Day Six on IWTV: Louis's first kill

Lestat's instructions for hunting and feeding felt to Louis crude, clumsy and rushed. But as Louis finally succumbed into the kill, his description of the experience was a lot like what humans feel when in love! This one of the beautiful deviations Anne Rice's vampires made in all of Goth literature. A lot of today's writers tried to follow suit and romanticized the vampire after this landmark novel.

Rice's vampires are dark, tragic, and romantic. They are not mindless predators. Louis's first kill was chilling, brutal, and intriguing (they attacked a bunch of men and that was erotic), but it also is sacred, akin to deep intimacy of sex, though resulting in the death of the victim and animation of the vampire. For Louis, the result also was his damnation.

I feel really lonely today. That's the truth. I wonder if all creatures under heaven are damned to feel lonely and only have snatching glimpses of scintillating happiness in their lives. All that ache. Louis found out that after his first kill he had a deep respect for life and beauty, and this tears him up inside, because he has become that which takes away life. Can there be beauty in darkness? Maybe. But very few minds are ready to explore it. Doesn't it seem that stars are brighter when no city lamps compete with their light? And yet they too seem lonely in that Great Expanse.

Last Sunday we were taught to fix our eyes on Jesus. How to do that, they didn't say. They said don't look to people or circumstances because they are bound to fail you. Look to Jesus. Where is He? I cannot see Jesus with physical eyes. I can read about Him in the Gospels, hear about Him in the lives of people. How do I fix my eyes on Him? Isn't He inside me? Do I look inward, as in meditation?

At church last Sunday the minister also said that all I do offered to God from my heart becomes sacred. Even after years of church and the blessing of a beautiful family I still have a hole in my heart. I wake up and it is there. I cannot deny it any further. I have asked Jesus before to come in, and it--the gaping hole--is still there. Though now it seems I have a Companion to share it with.

I wonder if the Messiah came not so much as to medicate pain but to be with us intimately in the face or midst of pain and loss. He has suffered on this earth, too, like any human being. I identify most with the Human Christ, the Suffering Christ, than with all the songs of victory belted at church last Sunday: "Everything will be all right `cause we're on the winning side." Honestly, there's very little poetry in most worship songs these days. It's sickening.

We did sing a song that talks about choosing still to just worship, and that song was full of truth and meaning. And so is my favorite Blessed Be Your Name.

There is so much to learn through all the joys and sorrows of life. Louis said, "If I were to maximize every experience available to me, I must exert my own powers over my learning." Then he said in a setting of a beautiful gallery of jasmines and wisteria and fresh rain and a large moon, "I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another." I think this is beautiful.

I want to learn God. I want to know God's Presence and Love. I want to delicately and reverently come to understand that three things will last forever--faith, hope, and love--and the greatest of these is love.

Day Three, IWTV: Louis's conversion

I forgot myself. I forgot myself totally.

Those were the mortal Louis's overwhelming thoughts when he encountered the supernatural creature that is the vampire. He said his past "shrank to embers."

This experience is almost akin, in fact, almost perfectly describes, my conversion to Christianity when I was twelve. I grew up as a Sunday School kid. My parents separated when I was six, and since then, my uncle Albert and aunt Wilma had taken me to church every Sunday. I enjoyed the stories, but that was all they were to me: stories. Fantastical, adventurous, but having no more real value than say Jack and the Beanstalk or Puss in Boots. All these stories anyway amounted to one moral for the young boy: be good and obedient.

Then one summer, in Laguna, someone shared the Gospel to me, and the clouds parted in my mind and my heart cracked open. I realized God loved me, and expressed it undeniably through the Man Jesus Christ. All those stories in the Bible taught me in Sunday School: Moses crossing the Red Sea, David defeating the giant Goliath, all of them pointed to Jesus' love, birth, sacrifice, death, and resurrection. I was reduced to nothing. I made a decision to embrace Christ.

I guess it was opposite for Anne Rice at the time. In the biographies of her, we learn that she turned to secular humanist atheism in college, having grown up Catholic. And I think she expressed the same feeling in this scene of Louis's transformation into the vampire. Isn't it curious that the feelings surrounding the separate experiences are the same? Two different conversions, both resulting into the death of ego.

I always return to that moment when my faith runs dry. And also at the story of my baptism, which is a story for another blog entry. And my near-death at the floods of Ondoy. God always saving, God always loving.

Louis cherished his last sunrise before he became a vampire. He was going to lose the light. I, on the other hand, grew up to be a teenager and realized I lost the dark. The music of the Smashing Pumpkins, whose poetry I loved were denied to me. So were Anne Rice's books that had the words vampire, damned, devil, thief and witching on them. I never smoked or drank. I tried to be obedient. But internally I rebelled.

In college I broke free from all shackles and read the novels I wanted and smoked. I was expelled from the catholic university because they found bottles of liquor in my bag, put there by my classmates. I went all crazy. I thought why did I convert to Christianity so young? Why don't I have the stories of ex-drug addicts, or ex-prostitutes who tasted the dark before coming to Christ? Why was I to be denied all these worldly pleasures?

Louis's transformation into the vampire was physical. He was to have a body that would have powers no human being could have. But his soul... did it change? That was his burning question for the rest of the book, and highly worth examining.

When I converted to Christianity, there was no heavenly lights falling down on me. The world felt utterly the same. But inside I felt cleaned, loved, treasured, assured. Writing about this now as a thirty-three year-old man, I think, what happened? How come I lost all of that? I might not have changed physically dramatically like Louis turning into a vampire, but my inside was changed. I became, in the words of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, a new creation. Am I less loved and treasured today than that first day? Surely not! For God is faithful and continued to love me in spite of my many rebellions through adolescence and young adulthood, and even in my 30s.

For us Protestants, the proof of commitment to our new faith was through certain rituals: prayer of acceptance and repentance, baptism. Both symbolized the death of the old self and the rebirth of the spirit. We were to study Scripture and continually meet with fellow Christians. For Louis, the proof of commitment Lestat required of him was for him to witness the death of his plantation overseer. Louis had a reverence for life which, he said, never went away even though he became a vampire. Why is death always a part of any ritual of conversion, whether symbolic (as in baptism) or actual (as in Lestat's killing)? These are mysteries of life I would not know. Life and death seem to be deeply ingrained into the very fabric of our universe.