Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  “Mom?” I asked just as my bedroom door was closing.

  “Yes, dear?” Mom answered, opening the door just wide enough to pop her head back into the room.

  “Mom, if monkey serum cured me, then maybe it proves we really are evolved from monkeys.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, dear.”

  “But would lizard blood have worked?”

  “It wasn’t blood, dear, and you are just trying to tease me.”

  “I’m not, Mom. I’ve been thinking about my polio, and I really do think that maybe this proves the atheists are right.”

  “I hope you are joking,” said Mom, opening the door a little wider.

  “No, I really do think that maybe we should change what we believe, because it looks like my treatment proves evolution.”

  Mom stepped back into the room and turned on the light so she could read the expression on my face, tell if I was serious or not. She gave me a hard look and sighed.

  “You might be joking and you might think this is funny, but you are coming awfully close to joking about things we never joke about.”

  “Monkeys?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean! We don’t joke about the Things of The Lord! Now good night, dear!”

  Mom flicked off the light, turned, and took a step back and started to close the door.

  “I think this means that Darwin is right.”

  “I said good night, dear!” Mom said through the door.

  “And I think Dad should change what he teaches about creation!”

  The door opened. Mom was standing there with her hands on her hips.

  “Now you really are being absurd!”

  “No, I am not. Dad says that Christianity is so true that if anyone can show it isn’t true, that he’ll give up his faith!”

  “Well, the Bible is true, and you know that!”

  “But I have monkey blood in me, so I’ve become a missing link!” I said, as I lost my struggle and burst into laughter.

  Mom started to smile even though she was trying hard not to.

  “Darling, this really is NOT funny! God created us each for a purpose, and I know you might only be joking; but there are some things far too serious to joke about, and this is one of them.”

  Mom shut the door. I heard a muffled laugh.

  “I evolved!” I shouted triumphantly.

  “YOU DID NOT!” Mom called back from halfway down the stairs. “Now that is quite enough! Go to sleep! You have crossed the line and are perniciously close to taking God’s name in vain!”

  “I didn’t say God has monkey blood!”

  I heard the rush of her steps back up the stairs, and the door flew open. Mom’s face was flushed.

  “That’s IT! One more word and I’m getting your father! And you know that will put him in a Mood! So don’t you dare make me!”

  6

  We were earnest and my parents were sincere. Dad had a vicious temper. Mom was a high-powered nut. But so what? Given the range of human suffering, I had a golden childhood. My sisters remember things their own way. I asked each for her thoughts. Priscilla and Debby responded. Susan declined.

  Priscilla wrote:3/1/2007

  My childhood in the Schaeffer family was so different from Frank’s. I was 15 years older than my little brother and until age 11 was brought up in the USA. My last years there were in St. Louis where I went to public school and had a regular and routine life. For me there was Sunday School—church—young people’s meetings and a huge Summer Bible school. I was surrounded with young people of my own age and I was very involved in school and in the church life.

  The one thing Frank and I shared as a Schaeffer child was Daddy’s love of art. Daddy would take me and my sisters often to the St. Louis Art Museum and we spent hours enjoying and talking about the art. Later Frank was taken as a child to European art museums. A couple of years ago Frank and I went through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY together and we agreed that what Daddy had given us in enjoyment, appreciation, and interest in the arts was one of the things we most valued in our childhood.

  A big difference in our upbringing was that Frank, as a very young child, was surrounded constantly by college-age students who invaded our home—for hours of discussion—table conversations—dealing with intense questions—problems—searching. For me at that time, being in university myself, these were my friends. I was thrilled that I could bring anybody home, no matter how cynical, shocking, blasphemous, and Daddy would be able to sit down and talk to them on their level and would listen to them, and we saw results as the conversations moved forward.

  Daddy did change in his view of the Christian life. In his pastorates [in the United States] he tended toward a pietistic view. It was “worldly” to go to movies, to smoke, to drink alcohol, to play cards, to dance, and we could only play hymns or listen to Handel and Bach on Sundays. Coming to Europe and starting L’Abri, Daddy and Mom slowly changed their viewpoint. It really made me proud of him to see he wasn’t caught in a box as to what was important in Christian spirituality. He introduced me to art, Sartre, Camus, the Beatles, and modern thought. His book True Spirituality shows what he came to see as real spirituality without the earlier pietism. . . .

  Susan wrote:3/2/2007

  I wrote four pages for you, [about her childhood memories of the Schaeffer household] that I think would be what I’d want to say. However, now I’m not at all content with them. I feel handicapped too by not seeing more of what you DID experience and feel—obviously so very different from myself. Also, as you have letters from the oldest and youngest [Schaeffer] sisters, that covers a lot. So, thank you for inviting me to have “un mot,” but my rather weary granny self has to respond, not at this time or place.

  “God bless” and love,

  Sue.

  P.S. Please don’t stop phoning! XOXO

  Debby wrote:3/2/2007

  Dearest Frank,

  This may not be what you expected! However, I do think it is honest and if you do use it, please use it as a whole. Obviously, if I were writing my memoirs there would be much more to say, but this is stripped down to the core as I see it. I send you this with much love and admiration for your own struggle and passion for life.

  My Childhood . . .

  Being fully aware that these are my memories, which are highly personal and thus made up of distortions, as well as half-remembered stories, I will attempt to give some clearly recalled events and impressions.

  My remembered life begins in a Swiss pension, in Lausanne, with a beloved old man, Monsieur Turrian, sitting in an old-fashioned kitchen, swinging me on his foot. My pneumonia that year, watching the doctor draw blood from my father, to mix with penicillin, so that the injection would hurt less, made a deep impression on my three-year-old self. Being carried on my father’s strong shoulders feeling jubilation that I was so high up and, a few years later, the comprehension of the true sorrow of passing time, as he announced that I was getting “too heavy” and that this would be the last time he could carry me, stands out as a milestone. Swinging on his hand and running to keep up with his stride, as well as riding in the child-seat on the back of his bike in Lausanne, in 1948, on the bikes he bought in Holland, stand out clearly. I still feel the soaring joy.

  My village life in Champéry was filled with gladness: living in our chalet, walking to school across fields and in the winter skiing every lunchtime. A big part of that period of my life was sleeping at the little school as a boarder, for weeks as my parents traveled [on their missionary speaking trips]. However, though I remember some sadness, mostly I loved the two odd ladies who ran it, Tante Lili and Mademoiselle Huguenin. One was angular and strict, the other puffy and fat and lovely to hug.

  My earliest and most abiding memories and view of my father, which never changed, was of a man brutally honest about himself and profoundly humble. The year I was four or five, my father having lost his temper, though not at me, came to me and asked me to pray for him as he had done w
rong. Also, that year as we walked home from church, up the village street, he so reassuringly held my hand and said we had two relationships: father and daughter and brother and sister in Christ. Before God, we stood as equals one next to the other.

  Thus my parents’ often stormy relationship was a factor of strength in my own life, as admission of fault, repentance, and forgiveness was a reality I saw my father practice daily. This relationship of two equal human beings was constantly present, beginning as a very young child all the way to my father’s death, as time was always made to discuss and debate the subjects that mattered to me, not only for my sake, but because my father loved to be presented with a new idea. So although my parents were very busy and intensely occupied, I treasure the importance of my person and ideas bestowed on me.

  Too many other memories crowd in: of skiing, vacations on the Mediterranean, and most preciously there the afternoon walks alone in the hills with my father, museum visits, and two treasured times in Florence, reading aloud as a family, dinners, so much information and love for history communicated as we walked, ate, or traveled.

  The decisions I took alone, that my father felt I should decide for myself, were indicative of what we would today call a “parenting style,” that I now feel left too much up to me. However, the legacy of my father was the freedom to look at what I had experienced and reject or change things in my own life, as I was never led to believe by him that these were ideal.

  My mother’s legacy was in stark contrast, as she singlemindedly pursued her ideals, often blinded to the realities of life or of our lives. As a dreamer and a highly artistic individual my mother created her own life with passion and hard work. I compare her to early discoverers of the North Pole. She pursued her objectives with determination, though bits of bodies all around her were lost to frostbite. The havoc she caused to all around her, as they were dragged in to help her meet self-imposed deadlines and goals, was phenomenal and scarring to me as a child. The force of her personality was such that I, at least, never even thought of refusing. Also, I would say, that though my father taught me the love of the Real, my mother’s idealism has taken years to peel away.

  Much love,

  Debby

  7

  When I was six, I went to America for an operation on my polio leg. (I turned seven in America.) In 1959 we crossed the ocean on a freighter, the Coroveglia. She was owned by the André Shipping Line, a Swiss company that belonged to the André family. They were the wealthiest people we knew, a special subject of awe and resentment. Amazingly for “dark post-Reformation” Switzerland, the Andrés were born-again evangelical Christians. They were rich, and from time to time they gave a gift to L’Abri, but never one large enough to impress Mom. “They could give so much more if they wanted to!” she would say. “Are they the richest people in the world?” I asked.

  “No, dear, but they are probably the richest people in Lausanne, and some of the wealthiest people in Switzerland, and that is saying something,” said Mom.

  “They don’t seem rich,” said Debby.

  “That is because they aren’t like some rich people who flaunt their wealth.”

  “Do they have their own plane?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, dear, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “What else do they have?” I asked.

  “Who knows what else, places in South America I think and offices everywhere for the shipping line, but when you visit them in Lausanne they’re just in their ordinary nice middle-class home and Mrs. André is peeling carrots like any Swiss housewife and Mr. André comes home for lunch like anybody else and they don’t even have a maid, just someone to help clean. At least I didn’t see a maid. It is really admirable, in that Swiss way.”

  When we traveled on the Coroveglia, Mom pointed out that “We still have to pay for the tickets, only less than we would otherwise.” The idea was that because we were in the Lord’s work, any person with a lot of money who was truly discerning would have given us the boat passage and to do less was something like Mary and Martha charging Christ for supper.

  We sailed from Hamburg. The ship was carrying coal dust. I rolled in the dust and got covered from head to toe. I remember the crew urging me on and Mom being angry and my eyes stinging.

  When I was two, I had traveled to the States and returned on the Ile de France, the ship I got polio on. But the voyage when I was six was the first I made where I discovered that life on shipboard, even a small old freighter, is wonderful. The feel of the engine vibrating under my feet, the roll of the ship, the sense of inexorable forward motion day and night, the lash of the moist wind on deck and the stale interior air down below, the dramatic moment each day as we moved our clocks forward: I loved it all, even the ubiquitous yellow linoleum that the cabins and narrow passages were covered with.

  The first mate kept a picture of a bare-breasted woman in his cabin. It was a black-and-white photo that had been tinted. Her nipples were mauve. It was my first view of pornography. I had seen plenty of nude statues and paintings, but I somehow knew this picture was different and didn’t mention it to my parents. I knew that if they saw it, my visits to the first mate’s cabin would end.

  I played on the bridge, went down to the engine room any time I wanted, and appreciatively breathed in the hot oil smell. I wandered all day from stem to stern, scrambling up and down ladders. On the voyage before ours, they had been hit by a hurricane and a huge wave had smashed one of the windows on the bridge. Flying glass sliced open a sailor’s face. The first mate told me about how he stitched up the sailor while getting medical instructions, stitch-by-stitch, over the radio from a seaman’s medical station broadcasting from Rome.

  We sailed into New York past the Statue of Liberty.

  “We’re home!” said Debby.

  Those words didn’t resonate with me. Home was our Swiss village. However, I was excited. America was where most of our guests came from. Each Christmas, we got boxes from friends and relatives. In the boxes were candy corn and “trashy American children’s books”—slick Golden Books—some with characters like Donald Duck, that gave me a little glimpse into what seemed like an easygoing glittering world of entertainment and abundance.

  I had a mental list of treats that I had seen or tasted in small quantities and now wanted to get my fill of: candy corn, root beer, TV, if possible, and a comic book. We headed to Pittsburgh, where I was to have surgery at the children’s hospital.

  I was taken to a Pittsburgh Pirates game (they won that game and, later, the World Series). I remember the feeling of stepping into the huge stadium in Pittsburgh, and being very embarrassed that I knew nothing about baseball! Was I a real American or not?

  Dr. Ferguson was to be my surgeon, and he was going to do a “muscle transplant” to move one less-atrophied muscle (maybe a tendon) from the front of my left leg to the calf where everything was shriveled up. This was to give my foot more mobility.

  I remember waking up after the operation as if surfacing from deep under the ocean, and seeing the spreading bloodstain on the heel of my elevated cast. I had the sweet cloying taste of ether in my mouth, nose, and throat and could taste it for days. My leg hurt, in a hot dull way. There were three incisions; a long one from just above my ankle up the side of my leg to my knee, one across the back of my heel, and one along the side of my foot above the arch. I had asked the doctor if I could stay awake so I could watch the operation. The answer was no. On my chart, Mom proudly showed me that in a box reserved for “patient disposition,” the nurse had written “cheerful male.”

  After the operation I had to wear a cast for the rest of the summer. We were to stay in America that whole time, three months until the cast came off. Then we would know if the operation had “taken.” Until then I was to stay off that leg! I was told that the transplanted muscle was fastened to my heel with a “single stitch” and that under no account was I to walk on my cast because if that stitch came loose, the whole operation would have been in vain.
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  Maybe this was true, or maybe I was being given extra motivation to stay off that leg. Mom prayed loudly and fervently for that “single stitch, that it may hold, O Lord!” until I could just about picture an angel somehow reaching into my heel and holding the stitch in place. But that didn’t stop me from walking without my crutches and often forgetting to stay off the bad leg and then worrying myself sick about the single stitch.

  For most of that summer of 1960, we lived on Long Island with “old Mrs. Johnson,” as we all called her, the wealthy mother-in-law of Dr. Keyswater. The Keyswaters were a family of “real bluebloods,” according to Mom. Dr. Keyswater was a surgeon and born-again. He was a member of our “Praying Family” of supporters and had arranged the operation for me. Some years before, when Susan was seven, she had been visiting their house and had knocked over a four-foot-tall Ming vase and broken it. The Keyswaters had been very gracious about this, Mom said. But I was to touch nothing in the house, because “it is filled with priceless treasures.”

  I remember begging Mom not to go out one evening but to stay with me. And she did, much to the Keyswaters’ annoyance, who declared me spoiled and said that they would have to cancel their dinner reservations as a result.

  Old Mrs. Johnson lived on a family estate on Long Island near Smithtown. There were mantraps made of tripwires and spikes to discourage the poachers who came to steal trout from a fish pond in the woods. The gardener gave Dad and me a guided tour while apologizing for the condition of the estate, saying that he was the only person who “she hires to take care of it,” so the most he could do was mow the lawns and do some watering. As for the rest of the grounds and the formerly well-stocked fish ponds, well, as we could see, they had “all gone to hell.” I glanced at Dad when the man cursed, but Dad didn’t seem to care. I knew Mom would have given the man a stern look.