Anne Rice and the Catholic Church in an Age of Discontinuity

I was listening the other day to Canadian national radio (CBC). Its Tapestry program interviewed Anne Rice, author of The Vampire Chronicles (Interview with a Vampire was turned into a movie). After many years as an atheist, she recently returned to her Catholic faith. (The Tapestry podcast is of the interview is available for download in .mp3 format.)

I was held by the beauty of her language, the journey that took her so far into darkness searching for bearings after the death of a daughter and the end of all possibility of believing in God. I was struck by the deeply literate ways she described the journey into atheism and its long returning. You can read it in Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. Anne Rice is no naive fool filled with romantic illusions about the church. She’s indwelt church history, so knows its glory and broken humanity. She also knows the philosophies of our time better than most.

The Cutting Edge & the Humour of God

Ever get tired of trite phrases? There are few that get me going. “Cutting edge” is one, “movement” another. In churchland we’ve lots of (in the spirit of Foucault) power words signaling who’s in and who’s out; who’s de guerre (or flavor of the month) and who isn’t.

I think the “cutting edge” is shifting around. I think it’s part of God’s humor — that irritating way the Spirit messes with all the people, systems and ideas we’ve declared no longer ‘in’ and breathes fresh life into old bones so they become the new ‘cutting edge’.

Take the old Anglicans for example. I can claim identity here. As a baby I was carried up the short street we lived on (Burleigh Road South — named after Lord Burleigh, aka, William Cecil, who served kings and queen in the 16th century — a definite misnomer for a non-cutting edge neighborhood like Anfield in Liverpool) to St. Cutherbert’s church (long torn down and replaced by the dull flats of urban, post war renewal) where I was baptized and given a God-parent. Cutherbert was of Lindisfarne fame so, perhaps, that is why the Cutherbert thing stuck.

Seeking a Missional Imagination

There’s been a dis-ease in the back of my mind for a while about the directions of the missional conversation in North America. I’ve written about one: it’s too ecclesiocentric. Most of what I read with missional in its title is about the church and making the church work with new formulas and programs. The missional conversation is about what God is up to in the world; church conversations are a sub-set we’ve turned into the main thing.

Another issue has been hard to put into words; but, yesterday I was reading the New York Times Book Review and saw how to address it. Russell Shorto has just released a new book, Descartes’ Bones. The picture on the cover is intriguing. It shows a headless skeleton. The reason for the image is in the plot of the book, which I won’t give away. Descartes lived in massively turbulent times when the tectonic plates of society were shifting. People were filled with anxiety and the question of God was up for grabs. It was a time, like ours, when established formulas and frameworks failed to address an emerging modernity.