, all that verbal sparring, all that anger - all that failure to love.

I am convinced that cruelty and unkindness are deeply sinful, because I know this sin in myself and the willfulness to commit it. And I say again that Our Lord's words in the Sermon on the Mount demand that we turn from this sin.

To follow Him, I must come to terms with the sin in myself. To write a memoir like this without confessing one's own capacity for sin is something I cannot do.

Think what a beautiful thing it would be if I could take back every unkind word I ever spoke, or every unkind deed I ever did, either deliberately, or accidentally - if I could take back every moment of pain I ever caused another human being.

How can I do this? Only in surrendering this knowledge, this admission, to the mercy of Christ.

Now I can proceed to the story of the Other Path.
Chapter Fourteen
The Other Path was perhaps in evitablle for a student of the religious conversion I had experienced. It was a path into the knowledge of the contemporary church, and an exploration of contemporary Christianity. And it was a path into the experience of contemporary Christians in America, Catholic or Protestant, and what their religion meant to them.

I didn't intentionally seek this path, really.

As described, I have a way of working in blissful ignorance of current church history.

So in 2005, when I went on the road to "promote" Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, I knew precious little of what really went on with Christians in the twenty-first century, and precious little of the debates dividing my own church.

Grateful as I was that my church still existed, in much the same form in which I'd left it, and devoted to my writing and theological reflections, I went forth into the world with an ignorance that was not wise.

The first discovery I made was a good one. Americans cared much more about religion than I had been led to believe by cynical friends and critics. I discovered that rank-and-file Americans everywhere wanted to talk about faith and talk from the heart.

As I visited radio programs, both secular and religious, I was surprised by the heat of the interest. National talk show hosts, after the cameras were turned off, would confess that they, too, were believers, that they, too, had undergone a recent conversion, or a faith journey, and the question of how one writes a novel about Jesus Christ according to orthodox belief was hardly academic.

Meanwhile e-mails poured in after my various television appearances. People from all walks of life said, in essence,

"Welcome home." Very few questioned my decision to be Catholic. There seemed a common bond shared by Christians of all denominations, and praise for the novel came from Catholics and Protestants alike.

Again and again, readers mentioned that they'd been reluctant to buy a novel "about Jesus" written by a woman associated with "vampire fiction," but they confessed that once having read the novel, they were extremely pleased.

I can't emphasize enough that this was a wonderful discovery. I was aware that faith and politics were hot topics on news shows. But I simply had no idea how many people, of all ages, took their relationship to Jesus Christ intensely seriously. I was confronted by men and women who felt deeply about faith; men seemed at times to be more interested in Gospel chapter and verse than women, but both were interested in the commitment to Christ and how it could change one's life. Young people also wrote to me about their journeys to faith, and how glad they were to see a known author declaring herself a Christian.

I became convinced that my urban atheist friends were to a great extent out of touch with Christian America. And I became more impatient than ever with the way that network television portrayed people of faith as hypocrites or pompous windbags, or