via Heading East
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Art Review | 'Pen and Parchment' Those Medieval Monks Could Draw
By ROBERTA SMITH
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Well: Is Your Ab Workout Hurting Your Back?
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"Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession," by Anne Rice.
Knopf. 2008.
Rice gave faithful fans fits when she concluded her lengthy vampire
saga with series hero Lestat searching for sainthood and followed
up with carefully orthodox biographical novels about Jesus. Now she
eloquently explains the life change that shaped those books: her
return to Catholicism. First, however, she limns the early-life
faith she hoped to resume and the long exile from it that began, so
typically, in college and continued until late middle age. She
expansively recalls the cohesion and beauty that regular mass
attendance, Catholic schooling, and community observance of the
panoply of Christian festivals bestowed on her New Orleans
childhood and adolescence. Much more tersely but no less
consequentially, she asserts the satisfaction of her thoroughly
faithful 41-year marriage to the poet Stan Rice (1942-2002). About
her long period of unbelief, she is even briefer, though she
retrospectively interprets her vampires and witches as sad
unbelievers still desperately striving for transcendence and grace,
as she was. Coming home to New Orleans in 1989 preceded coming home
to the church in 1996, and full realization of revived faith came
with the decision to write for God. As plainly written as a Quaker
spiritual journal, Rice's confession of faith will impress many who
wouldn't think of reading vampire romances--and possibly many who
read little else.
--Ray Olson, Amazon. com review
*Testing the limits of tolerance on a psychic’s new book.
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They Ask: Is God, Too, Lonely?
Carl SandburgWhen God scooped up a handful of dust,
And spit on it, and molded the shape of man,
And blew breath into it and told it to walk—
That was a great day.
And did God do this because he was lonely?
Did God say to Himself he must have company
And therefore he would make a man to walk the earth
And set apart churches for speech and song with God?
These are questions.
They are scrawled in old caves.
They are painted in tall cathedrals.
There are men and women so lonely they believe
God, too, is lonely.
from Harvest Poems 1910-1960; Harvest Books 1960*
What Makes a Great Bartender?
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