In a 1990 interview on NPR's "Fresh Air," Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire shared that she had never experienced anything supernatural. She believed that the claims that others had experienced the supernatural were valid; however, she herself could not be counted among them. I found this strange, dear listeners, that Rice would make this claim, given the fact that she was raised Catholic and surely received Holy Communion during Mass. What is transubstantiation – the turning of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ -- but supernatural? In this same interview, Rice said that she had lost her faith. In 1998, she would reenter the Catholic Church. As a Catholic, I understand that there are two realms – the physical and the spiritual – and that they regularly blend as when we ask saints to intercede for us or when we ask Saint Michael the Archangel to "defend us in battle." On the subject of ghosts, however, Church teaching seems to suggest that these are individuals who somewhere in between the world as we know it at present and the world to come: the afterlife. In fact, I often wonder if this is what purgatory is. Purgatory, after all, is that place some souls go in order to be cleansed of or "purged" of any lingering impurities. Ghosts, in this light, may be the souls of those who, upon dying, still had some leftover issues to work through. These issues prevent the soul from seeing the "light" of God's face, so they stick around for a spell to smooth out the wrinkles of their lives. The very heart posture of a practicing Catholic is such that the lines are open between the two realms. One night, aunt Nelly put a pot of water on the stove for it to boil. She left the kitchen for a moment, but on her return, she found the pot on the floor, water spilled everywhere. Strange, she must have thought. So she filled the pot again and placed it back on the stove. She left the kitchen again and came back to find the same messy scene. This happened so often that the wooden floorboards in front of the stove got damaged, so uncle Gerald had to replace them. He pulled up the water-soaked boards, but before he installed the new boards, he spotted something white in the hole he had made. He reached down and pulled out an object wrapped in white linen, and when he peeled back the cloth, he discovered something horrific: the skeletal remains of a baby. The previous owner had a daughter who got pregnant out of wedlock. Not wanting the baby, she became desperate, so when it was born, she boiled it to death and hid her crime beneath the floorboards. Or the time my grandmother had a dream that her brother, Alvin, was staying in a pretty little cabin at the base of a hill but was not allowed to leave. He was not ready. He had to wait. But why? He shot himself and died leaning against the trunk of a great tree. His reasons were straightforward. His wife had left him, and he had cancer. He was also tired of the nightmares. Alvin had fought at the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Alvin was a man who shouldered a lot of pain, and while his actions can never be justified, it might explain why he had to stay in a pretty little cabin until he was better. Purgatory? Perhaps. One would hope that God's grace was extended to him. You, dear listeners, likely have your own unexplainable tales of the supernatural: disembodied spirits manifesting in the physical world. Remember, though, that you yourself are spirit, though embodied, which means that the spiritual realm is a part of you and you apart of it. So Anne Rice, great writer though she was, was myopic in her thinking about the supernatural. What she claims not to have experienced was all around her, was, indeed, inside her. How much more bold would we be if we simply embraced this fact? The physical is brief; the spiritual is eternal. Practically speaking, then, which language is better for us to invest in learning?
