When Reynolds Price comes to town, the conversation quickly turns from fiction to faith. And for good reason. Reynolds Price is a writer who is not afraid to speak out about his religious experiences and convictions and how they have changed his life. Mr. Price refers to himself as an outlaw Christian. Of Protestant faith, he is not a regular churchgoer.REYNOLDS PRICE (Author): And I can't believe God's worried about it. Even I'm not that self-absorbed, that the maker of the Pleiades and black holes really is clocking my church attendance.
BUNYAN: Yet Price experienced a profound vision of being with Christ at Galilee, which sustained him during his illness. I asked him to share his unique perspective as a survivor of cancer who is also a respected writer on religion and spirituality.You have said that you stopped going to church when you were asked to coach Little League. What happened?
Mr. PRICE: I really only said it about half comically, but I have indeed on one or two occasions, probably in my 30s, sort of attempted another relationship with the church and I would immediately get this, "Well, you'll want you to join our Wednesday men's so and so, and we'd love you to coach the boys' soccer team, and you'll certainly want to come to the family supper night and bring your own casserole." And that's really my sense that that's not part of what I want it to be.
BUNYAN: Reynolds Price, now in his mid-60s, says his struggle with and recovery from spinal cancer gave birth to A WHOLE NEW LIFE, the title of one of 14 books he's written since his illness. It chronicles his experience with cancer, including a healing vision of Christ.Mr. PRICE: I was sitting propped up in bed, waiting for someone who was sleeping in another part of the house to come and help me get up, and just suddenly -- and I affirmed that it wasn't a dream, it was another kind of alternate reality that was far realer than any dream that I'd ever had. And just suddenly, I was in a slightly strange place, lying down on a bed of stones by a lake, and around me were -- these various men were asleep, huddled on the ground. And then one of the men stood up and came toward me and then sort of brushed me and beckoned me to follow him to the lake. And because I'd been in Israel for my second visit just a couple of months before -- several months before, I realized that this was the Sea of Galilee and that this man was Jesus.
BUNYAN: This experience had a profound impact on you.
Mr. PRICE: I can't imagine what God thinks he's achieving by having a parent stand and watch the death of a four-year-old child from cancer or leukemia. I can't even begin to try to tell anybody on Earth what that's for. I think I can see what the extraordinary and obviously bearable amount of pain that I suffered was directed on -- turning me into a different kind of communicant, and different kind of communicator with the human race -- and it seems to me it's at least begun to do that. I'm not saying I think God's a sadist, though there are certainly times in every life, it's very hard to think one's not in the hands of a sadist, but it does seem to be -- and, of course, it's not just Christianity, which has figured that out, Judaism and all the other great creeds have known forever that if we're ever to arrive at the state of anything called wisdom, pain seems to be the way we get there.
Mr. PRICE: I'm not interested in literary affects of any sort anymore, I mean, first I didn't -- what I always loved and admired most in great fiction and poetry, which was pure, clear, honestly fallible truth-telling -- not that I know the whole truth about anything on Earth. I do believe that now that I'm in my mid-60s, I've picked up a thing or two that's communicable to the rest of the human race. I think it's one of our duties as human beings to pass on that knowledge in some form to those around us. And a writer or a person working in any of the media, obviously, I think has a literal religious duty to pass that knowledge down.
