Rice for Easter

Apropos my Friday post about Anne Rice and her Jesus books, here's part of an essay she contributed that same day to OnFaith, a joint website of the Washington Post and Newsweek. If you prefer, you can read the entire essay here. Happy Easter:

Anne Rice
My Trust in My Lord

Look: I believe in Him. It’s that simple and that complex. I believe in Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the God Man who came to earth, born as a tiny baby and then lived over thirty years in our midst. I believe in what we celebrate this week: the scandal of the cross and the miracle of the Resurrection. My belief is total. And I know that I cannot convince anyone of it by reason, anymore than an atheist can convince me, by reason, that there is no God.

A long life of historical study and biblical research led me to my belief, and when faith returned to me, the return was total. It transformed my existence completely; it changed the direction of the journey I was traveling through the world. Within a few years of my return to Christ, I dedicated my work to Him, vowing to write for Him and Him alone. My study of Scripture deepened; my study of New Testament scholarship became a daily commitment. My prayers and my meditation were centered on Christ.

And my writing for Him became a vocation that eclipsed my profession as a writer that had existed before.

Why did faith come back to me? I don’t claim to know the answer. But what I want to talk about right now is trust. Faith for me was intimately involved with love for God and trust in Him, and that trust in Him was as transformative as the love.

Right now as I write this, our nation seems to be in some sort of religious delirium. Anti-God books dominate the bestseller lists; people claim to deconstruct the Son of Man with facile historical treatments of what we know and don’t know about Jesus Christ who lived in First Century Judea. Candidates for public office have to declare their faith on television. Christians quarrel with one another publicly about the message of Christ.

Before my consecration to Christ, I became familiar with a whole range of arguments against the Savior to whom I committed my life. In the end I didn’t find the skeptics particularly convincing, while at the same time the power of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John swept me off my feet.

And above all, when I began to talk to Jesus Christ again it was with trust.

On the afternoon in 1998 when faith returned, I experienced a sense of the limitless power and majesty of God that left me convinced that He knew all the answers to the theological and sociological questions that had tormented me for years. I saw, in one enduring moment, that the God who could make the Double Helix and the snow flake, the God who could make the Black holes in space, and the lilies of the field, could do absolutely anything and must know everything --- even why good people suffer, why genocide and war plague our planet, and why Christians have lost, in America and in other lands, so much credibility as people who know how to love. I felt a trust in this all-knowing God; I felt a sudden release of all my doubts. Indeed, my questions became petty in the face of the greatness I beheld. I felt a deep and irreversible assurance that God knew and understood every single moment of every life that had ever been lived, or would be lived on Earth. I saw the universe as an immense and intricate tapestry, and I perceived that the Maker of the tapestry saw interwoven in that tapestry all our experiences in a way that we could not hope, on this Earth, to understand.

This was not a joyful moment for me. It wasn’t an easy moment. It was an admission that I loved and believed in God, and that my old atheism was a façade. I knew it was going to be difficult to return to the Maker, to give over my life to Him, and become a member of a huge quarreling religion that had broken into many denominations and factions and cults worldwide. But I knew that the Lord was going to help me with this return to Him. I trusted that He would help me. And that trust is what under girds my faith to this day.
. . . .
As we experience Easter week, we celebrate the crucifixion that changed the world. We celebrate the Resurrection that sent Christ’s apostles throughout the Roman Empire to declare the Good News. We celebrate one of the greatest love stories the world has ever known: that of a God who would come down here to live and breathe with us in a human body, who would experience human death for us, and then rise to remind us that He was, and is, both Human and Divine. We celebrate the greatest inversion the world has ever recorded: that of the Maker dying on a Roman cross.

Let us celebrate as well that throughout this troubled world in which we live, billions believe in this 2,000-year-old love story and in this great inversion -- and billions seek to trust the Maker to bring us to one another in love as He brings us to Himself.

Anne Rice is the best-selling author of 27 books, including "The Vampire Chronicles" and "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt."

Would You Vote for a Mormon?

I have no affection for the Mormon church. I think Mormonism is a false religion, and assuredly not Christian.

Which leaves me no fan of Mitt Romney. And thinking there's no way I'd vote for him for president. But a recent opinion piece by Michael Gerson in the Washington Post has set me to thinking: maybe my aversion to Romney is misplaced. Here's an excerpt from Gerson:

There is a long tradition of American leaders who believe that religion is so personal it shouldn't even affect their private lives. But this rigid separation between religious conviction and public policy lies outside the main current of American history. Abraham Lincoln's theology, while hardly orthodox, was not his "own private affair." "Nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness," he asserted, "was sent into the world to be trodden on." Martin Luther King Jr. claimed that to find the source of our rights, "it is necessary to move back behind the dim mist of eternity, for they are God-given."

These were theological arguments, not merely rhetorical adornments. But they were also carefully limited.

American political leaders have generally not talked about soteriology -- how the individual soul is saved. In Christian theology, these choices are fundamentally private, and government attempts to influence them are both doomed and tyrannical. American leaders have also wisely avoided the topic of eschatology -- inherently speculative theories about the end or culmination of history.

But religious convictions on the topic of anthropology-- the nature and value of men and women -- have profoundly and positively influenced American history. Many of the greatest advances toward the protection of minority rights, from the abolition of slavery to the civil rights movement, came in part because people of faith pushed for them. And religious men and women made those efforts because they were convinced that all human beings -- not just all believers -- are created in God's image.

So what does this mean for Romney? Many Christians have serious problems with Mormon theology on personal salvation and the nature of history -- disputes that go much deeper than those between, say, Baptists and Presbyterians. These disagreements are theologically important. But they are not politically important, because they are unrelated to governing.

Romney, however, should not make [John F.] Kennedy's mistake and assert that all religious beliefs are unrelated to politics. What Mormonism shares with other religious traditions is a strong commitment to the value and dignity of human beings, including the unborn, the disabled and the poor. This conviction is unavoidably political, because it leads men and women to act in the cause of justice, not in order to impose their religion, but to protect the weak.

Given this common ground, evangelicals and other religious conservatives should not disqualify Romney from the outset. There may be other reasons to oppose him for president, but his belief about the destiny of the soul is not one of them.

What do you think?

Finally, Something of Interest in the Sports Section

An important dispatch from the Washington Post about the Washington Nationals baseball team:

Reliever Jesus Colome remained in a hospital yesterday with an infection on his right buttock, though GM Jim Bowden said he would get out today. The Nationals don't know when Colome, 4-0 with a 2.76 ERA in 40 appearances, will be able to pitch. "It's a serious situation," Bowden said. "We pray for his buttocks and his family."

Guess they're taking 1 Thessalonians 5.23 literally. If the prayer is answered, does that mean we can say that God saved his a**?

Elimination, Selective Reduction, Deletion - Murder?

If you can read this GetReligion post without being repulsed and at least a little sick, then you deserve my admiration or pity. The Washington Post article it's mostly about discusses the murder of selected fetuses when the mother is carrying more than one at a time. Pregnant with 3, but only have room at home for 2 more? There are doctors who can help you with that.

It's astonishing to me that the Washington Post would run an article such as this, which hardly helps to forward the pro-choice agenda. Here's an excerpt that gives you an idea of what you're getting into:

Evans prepared two syringes, swabbed Emma with antiseptic, put the square-holed napkin on her stomach. Then he plunged one of the needles into Emma’s belly and began to work his way into position. He injected the potassium chloride, and B, the first fetus to go, went still.

“There’s no activity there,” he said, scrutinizing the screen. B was lying lengthwise in its little honeycomb chamber, no longer there and yet still there. It was impossible not to find the sight affecting. Here was a life that one minute was going to happen and now, because of its location, wasn’t. One minute, B was a fetus with a future stretching out before it: childhood, college, children, grandchildren, maybe. The next minute, that future had been deleted.

Evans plunged the second needle into Emma’s belly. “See the tip?” he said, showing the women where the tip of the needle was visible on the ultrasound screen. Even I could see it: a white spot hovering near the heart. D was moving. Evans started injecting. He went very slowly. “If you inject too fast, you blow the kid off your needle,” he explained.

If a nation ever deserved God's judgment, isn't it ours?

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(Please read the whole GetReligion post here.)

Context Matters

This linked article from The Washington Post is way too long; the reporter needed a better editor. But the article does raise a valuable point. Context matters.

Here's what happened: Joshua Bell played his violin in a Washington, DC subway station. Joshua Bell is not your standard street musician, however. He's one of the world's most famous violinists. He sells out concert halls where seats go for $100 a pop. His Stradivarius violin was made in 1713 and is valued at $3.5 million+. He gets paid as much as $1,000 a minute for his performances.

He played for 43 minutes. During that time, 1,097 people walked by. How many people stopped to listen for at least one minute? Seven. How much money did the passersby drop into his violin case? $32.17. How many people recognized him? One. How many clapped at the end of each piece he played? None.

Context matters.

We see what we look for, and we accept what we're prepared for. In the process, we shortchange others, and we get shortchanged, ourselves. The implications of this (sociological, anthropological, theological, cultural, relational, . . . ) are endless. Here's just one:

"He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
He came to that which was his own,
but his own did not receive him."
(Isaiah 53.2b-3; John 1.11)

He wasn't recognized. He was out of context. Where do we fail to see him today?

(You can read the complete Joshua Bell story here. The article also contains some good video.)