Rice is worth the Price

On my way to pick up a kid from her dance class I realized I was early, so, to kill time, I dropped into a book store. I found a book in the bargain bin by Anne Rice called Christ the Lord, Road to Cana. I couldn’t put it down. Rice is a best-selling author known for her vampire books (nearly 100 million copies). Not being a fan of vampire books I can only say that I had heard that her books were a, “rich tapestries of history, belief, philosophy, religion, and compelling characters that examine and extend our physical world beyond the limits we perceive.” She is one of the most widely read authors in modern history. Apparently Rice returned to the Church in 1998, and in 2002 consecrated her writing entirely to Christ, vowing to write for Him or about Him.

In Anne's Profession of Faith, she writes, “In 1998 I returned to the Catholic Church… I realized that the greatest thing I could do to show my complete love for Him was to consecrate my work to Him—to use any talent I had acquired as a writer, as a storyteller, as a novelist—for Him and for Him alone... Thence began my journey into intense Biblical study, intense historical research, and intense effort to write novels about the Jesus of Scripture, the Jesus of Faith, in His own vibrant First Century World...”

She has written two books about Jesus Christ, Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt, and Christ the Lord, the Road to Cana. It was the second book that I found in the bargain bin and after I read it I thought it would have been worth the full price.

I had heard that Rice had given up on writing about vampires and in her memoir Called Out of Darkness she explains why. “In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from [God] for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I’d been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him. The reason? It was magnificently simple: He knew how or why everything happened; He knew the disposition of every single soul. He wasn’t going to let anything happen by accident! Nobody was going to go to Hell by mistake.”