Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  So, according to Mom, God Ordained and Foreknew that a few of us would be forgiven our Sins because we’d adopt Correct Calvinist Theology and also that in the mid-1880s German gynecologist C. Haase (using Mr. Goodyear’s discovery) would invent a rubber contraceptive device with a handy spring molded into the rim. Therefore, it turned out that God changed His Mind about punishing at least some women by Predestining Protestant women to space their children and if they were Reformed Calvinists, too, He’d also chosen them to be of The Elect—that is, “elected” (chosen) to go to Heaven.

  Thus, my family was fortunate. We were Protestants living after the rubber vulcanization process was invented. That meant that Mom was only punished four times—five if you count her miscarriage—unlike Roman Catholic women who, even after rubber was invented, still got punished dozens of times because the supposedly infallible popes (filling in for Jesus during His unexpectedly long absence) rejected God’s Plan for the Rubber Vulcanization Reprieve.

  Anyway, Mom’s miscarriage loomed large as an example of God changing His Mind. Luckily for me, my parents had “tried again,” as Mom put it, and had me. I was especially lucky because Mom was forty at the time. “I’d never have tried for a fourth child at that age except for the fact I lost your brother and we wanted a son,” Mom said. Though, “luckily” is the wrong word. As Mom always said, “Real Christians don’t believe in ‘luck.’ The Lord is in charge, so we never use that word because it’s a denial of the Sovereignty of God.” So, according to Mom, I should rather say that her losing my brother was providential.

  I always wondered what my older brother was like or, rather, would have been like. My three sisters were all so much older than me. I would have liked any sibling close enough in age to be a friend rather than more like a second mother. Still, I believed that in Heaven everything we can’t understand now would be made clear. For instance, we’d not ever be able to figure out why my older brother was stillborn or even why—when I was two—I’d contracted polio and so had to wear a leg brace. And Mom would explain Dad’s “Many Weaknesses” by saying that she was sure she was supposed to learn something from “putting up with your father but will only really understand what it is, someday.” All these things would be made “clear later, in Heaven, Dear.”

  Heaven was a long way off, and meanwhile I would have liked someone my own age to play with. I never blamed God, though, because I always assumed that any problem I had with the way things were was due to the fact that my “knowledge of the big picture” (as Mom called everything of “eternal significance”) was incomplete and that “only in Heaven will we fully understand” why, for instance, billions of “unsaved” Chinese, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, Episcopalians, United Methodists, Unitarians, Anglicans, and Roman Catholics—even the “wrong sort of Presbyterians”—were going to Hell with no second chance, let alone why my older brother had died.

  Heaven would solve everything. Mom said, “Your bad leg will be perfect in Heaven!” She said that there would be no tears in Heaven. But Mom still cried when she told me about the doctor letting her hold my brother before he “took him away.” And Dad was at his most gentle with Mom when she told and retold the story of the stillbirth, how she was in the little Swiss chalet we were living in back then when the “baby came too early” and how she got on her knees and “prayed and wept before the Lord when the contractions started, but His answer was ‘no’ and He took him.”

  Mom also said that one good thing was that the miscarriage had helped her better understand her mother. “Mother had something worse happen to her,” Mom would say. “Her son died at one year of age when she was in China. They just fed him rice water as ‘medicine’ because this was long before antibiotics, but the poor little boy died. You see he had dysentery. I had to lose your brother before I really understood why Mother cried so hard, even many years later whenever she spoke of this.”

  It was a dreadful and awesome thing to know that even if I couldn’t “fully understand until we get to Heaven,” nevertheless somehow my life was possible because Mom had delivered The Other Baby two months early and he died for me as the doctor “did all he could but failed because God had other ideas—in other words, You, Darling—and besides we weren’t in a hospital.”

  When Mom talked about my older lost brother, she often shed tears. “He had all his fingers and toes,” she’d say. “He was so beautiful. His little face was so sweet! I think he would have been my most beautiful child. His fingers looked as if he’d have been a great pianist, so long and graceful! He had a full head of hair just like you did.”

  My brother was growing up in Heaven instead of with us. Or was he? Did babies in Heaven grow up? My sister Susan said that they all were “the same age as everyone else is in Heaven is,” which, according to her, was thirty-three, the age she said Jesus was when He was resurrected.

  “Mom, Susan says my brother is the same age as Jesus,” my six-year-old self said.

  “Susan can’t know that, Dear. We won’t know those sorts of things until we get to Heaven.”

  “But if he’s still a baby, who will take care of him?”

  “Jesus said that the little children should come to Him so we can be very sure that He is tender with all the little ones.”

  “But he can’t have accepted Jesus because he was too little when he died,” my preoccupied seven-year-old self said.

  “Yes, but he was also taken before the age of accountability, so he hadn’t sinned yet.”

  “Not even by original sin?” the theologically precocious ten-year-old version of me asked.

  “We won’t understand the balance between Free Will and God’s Foreknowledge until . . . ”

  “We get to Heaven,” my thirteen-year-old-smart-ass self muttered while completing Mom’s mantra.

  “Don’t use that tone when talking about the Things of the Lord, Dear! He has a Wondrous Plan for your life, and you know that, even if you are in a temporary state of youthful rebellion,” Mom said.

  She was right. I did know that God and I were inextricably entangled, and I still know that, no matter what the fifty-eight-year-old version of me says that I believe or don’t believe on my agnostic days. And I still know that God will “lead me” in ways that I’ll understand only in Heaven, no matter what I say to the contrary, even when I’m in an atheist frame of mind or when I hold forth to other enlightened people (at least “enlightened” in our own minds) speaking in an we’re-all-too-smart-to-take-anything-at-face-value progressive code that presumes that anyone who disagrees is a backward rube.

  Back to Family Planning Day. It unfolded like this: Mom glanced up from reading Girl of the Limberlost out loud and said, “We space our children.” The “we” she was referring to were all Saved Protestant fundamentalists in general and We Schaeffers in particular. Then Mom whispered, “You see, Dear, they don’t believe in family planning like we do. Those poor Catholics live in such terrible darkness.” Mom looked pityingly at the large family sitting next to our family on the Paraggi-Portofino beach. We’d been curious about the twelve children, their ages ranging from one to twenty (or so), attached to the boisterous “Obviously Very Roman Catholic Family,” as Mom had labeled the overflowing happy tribe lounging on assorted deck chairs.

  The Paraggi beach is a narrow strip of sand about three hundred yards long by twenty yards wide, and when we Schaeffers were vacationing there, two hundred or so deck chairs filled the beach. They were arranged in rows so close together that each chair nearly touched the next. The view of the turquoise bay and gnarled pine trees, stark and dramatic as they clung to the rocky cliffs above the water, was magnificent. Vacationers sat under red-and-blue umbrellas emblazoned with the Martini & Rossi and Campari logos in a sort of seaside version of airplane seating. In Italy, going to the beach was a social occasion shared with people who had no sense of personal space. It was inevitable that in such close proximity we’d spend hours comparing others to our family, mostly unfavorably but also somewhat enviously
. My sisters Susan and Debby were amusing themselves by trying to figure out the Very Roman Catholic children’s ages. Dad, as usual, was ignoring all of us, eschewing deck chairs and lying face down on a towel roasting in the sun while reading back issues of Newsweek and the Sunday School Times.2

  Besides having a dead older brother, I had three very much alive big sisters: petite, ineffably kind, intellectually brilliant, and easily-moved-to-tears-by-the-plight-of-The-Lost Debby, seven years older than me; athletically powerful, almost-as-holy-as- Mom, and incredibly creative Susan, ten years older than me (who later in life would become an enlightened educator and have children who would found wonderful schools); and as-beautiful-as-Mom, always cheerful, sparkling, and lovely Priscilla, fifteen years older than me, who vomited any time she got upset, which was often because Dad had made her work as his secretary from the time she was thirteen and yelled at her when she mixed up the filing of his letters. (Priscilla got married when I was five, and by the time of the Diaphragm Vacation, she was living in St. Louis with her husband, John, who was in seminary.)

  Unlike my sisters, who labored as coworkers in L’Abri from their early teens on, my relationship with my mother was defined by her being either too busy to know that I existed (bedtime stories and Bible stories excepted) and/or so overly solicitous as to virtually crush me in her embrace. You see, my sisters, being much older, had experienced childhood in America and then Switzerland before my parents’ ministry became wildly successful. So they had childhoods approximating “normality” or at least as normal a growing up as the daughters of American fundamentalist missionaries could have been. In other words for better or worse my sisters saw a lot more of Mom and Dad than me. By the time I was six or seven L’Abri was swarming. By the time I was twelve my parents might as well have been overbooked rock stars for all I saw of them. While my grown-up sisters tried to follow our mother’s example in The Work, I seesawed between wonderfully liberating neglect—no school and the freedom to run wild in the Alps while Mom did the Lord’s Work—and Mom’s sporadically hovering to an extent that would have put any proverbial “Jewish mother” to shame.

  While we were walking up and over the lovely winding footpath that led from the beach to the adjoining Portofino bay, I asked Mom what spacing children meant. She motioned to me to slow my pace. We paused and gazed out at the aquamarine sea as it stretched, glittering, to the horizon. Mom always said that “this view is the most beautiful in the world, except for the view of the Pacific Ocean from Big Sur in California, Dear, that I saw as a young girl.” I took a deep breath and was rewarded by what must be the most delicious combination of scents in the world, Big Sur notwithstanding: wild arugula and oregano, Bain de Soleil suntan lotion, gardenia scent wafting from the other side of the old stone wall separating the path from an adjoining estate, a faint hint of garlic and meat frying in olive oil wafting from one of the restaurant kitchens beyond the brow of the hill, balmy salty sea air, pine resin, and, of course, Mom’s ubiquitous Chanel N°5.

  When Dad and my sisters were out of earshot, Mom explained the basics of contraception. This led to (yet another) discussion of how and why God might have chosen me to be born and not my brother, and that ended with (another declaration) that “we’ll never know the answer to that until we’re in Heaven.” A few minutes later Dad and my sisters strolled off to watch a fishing boat unload. Mom marched me up to her hotel room and, like a magician extracting a rabbit from a hat, pulled her diaphragm out of her toiletry case. “Mommy puts this up inside my Special Place so that when Daddy puts his seeds into me,” she said, “this stops them from swimming into Mommy’s womb and fertilizing the precious egg God created.”

  This explanation set my mind on fire with thoughts of just where that actual diaphragm had been, which seems an unforeseen consequence, given my mother’s insistence that all sex “is wrong outside of marriage.” Did my mother really want me zeroing in on Male Vagina Obsession that young? Probably not given that our Puritan ancestors had been “battling the flesh” centuries before we came along and Mom constantly warned her children to beware any temptation that could lead to Sex on the wrong side of the all-important Marriage Bed.

  Mom’s Puritan forebears (on her mother’s side) sailed to America on the second voyage of the Mayflower. To gain passage on the Mayflower, you had to be an upstanding Believer with impeccable and “correct” theological views. And the essence of Puritan correctness was to brood over the Salvation of your Soul and to Worry about whether you were one of The Elect or not.

  I was one with my forefathers when it came to The Worry part. The Worry was ever present, no matter what I thought or hoped I believed. I might have chosen God, but the big question was, had He chosen me? And one big indicator was if my “Flesh,” rather than my “Christ-centered,” nonsexualized self, had the upper hand. If it did, then maybe I hadn’t ever really been Saved or, worse yet, was never elected to begin with!

  Mom’s ancestors (on her father’s side) also sailed to America early in the history of the colonies and were “real Bible-believing Christians,” as Mom would often say. Unlike Dad’s hard-bitten atheist German and “recently immigrated lower-class sadly very secular family,” as she always called them, Mom’s parents followed in the footsteps of her pious forebears. My mother’s great-great-grandparents became wealthy New England bankers, but in the late nineteenth century Mom’s parents renounced The World to serve the Lord and sank into the genteel soul-improving penury that’s the “gift” given those who “give up everything for the Lord.” In other words, my maternal grandparents were “called” as missionaries to China.

  My mother, Edith Rachel Merritt Seville, was born November 3, 1914, in Wenzhou, China. She was the fourth child of George and Jessie Seville, who were serving in the China Inland Mission. Mom’s parents gave her the Chinese name Mei Fuh, meaning “beautiful happiness.” Mom’s sisters were carted off to a mission boarding school, and one of them later joined the American Communist Party. The other married a mental patient who tried to kill her.

  After serving as missionaries for many years, Mom’s parents left China in 1920 and sailed back to America, along with Mom and her two older sisters. “We had no money, but ours was not a poverty of spirit,” Mom often said, then added, “Not only did Mother and Father know and serve the Lord; my lovely parents were educated, refined, and spoke five languages. Their knowledge of art and literature just goes to show that you can be faithful to Christ, believe that every word of the Bible is true—which it is!—and be cultured too! Their only mistake was sending my sisters off to mission schools, and that meant they only saw Mother and Father once a year. The schools were very strict.”

  Mom was (and is) extraordinarily beautiful. She had a “Mediterranean Italian Jewish look,” as my sister Debby once said, jet black hair, large sparkling dark brown eyes, a radiant smile, and a petite hourglass figure. But as if that weren’t enough, my mother also possessed so much natural energy as to make all those around her seem sedentary and earthbound.

  When Mom was alone with us, she presented Dad to her children as her number one “cross” to bear as well as the “love of my life.” It wasn’t so much a “love/hate” relationship as a love/pity relationship. Mom was helping Dad improve and helping her children to understand that this was, as it were, her solo ministry within their joint ministry to The Lost. She said that she loved Dad, but also that my father had no sense of humor, a terrible temper, and “no taste in clothes.” She would complain that he “never plays with you children,” “doesn’t read for pleasure,” “shouts when he preaches,” “hasn’t ever bought you children a present even though he always wants me to sign every card on the gifts from us both,” “can’t cook or even boil water,” and “made this bruise on my arm when he punched me last night.”

  But Fran did “give up everything for the Lord” and also “stood up to Theological Liberalism,” which (for Mom) seemed to outweigh his many “Weaknesses.” Mom also said Dad was a passionate lov
er. “Which,” as my sister Susan dryly remarked to me many years later, “was a lot more than we needed to know.”

  An Edith Schaeffer cult (made up of mostly born-again middle-class white American women) grew up around Mom’s books after she began to be published in the late 1960s. I’ve met countless women who say that they raised their children “according to Edith Schaeffer.” Of course, what they mean is that they raised their families according to the “Edith Schaeffer” fantasies they encountered in her books.

  Mom went so far as to write several best-sellers with titles like What Is A Family? though our actual family was a model of dysfunction. However Mom was no hypocrite. She was just forgiving. The image of Schaeffer family happiness she painted in her books and talks was motivated by her genuine missionary desire to present us as “an example to The Lost.” And most of our family’s dysfunction was the result of my father’s Moods, or as Mom put it, “Fran’s Temper” and/or “Fran’s Many Weaknesses.”

  Mom always seemed able to keep the reality of Fran’s Many Weaknesses isolated from Dad, as if they existed on their own and weren’t really part of the man she had married. Rather, they were caused by some wicked visitor who broke into our home from time to time and made Dad do bad things. So I grew up loving my father but being afraid of him when he became the raging portal for that other visitor. Somehow my mother never wrote off the man she’d married, even though she was openly critical of him in petty ways, not to mention running down that “other visitor,” who, with frightening regularity, invaded the good man she loved.

  Dad, Francis August Schaeffer, was born on January 30, 1912, and died on May 15, 1984. When Dad died, President Ronald Reagan wrote this note to Mom:While words are inadequate to console you on your loss, you can take comfort in knowing that Dr. Schaeffer will be greatly missed by all who knew him and his work. He will long be remembered as one of the great Christian thinkers of our century, with a childlike faith and a profound compassion toward others. It can rarely be said of an individual that his life touched many others and affected them to the better. It will be said of Dr. Schaeffer that his life touched many and brought them to the truth of their Creator. In June of 1982, Francis last wrote to me and enclosed a copy of an address he had just given which described in moving terms that “final reality” which is God. Dr. Schaeffer drew all his strength and spirit from that source and shared that message with a waiting world. Now he has found his final home . . .