Road to Cana

I'm up for leadership at the monthly book group at St. Paul's this Saturday morning. I get to choose the book without any criteria and this time I decided on a novel by the vampire queen Anne Rice. Rice returned to the Roman Catholicism of her early days, although she has since left that denomination because she can't abide its stances on homosexuality and women.

No vampires on Saturday though. We will be discussing The Road to Cana which is Rice's imaginative portrait of the adult Jesus. Her first novel on Christ's life, Out of Egypt, was about his childhood and it was okay, in my opinion, but not great. Road to Cana is better, more thought-provoking. Rice is good at interweaving here interpretation of the "gaps" in the limited narrative we get from the gospels with the story as told in the New Testament. The gospels were never intended to be biographies, so most of what we find there focuses on the roughly three years of Jesus' ministry with very little of the rest of his 33-year life. Even those estimates of  ministry and lifespan are really that --estimates.

Rice's portrayal of Jesus' encounter with Satan in the wilderness is quite unusual and readable.

There is still time to read the novel (it isn't heavy) so please join us. Have you read it, or Rice's other Jesus novel? Do you wish the gospels had given us more of Jesus' life story? Are you coming to the conversation? Free breakfast!