Book Review #8 – “The Road to Cana” by Anne Rice
Book Review #8 – “The Road to Cana by Anne Rice; published 2008, Random House Publishers. [this is Book Two of her Two-Part series “Christ the Lord“; Book One is “Out of Egypt” published 2005].
“James, don’t you understand what I want? I come to bring the Face of the Lord – to the whole wide world! The Face of the Lord I mean to bring to all.” (Road to Cana, p. 239).
Genre of the Book. How would a reader describe this book? Most would call it historical fiction, while she simply referred to it as a novel. Soon after returning to her Catholic roots, while sitting in a church pew, novelist Anne Rice was struck forcefully by one thought… “I think Jesus wants me to tell his story.” Later, she called her work a “realistic fictional portrait of Our Lord in Time,” and described her “Christ the Lord” series as “rooted in the faith that the Creator of the Universe became human in the person of Jesus Christ and dwelt among us… In these two novels the magnificent mystery of the Incarnation is accepted and affirmed as fact.” During her epiphany in that church pew, she was inspired to “write the Life of Jesus Christ. So I consecrated the book to Christ. I entirely consecrated my writing and vowed to write only for the greater glory of God.” Essentially, Anne Rice believed that “Jesus is who he says he is in the Gospels,” and decided to base her novel on the truth and reality of Christ.
Overview of the Life of Anne Rice (1941-2021). Her life story reads like a dramatic novel loaded with unexpected twists and turns, unpredictable ups and down, mournful tragedies and triumphant joys. She seemed deeply conflicted most of her life while also at times able to embrace a deep faith in God. She undoubtedly quoted often enough to herself from the gospel story, “I believe, help my unbelief.” Her prolific writing career included 28 published books with over 100 million copies sold, and so was one of the most popular authors in the modern era.
1941. Rice was born in New Orleans and raised there in a devout Irish Catholic family. They attended daily Mass, she attended Catholic schools and confirmed in the RC church at twelve years old, and she remembers creeping around in the dark hand in hand with her father as together they visited famous cemeteries.
1959. While attending the U. of Texas, she became a committed theist, explaining her decision this way… “My background was so sheltered it didn’t seem to fit with the modern world. I felt I had to deal with my faith and reconcile it with the world around me. I felt when I accepted a world without God, I accepted reality and stopped believing in an illusion.”
1961-1993. She married the love of her life, Stan Rice, who she described as a “passionate atheist”, and five years later their one and only daughter died of Leukemia. In her grief she started her first novel, “Interview With A Vampire,” which reflected her “misery in being cut off from God and from salvation, and my being lost in a world without light.” She commented later that, “Grief has shaped everything I have written.” She then composed one vampire novel after another for her “Vampire Chronicles” series. These Vampire years were spent, in her words, “groping in the dark, without being aware that they reflected my quest for meaning in a world without God.” She then wrote a series of books that were described as Gothic fiction, supernatural thrillers, and erotic literature that bordered on explicit pornography.
1993. Anne began to revisit the possibility of God’s existence, for a fascinating reason… “I stumbled upon a mystery without a solution, a mystery so immense that I gave up trying to find an explanation because the whole mystery defied belief. The mystery was the survival of the Jews. I couldn’t understand how these people had endured as the great people who they were. It was that mystery that drew me back to God. It set into motion the idea that there may in fact be God. And when that happened there grew in me for whatever reason an immense desire to return to the banquet table.”
1993-1998. Finally, after many years of intense soul searching, she found a priest who would hear her Confession so she could be reconciled to her Church and to God Himself. Through that sacrament, Anne returned to full participation in the Catholic Church. She suffered a near death experience in ’98 from a diabetic coma and at that time “fully surrendered to God” She concluded then that “If Christ knew everything, I did not have to know everything, and in seeking to know everything, I’d been, all my life, missing the entire point.” Rice then spent many years in constant, intense Bible study and diving into every work of biblical scholarship she could get her hands on.
2002. Her beloved husband died in ’02 and she continued her commitment to the Church and to her biblical research. She soon had her “born again” experience sitting in her church pew, vowing to write the life story of Christ. After even more years of biblical study and theological research, particularly concerning the Gospels, she published her first novel about Jesus in 2005, “Out of Egypt.”
2008. Anne published her second novel in her series on the story of Christ, “The Road to Cana,” with the intention of eventually writing a trilogy. She was never able to complete that series.
2010-2021. Two years after publishing The Road to Cana she announced to the world that she was “quitting Christianity” and the organized Church over her deeply felt disagreements with their official positions on various social issues. Despite declaring herself a “secular humanist” she was adamant about her fervent commitment to Jesus in her private life, and that her “anger and confusion” with the Church did not keep her from believing Christianity’s core doctrines. She declared her continued love of the Person of Jesus. She died of a stroke, a brain hemorrhage, at 80 years old. She kept these words on her website until her dying day… “Stretch your wings over us, Lord, and let us fly under them.”
My Thoughts on Anne Rice’s Faith in the End. I think in the end Anne married Jesus but didn’t like her in-laws. She kept her love for her spiritual spouse while trying to move as far away as possible from Christ’s Church family. After her attempts to get along with Christ’s family and remain united with them, she apparently decided there were irreconcilable differences and felt that she needed to cut off communication with them while remaining with Christ. It seems that her love for Jesus continued to grow to the end, despite her unfortunate fracture from His Body the Church.
Jesus the Narrator of the Story. It’s interesting to read a novel in which the main character is Jesus and He speaks in the first person throughout the story. Anne Rice spoke as if she was inside Christ’s head and could speak for Him. Really interesting. The story starts when Jesus ws thirty years old in Nazareth, was formally named Yeshua bar Joseph, was referred to as Yeshua, and respectfully named around town as Yeshua the Sinless. There were those, though, who referred to Jesus as the village fool. He was in his father’s business, becoming adept at the building trades such as carpentry, stone masonry, bricklaying and laying down marble flooring. At the start of the story, Jesus asked a rhetorical question, “Who is Christ the Lord?” Then he answered it… “I am Christ the Lord. I know. What I must know, I know. And what I must learn, I learn.”
Some Favorite Highlights from the Book. These defining moments in Christ’s life came after some inner turmoil. “Never had I so needed to be alone, pleasing as it was to be amid such frank and innocent happiness. I walked. I walked at evening through the hills; I walked to Cana and back and walked as far as I could and sometimes made my way home under heavy darkness, my mantle wrapped tight around me, my fingers freezing. I didn’t care how cold I was. I didn’t care how tired I was. I had one purpose and that was to wear myself out so that I could sleep without dreams, and thereby somehow endure the pain I felt. It was a terrible restlessness, a sense again that all that happened around me was somehow a sign to me.” (pgs. 149-150).
At The Baptism of Christ. “I moved up in front of John bar Zechariah. He stood frozen, staring at me. I looked at him – at his rugged frame, the hair matted to his chest, the dark camel-skin cloak half covering him. I saw his eyes fixed on mine. They were glazed, his eyes. I held up my hands. “We’re made in His image, you and I,” I said. “This is flesh, is it not? Am I not a man? Baptize me as you’ve done everyone else; do this, in the name of righteousness. I went down into the water. I felt his hand on my left shoulder. I felt his fingers close on my neck. I saw nothing and felt nothing and heard nothing but the cool flooding water, and then slowly I came up out of it, and stood, shocked by the flood of sunlight. The clouds above had shifted. The sound of beating wings filled my ears. I stared forward and saw across John’s face the shadow of a dove moving upward -and then I saw the bird itself rising into a great opening of deep blue sky, and I heard a whisper against my ears, a whisper that penetrated the sound of the wings, as though a pair of lips had touched both ears at the same time, and faint as it was, soft and secretive as it was, it seemed the edge of an immense echo… ‘This is My Son, this is My Beloved.'”
At the Temptation of Christ. This scene in chapter 22 is a masterpiece. I can’t do it full justice unless I quote the entire passage, but I’ll try to offer a taste of its power with some excerpts… “I turned around. He was about my height, and beautifully garbed, more like the figure of the King. He wore a linen tunic, embroidered with a border of green leaves and ref flowers, each little floret glistening with gold thread. The border of his white mantle was even thicker, richer, woven as the mantles of the Priests are woven, and hung even with tiny gold bells. His sandals were covered with gleaming buckles. And around his waist he wore a thick leather girdle studded with bronze points, as a soldier might wear. Indeed a sword in a jeweled scabbard hung at his side. A shock spread over my face, and then all of my skin. He was my duplicate, except I’d never seen myself in such attire. “You see, he began, “I’m aware of your particular delusion. You don’t hold yourself to be a mere prophet or a holy man, like your cousin John. You think you’re the Lord Himself…. But I know you’re hungry, dreadfully hungry. So hungry you’d do almost anything to have something to eat. Now if you are a holy man of God,” he said, catching up with me, and walking alongside me, staring at me eye to eye when I glanced at him, “and we’ll forget the delusion for the moment that you’re the Creator of the Universe, then surely you can turn these stones, any of them here, into warm bread. And you do claim to be a holy one of God? Son of God? Beloved Son? Do it. Make the stones bread.”… “And you do so love to have your name mentioned, don’t you?” I said. “Beelzebub,” I said. “Is that your favorite?” I said it in Greek, ‘Lord of the Flies.” He said, ‘”I loathe that name!” “Well what name could ever rescue you from the chaos that’s your very purpose?” I asked…. I then felt myself drawn upwards with spectacular speed and suddenly another roar, more familiar and immense, surrounded me, and I stopped short at the edge of the parapet of the Temple in Jerusalem. “Look on all this,” he said beside me. “And why should I? I asked. “It’s not really there.” “No? You don’t believe it? You think it’s an illusion?” “You’re full of illusions and lies,” I said. “Then fling yourself down! Now, from this height. Fling yourself down into that crowd. We’ll see if it’s an illusion. Throw yourself down! I say, Do it, and let the angels sweep you up.”… He said, “Pay heed to me, fool. I’m running out of patience. Nothing is done here without me. Nothing. Not the simplest victory is accomplished unless I’m part of it. And this is my world, and these are all my nations. Will you not get down on your knees and worship me!” “Those aren’t your nations,” I said. “The kingdoms of this world aren’t yours. They never were.” “Of course they’re mine,” he said. It was almost a hiss. “I am the ruler of this world and I always have been. I am its Prince. Worship me,” he said gently, beguilingly, “and I will show you what is mine. I will give you the victory of which your prophets sang.” “The Lord on High is the One whom I worship, and no one else,” I said. “You know this, you know it with every lie you speak. And you, you rule nothing and you never have. I’d laugh at you if you weren’t so unspeakable. You’re the Prince of the Lie!” “You stupid miserable little village prophet!” he said. “They’ll laugh you out of Nazareth!” “It is the Lord God who rules,” I said. “And He always has. You are nothing, and you have nothing and rule nothing.” “Stop it, I demand that you stop!” he shouted. He put his hands up over his ears. “It’s I who came to stop you!” I responded. “I will destroy your Fabled Rule, as I destroy you – as I drive you out, stamp you out, blot you out!” “You’ll curse the day you refused me!” he shouted behind me. “You’ll die on a Roman cross if you try to do this without me!” he said. I stopped and faced him. “Get behind me, Satan,” I said. “Get behind me!”
At the Wedding in Cana. “My mother came to me, and put her hand on my arm. I saw panic in her eyes. I looked into her eyes. How urgently she implored me. I bent down and laid my hand on the back of her neck. “Woman?” I asked gently. “What has this to do with you and me?” I shrugged. I whispered, “My hour hasn’t come.” She drew back slowly. She looked up at me for a long moment with the most curious expression on her face, a combination of mock scolding and then placid trust. She turned to Uncle Cleopas and put her hand gently on his shoulder, and gazing up at me out of the corner of her eye, she said to Cleopas, “Brother, tell my son the commandment. He has lately received the blessing of his father. Remind him. ‘Honor your father and your mother.’ Are those not the words?” I smiled. I bent to kiss her forehead. She lifted her chin slightly, eyes soft, but withholding her smile. My mother pointed to me as she addressed the servants: “Do whatever he tells you to do.” Now her face was gentle and natural, and she looked up at me and she smiled as a child might smile.”