Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Even when giving was down, Mom somehow saved the money for the train tickets and the cost of the pensione and/or hotel. (Of course, the great exchange rate between dollars, Swiss francs, and lire helped.)

  Italy was where I got to know Lino, an almost-famous surrealist painter. He was probably in his late thirties when I first met him. Lino was slender, olive-skinned, quiet, and polite. He was also very “typically Italian-looking,” according to Mom. He dressed impeccably in a suit, even when he was painting

  I would take Lino my paintings and drawings, which I was always working on while in Italy. He talked to me as a fellow artist, not as a child. I also got to know his debonair middle-aged homosexual lover and manager—a tall aristocratic man who dressed in gray wool slacks, pastel knit shirts, and loafers with no socks and a sweater draped over his shoulders, perpetually tan, and smelling faintly of exotic cologne—and several other artists who let me hang around their studios in Portofino.

  I’d known Lino and his lover since I was six or seven—“forever”—and had always hung around Lino’s studio watching him paint. It was my favorite after-the-beach-before-dinner place to visit.

  Lino told me that his first big break as an artist was being commissioned to paint a large mural on the ill-fated SS “Andrea Doria,” the famous Italia Line ship that sank off Nantucket. He once showed me a postcard of his mural, then shrugged, and said, “And now it is all at the bottom of the sea!”

  Mom and Dad seemed to thrive in Italy, too. They would slip off in the evening for the walk from Portofino out to the lighthouse that sits at the tip of the peninsula protecting the harbor. The path was lit by small, beautifully concealed lights that cast a soft romantic glow over the flagstone path. Mom and Dad would leave me playing in the main square, or up in my room with Debby reading to me, and slip away. If I was up when they came back, I always noticed how happy they were. They would seem so relaxed and so in love. Mom’s eyes were bright. Dad was smiling. They would always be arm in arm and head straight for their bedroom.

  If two lines were forming—one headed to the L’Abri chapel, the other to Portofino—I always knew which line I’d be in! Portofino was paradise! You’d walk past a small gallery where there were Salvador Dali’s for sale and sometimes Salvador Dali himself. I saw Rex Harrison, Jackie Kennedy, Princess Grace, mob bosses, and probably most of the ever-changing Italian government, and everyone else who drifted in on a yacht or came over from Santa Margarita in a slick power boat of a late afternoon.

  This was the Riviera as portrayed in the first thirty minutes of The Talented Mr. Ripley (before the movie’s story turns dark). It truly was La Dolce Vita. It was warm air, and the smell of fresh pizza coming from the chimney of some little trattoria or the aroma of leather goods wafting out of shoe stores. It was the glittering window displays of boutiques that sold belts and sweaters too expensive to bother putting a price tag on.

  I absorbed a vision of a verdant existence that somehow was bigger than everything else. This fleeting vision left me happy and wistful, longing for something I could not pin down. I still feel it.

  My unnamable longing has to do with sex, and living forever, and the freshest food, and best smells, from wild arugula to spilled red wine, to the distant sounds of motor boats and the scratchy whisper of lizards’ claws scampering over sun-baked walls, and girls in bikinis, sultry mothers breast-feeding babies, cobblestone back alleys full of stores smelling of the glue used to repair shoes, and the stale blood of butchered rabbits on sawdust in the tiny shops that lined the alleys where we would walk in the nearby town of Santa Margarita, cigarette smoke and thick dank air of the bars we’d duck into to buy a fresh-squeezed orange juice now and then. Mostly it has to do with beauty, and wanting . . . what? I can’t name what it was or is. Perhaps it has to do with wanting to live well and never getting there, because “there” is to be unself-consciously Italian and you have to be born that way, and I wasn’t.

  The smell of Italian leather still evokes those glorious shoes and belts with no prices and still makes me feel dreamy and luxurious, as if I’ve been transported to a world of perpetual warm water and the distant sound of boat engines, the smell of oil paint and linseed oil, that easy feeling of all being well in a world where the colors are bright, the people happy, cats are scrawny, girls are pretty, men are polite, children numerous, dinner is late, ice cream is dark and impossibly chocolatey. Many a saleswoman on Madison Avenue probably wonders why this middle-aged man will step into their shoe emporium, sniff the leather-scented air, close his eyes, sigh, and then head back out to the street in a blissful trance.

  And my parents God bless them, let me be! Italy was where they proved themselves to be so much more than their fundamentalist beliefs. It was as if they wanted me to somehow grow past the constricted world they had fallen into.

  I think Mom and Dad were a lot more comfortable in Portofino, too, than they were in L’Abri. Mom dressed like a movie star; Dad looked like one of the more intellectual faculty-members of some Italian university. And Mom always looked so elegant. She had taste and was extraordinarily creative. She could combine her few simple pieces of silver jewelry, a silk skirt she’d made, and a blouse bought on sale for a dollar or two, into an outfit that made people do a double-take, as in “who is she?” Besides, in Europe, that intellectual craggy look of Dad’s was always “in.”

  My parents certainly did not look American. In fact, Mom would often say, with a disgusted shake of her head, “They look so American!” as a put-down to visiting missionaries who came thorough L’Abri, or, heaven forbid, if we saw Americans in Italy, or during our ski vacations in Zermatt. My sisters would hiss: “They look American! Stop speaking English until they go away!” And we’d clam up or speak French. Mom and Dad always went along with this, although, because Dad never learned French and Mom spoke it incredibly badly, they would just sit silently until the danger passed.

  12

  In the winters, we went to the Hotel Riffelberg. It was perched above a cliff overlooking the Zermatt Valley and a range of jagged peaks, including the famous Matterhorn. To the north, the hotel faced a steep snowfield perfect for skiing, which swept up for a mile or more to the top of the Riffelhorn and beyond that to the summit of Gornergrat Mountain. We stayed at the Hotel Riffelberg because it was less expensive than the hotels in Zermatt, and the skiing was better.

  The trip from Huémoz to Zermatt began at the front door of Chalet Les Mélèzes with my mother running down the stairs while Debby acted as a kind of relay team whose duty it was to both relate information about Mom’s progress to my father and to hurry Mom along out of the chalet.

  At last my sister bundled her down the icy steps, along the path cut through the snow, through the gates, then down the steep stairs to the road. Mom’s descent was watched by my exasperated father, the furious driver of the yellow postal bus, and the angry passengers who—mostly heavyset and malodorous peasant women on errands to Aigle, our “big town” in the valley—were by now ready to make good their threat to drive off and leave Mom and the rest of us “Américaines” to find another way to get to the station.

  “Tell Edith,” Dad yelled, “that if she’s not here in ten seconds, everyone in this bus will miss their connections in Aigle! Tell her we’ve probably already missed the ten-forty to Visp and the connection to Zermatt! Tell her that if we miss the twelve-ten to Zermatt, there isn’t another one until five-eighteen and we’ll miss the Gornergrat train and won’t get to Riffelberg tonight!”

  “Yes, Dad,” I said.

  “And tell that woman that if we miss the Gornergrat connection, she can just forget the whole thing!”

  The driver added a sour comment, “Non, mais! C’est pas possible! Je pars en trente secondes! Nom de Dieu! Non, mais! Merde!”

  On the cog rail line that was the last step in the four-hour journey, I’d be staring at the snow-covered pine trees. Their branches were weighed down so heavily that the snow formed an almost straight white sheath, maki
ng the trees look strangely narrow. Through the trees, the high peaks could be glimpsed, dazzling white and towering above everything as the view unfolded. My heart always raced at the thought of what the slopes were going to be like, judging by the amount of deep powder piled in tall sparkling drifts along the track.

  Riffelberg was only a mile or so above Zermatt as the crow flies, but the cog railway slowly meandered for twenty minutes through dense forest and over several high bridges, as well as through various glistening icicle-crusted tunnels, before it ground its way out into the open above the tree line. The forest suddenly ended, and the splendid twilit view of the town of Zermatt below and the pale mountains above exploded around us. Stars were visible in the darkening arch of sky.

  13

  Mom used two trees to illustrate a major point in her “Talk on Prayer.” She had several standard talks. There was the “L’Abri Story,” her “Girl’s Talk,” and the famous “Talk on Prayer.”

  Ours was such a “special story,” right up there with the biblical narrative of the struggles of the People of Israel, that when a new guest arrived at L’Abri, the first thing that happened was that Mom, or one of my sisters, would sit them down and tell them “The L’Abri Story.” (In later years, Mom wrote L’Abri, and it became a best-selling book, her first of many that led to a huge following of evangelical readers.) The new guest would learn about what mighty deeds God had done to raise up The Work that they might be led to us. They had stepped into an ongoing miracle. And they could become a part of it, too—or, as Mom would say, “Another thread in the tapestry.” With every new chalet added to The Work, every new brother-in-law, every new step—for instance, when Dad and Mom published their books—the “L’Abri Story” got longer.

  I forget the point Mom made with her two trees in the prayer talk. I only remember that she spoke at length about going up into the woods and putting her feet on the trunk of one tree, then switching her feet to the trunk of the other tree while praying, something she demonstrated while lying on the living-room floor. (Mom liked to wear slacks when she spoke, because that way she could prance around, get on the floor, do whatever it took to illustrate her points.) Anyway, the trees illustrated something or other about how one trunk represented our requests to God and the other trunk was something to do with how he answered us—or, rather, answered Mom, because she was our number-one prayer warrior, the rest of us not even being a distant second.

  It was amazing how everything Mom did in her personal life had such spiritual significance, even Mom’s favorite spot in the forest above our chalet where those trees were folded into the ministry. Mainly what Mom’s talk on prayer proved was that she prayed for hours and hours every day and just loved it! Sometimes I wondered if she did protest too much. Who was Mom trying to convince that she was having so much fun up there in the woods with God?

  Mom drove me crazy with her pietistic spin on just about anything. She also drove my sisters and myself crazy by folding the most personal moments of our childhood lives into her talks as further illustrations of God’s hand on us, or to make points about how to raise a family.

  14

  As L’Abri grew, it became more formal. Guests were called “students.” Then students had their stay limited to three months, after too many people were being turned away and/or were trying to stay for very long periods. At some point (in the early 1960s), the students were asked to pay a minimal amount per day to stay, whereas at the beginning of the work they were considered houseguests and of course everything was free. If you wanted to stay longer than three months, you could become a “helper” and stay up to six months more. And if you felt led by the Lord (and, more importantly, if Mom and Dad really, really liked you), you could become a “worker.”

  The workers were the permanent staff. Some workers would be elected to become “members.” But the members—who were supposedly our independent board—pretty much did what Mom and Dad wanted. I never knew of a decision the members took during Dad’s lifetime that went against his wishes. And this whole network of people, past students, workers, and friends were all bound together by my mother’s “Family Letters” that she sent out every few months.

  Cynthia was a L’Abri worker when I was a small child. She was in and around the L’Abri work for years. Later, she became a member. Cynthia was also my homeschool tutor for a time.

  Mom didn’t put me in the village school with “all those rough peasant children,” for fear that they would make fun of my polio leg. Besides, Mom wanted me in a Christian environment. So I was homeschooled, but most of the time I did little more than struggle to sound out a page or two of words then head for the forest or village. Out of sight I was also out of mind for whole blessed days at a time.

  Cynthia had “a special heart” for the Chinese, with Japanese and Koreans coming a close second. Her plan was to heed God’s call to her to be a missionary to the “millions of lost souls of the Orient.” Cynthia felt that the Lord was leading her to follow in the tradition of Hudson Taylor, the pioneer missionary to China, who grew a pigtail and dressed like a native, the better to “reach out to the lost Chinese.” (He founded the mission my grandparents were in.) Cynthia planned to go Hudson one better; she planned to marry “an Oriental.”

  Cynthia suffered from bad breath; at least she thought she did. I thought her breath was fine. Nevertheless, she brushed her teeth six or seven times a day and I used her imagined affliction to avoid learning to read. I pretended to be sickened as we bent our heads together over the page. Then she would excuse herself and go brush her teeth—again.

  I’d never say anything, just pull away and take a deep breath as if about to charge through a smoke-filled room, then read out loud till my breath ran out, then lean way back and take another gasp of air. With any luck, when she went down the hall to brush her teeth, she would get distracted by Mom, who needed help in the kitchen making lunch for thirty guests. Cynthia wouldn’t come back for a while, and I could just stare out the window. Of course, this was when there were no Japanese, Chinese, or Koreans around. If there were, then Cynthia was fully occupied and homeschool was indefinitely postponed while she gave the current Oriental Bible studies.

  Would God answer earnest, sweet, pretty Cynthia’s prayer and provide her a husband so she could return with him to some far-distant land as a missionary with access to the “indigenous people”? I would daydream about Cynthia’s future husband out there somewhere, if only he’d marry Cynthia before “the change.”

  Mom would comment, “Poor Cynthia, you know time is really running out for her! I just pray that the Lord brings her someone . . . before the change!”

  There was so much to worry about: God finding the man in time, God preserving a few good eggs in Cynthia’s aging insides, the man being “God’s choice for Cynthia,” and keeping the lost millions from getting sick and dying before Cynthia could get there and do her stuff and save them. All sorts of clocks were ticking: biological, spiritual, eternal . . . and she’d have to learn the language first! Between the babies, learning the language, finding a man—and this didn’t even address the issue of the funds to get out there—how could God do it all before the change?

  The quest for Cynthia’s husband and the state of her withering ovaries became a major obsession of my childhood.

  “Have you found anyone yet?” I would ask.

  “No, but there are two Koreans coming up next weekend from the University of Lausanne,” Cynthia said.

  Cynthia picked up the reading book and thrust it in front of me.

  “But tell me,” I added hurriedly, “how do you know that the Lord wants you to marry one of them?”

  “I don’t know who the Lord will lead me to, but I have a very special heart for them. And there are signs.”

  “What signs?”

  “Well, for one thing I’m naturally good at languages. I’ve been learning Japanese and Chinese.”

  “But now it looks like it may be a Korean.”

  “
Never mind that.”

  “Or two of them.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Okay, what other signs?”

  “Well, by God’s grace I’m small. I couldn’t marry one if I was towering over the poor little chap, now, could I?”

  “If they’re really short, they can stand on a box to kiss you.”

  “That is quite enough! Now open your book and read from: ‘Kate has a ball to share with Jack. . . .’ ”

  “I just want to know one other thing. Are you going to have children with them?”

  “Of course, if the Lord wills.”

  “Mom said it will have to be soon because of the change.”

  Cynthia, always slightly pink, sometimes blushed as only pale Englishwomen do, turning strawberry-red. And I was cruel the way only little boys can be cruel, especially one who knows far too much about female anatomy and uses this knowledge to distract his tutor from doing her job.

  With three older sisters and a mother who liked to talk “frankly” about sex to her children, I had been swimming in a sea of female secrets and absorbing titillating inside knowledge since I could remember. Mom skipped the birds and bees and cut to the chase. By the time most boys were just beginning to wonder if girls were different from them “down there,” I was awash in menstrual cycles, ovaries, the inside dope on my sisters’ urinary tract infections, Mom’s diaphragm—“We’re not Catholics, and spacing your children is a good idea!”—even intimate knowledge about how sex could help Dad’s Moods.

  “Your father insists on having sexual intercourse every single night! That’s why I can’t be with you and have to go on this trip to England with him. He won’t be away from me even for one night, darling.”

  The thousands of young women and men who passed through L’Abri between, say, 1957 and 1980 (when I moved away to America) may assume that every single private and deeply embarrassing conversation they ever had with my mother was “shared” in vivid detail with my sisters and myself, not to mention with other L’Abri workers. There was the airline stewardess whose husband said he would leave her unless she had breast augmentation surgery. She did, and he still left her, and, “on top of that, her breasts were ruined!” And there were all the single pregnant women. I knew the details of how each one got pregnant. “And she was a virgin! And they were in his car, and you know what, she said all she felt was pain and didn’t even enjoy it! And she never saw him again! And now she’s pregnant!” The average guest at L’Abri was a pretty girl in her early twenties, full of questions—“deep questions” were even better—about God, about life, and about relationships—above all, marriage. And Mom’s talk on marriage kept her female audiences spellbound. Mom told me what she was telling them, and about their “private” questions.