Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  We believed that God still could do miracles, but that there had to be a bigger reason. For instance when he saved certain missionaries in the China Inland Mission, it was so more Chinese could hear the gospel and be saved. So that was why the missionaries were miraculously delivered from various bandits, warlords, Boxer rebels, and communists. It was for God’s greater glory, not just to save the missionaries, who, after all, were perfectly willing to be martyrs, just like Stan and Betty Stam, co-missionaries with my grandparents who had “gladly” died singing hymns as the Boxer rebels beheaded them.

  I didn’t say what the oil was for because I couldn’t think of any good reason to heal Jean Pierre, except that he didn’t want to jump at loud noises. And we all already believed in God, so we didn’t need more proofs because we were like the people—in fact, we were the people—Christ spoke of when he said that Thomas had believed in him because he had seen him and touched him, but that certain people in the future would believe without seeing, just by faith alone. Those believers were going to be particularly blessed. That was us.

  But I had doubts. It always seemed to me that what Mom and Dad assumed were answered prayers sometimes had more mundane explanations. For instance, Mom always said: “We never ask for money. We just take our needs to the Lord in prayer.” But I also knew that she “shared” our needs in her “Family Letter” with our “praying family,” who then sent donations. I knew that Mom paid very special attention to wealthy visitors and also shared our needs with them, sometimes by mentioning the current need in one of her long prayers. I kind of had an inkling of how the living-by-faith trick worked. Perhaps this was why, when I prayed, it was with very little faith. So I thought, if Jean Pierre is healed, then I for one will gain greater faith and believe even more, so that might be the greater purpose. Anyway, it was worth a shot.

  “Jean Pierre!”

  “Oui?”

  “Stand still and think about how much you believe.”

  “Bien.”

  “How much faith do you have right now?”

  We were standing up on the back road behind Chalet Bellevue. The day was perfect, hot sun, crisp cool air, and the mountains looked so close and sharply detailed that they seemed unreal. No one was around. We were hidden by the pine hedge, so if someone did come along, all they would see was us standing there with me holding a small plastic yogurt cup. There was nothing suspicious about that: For all they’d know, we could just be collecting slugs or worms. And if it worked, then who was going to get mad once Jean Pierre began to jump for joy and thank Jesus?

  “I have le much faith,” said Jean Pierre.

  “Do you solemnly promise that you are sure this will work?”

  “Bien sur!”

  “So you’re sure that you’ll be healed?”

  “Oui.”

  “Okay. Then in the name of Jesus . . . stand still!”

  “I am nervous.”

  “But you have to stop twitching! You made me spill some oil!”

  “Je m’exuse.”

  “Okay; now are you going to stand still?”

  “Oui.”

  “Okay, then. Now in the name of Jesus. . . . Wait. Do you think I should do it like Dad does when he baptizes new believers in the name of the Trinity?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You know what the Trinity is, don’t you?”

  “Non.”

  “What?!”

  “What it ees?”

  “Well, how can you say you accepted Jesus if you don’t know who the Trinity is?”

  “Nobody deed tell me thees.”

  “Dad will be furious with the ladies. How on earth can they lead people to Christ if they aren’t telling you guys that he is the second person of the Trinity? Why, you don’t even know who you believe in!”

  “I am tired and must sit. Heal the oils tout suite, Frankie!”

  “Okay. But if it doesn’t work, it’s because you have a theological problem. But here goes. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit . . . by the way, THAT is the Trinity.”

  “Bien. Je comprends.”

  “In that name and of course mostly in Jesus’s name, I command the spasticness to depart and that you be healed!”

  I reached up—Jean Pierre was a foot taller than me—and poured the oil over his head. There was more in the cup than it had seemed. It looked like a little but as it ran all over Jean Pierre’s shirt and stained his maroon corduroy pants a dark blotchy black-red, I realized that this anointing business was a lot messier than as advertised in the Scriptures where it only said it ran down over people’s heads, shoulders, and beards, and nothing about really messing up their clothes.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “Non!”

  “Well, then, you didn’t have the faith after all.”

  “Mes oui, I have the faith! It ees you who did not have the faith! Salaud!”

  “What are you going to tell the ladies happened to wreck your shirt and pants?”

  “Merde!”

  “See?! We’re in the middle of a healing and you are using profanity and you expect God to heal you? I’m wasting my time!”

  “It ees you who have no faith! It ees because you are play with your pee-pee that Jesu no heal me!”

  “You’re blaming me because we touch ourselves? What about you?!”

  “Oui, you are feelthy, so God he don’t hear your prayer, so he don’t heal me.”

  “Fine, then find somebody else to do it!”

  I marched off in a huff. And it was a week before I went back over to Chalet Bellevue, and I only went then because Jane Stuart Smith was doing her weekly Sunday hymn-sing with the children and I liked to hear her sing. After the hymn-sing, Jean Pierre and I made peace behind the hedge, aided by several bra advertisements.

  20

  Two old ladies—rather one old lady and one middle-aged lady who seemed old—arrived. First, Gracie Holmes came to stay, and then Grandmother Schaeffer, Dad’s mom. Gracie lived in a little room at the end of the middle-floor hall, two doors down from the kitchen and next to a girl’s dormitory. Grandmother got Susan’s old room at the end of the upstairs hall.

  Gracie came to live with us when I was nine or ten. She was an Englishwoman with the IQ of an eight-year-old. She had had a stroke when she was in her twenties that left her paralyzed on the right side of her body. She walked with a limp, dragging her right foot, and her right arm was almost useless. Gracie’s face was asymmetrical. She had false teeth and pink babylike skin and watery pale blue eyes. Her tongue would loll out of her mouth when she was thinking hard. Gracie had somehow gotten stranded in a Swiss home for mentally retarded adults. Susan met Gracie (where, I don’t know) and brought her for a visit to L’Abri so she could meet other people who spoke English—and, of course, have the chance to accept Jesus. Gracie came to visit every weekend after that and accepted Jesus as soon as Susan told her to. Then one day Mom asked Gracie if she would like to stay. Gracie burst into tears and said yes.

  After Gracie moved in, she would lug a big Bible to church every Sunday and sit there smiling at everyone with her Bible open and upside down. Gracie and I became good friends. It was as if she was my little sister. I teased her but never about her condition, only in the sense that she was easy to fool. She would accept anything I said at face value, either believing it or pretending to. For instance, Gracie and I prepared in various ways to meet Jesus.

  “Jesus is coming back in a few minutes Gracie,” I said barging into Gracie’s room one morning.

  “Very nice, darling,” Gracie said, very matter-of-fact, except she pronounced it “dalin.”

  “So you better get ready.”

  “Yes.”

  “So get up and get dressed. You don’t want to meet the Lord in that old nightgown, do you?”

  “No, dalin.”

  “Okay, then hurry.”

  A few minutes later, we were standing in front of our chalet. Gracie was looking up into the sky expectantly and clutchi
ng her oversized handbag, while I was trying not to burst into laughter. Gracie was in her best dress. A few minutes passed.

  “Where is he, dalin?”

  “I think he took the bus from Ollon.”

  “Oh?”

  “After he gets here, he’ll take us all to heaven.”

  “On the bus, dalin?”

  “Several buses.”

  “Good, dalin.”

  Ten minutes later. . . .

  “Where IS he, dalin?” asked Gracie with a petulant edge in her voice.

  “He’s late.”

  “I must do the ironing, dalin.”

  “We won’t need anything ironed when Jesus comes back.”

  “But I MUST DO IT!”

  Gracie’s tongue was protruding and she was turning a bright pink. She got upset if something kept her from her duties. Her eyes, always larger than life as seen through her thick glasses, seemed to get bigger.

  “Okay, but don’t blame me if you get left behind. What will Jesus think if you aren’t waiting?”

  “Well, dalin, you tell him I’m upstairs doing the ironing for Mr. Schaeffer, because he wants his nice white shirt for Sunday.”

  “I will, but Jesus might be angry.”

  “Never mind him, dalin.”

  Mom looked over the top-floor balcony. “Frankie?”

  “Yes, Mom?”

  “What are you and Gracie doing?”

  “We’re waiting for Jesus, but I must go iron, dalin, mustn’t I?”

  “Yes, Gracie, you go do that, but maybe you’ll want to change out of your Sunday dress first.”

  “Yes, dalin,” said Gracie, and she marched off.

  “Frankie!”

  “Yes, Mom?”

  Gracie would hide the shirts she scorched. She would also count the silverware and follow guests around asking them where a missing spoon or fork was until everyone was so exasperated that people would drop what they were doing and help her find the fork. And then Gracie would beam at them and/or mutter darkly about how she knew they had been stealing “Mrs. Schaeffer’s forks.” Sometimes I would hide silverware under a student’s pillow and then hint to Gracie that I suspected the girl or boy of theft until she searched their room. Then it would take Mom half the afternoon to get Gracie to stop following the suspect while mumbling darkly and calm the accused “thief” down. The possibilities were endless.

  After a few years of being “in charge” of the house, Gracie would routinely hide all the silver, the napkins, and even the toilet paper. That way, no one could do anything without going to her and begging for whatever they needed. My parents never made her change her strange and squirrel-like habit. “She just wants to feel important,” Mom would say. “There’s no harm done.”

  Grandmother Schaeffer came to live with us in 1962 (or thereabouts), after she broke her hip. She was my bad grandmother, as opposed to my good grandmother. (Our “good grandmother” was Mom’s missionary godly mom who had passed away many years before, though Mom’s dad went on living till he was a hundred and one years and three days old.)

  “Grandmother Schaeffer believed nothing when she was raising poor Fran,” Mom would say. “She wasn’t even a nominal Christian. And now, look, we’re stuck with her!”

  Grandmother Schaeffer had always been small and now was shrunk down to a barely-four-foot angry troll. She had a tough little wizened face and a perpetually sour frown. I resented her. We had no privacy in our home anyway, and now what little there was evaporated with my grandmother’s coming to haunt our top-floor apartment.

  Grandmother had never been outside of Philadelphia until the day she flew to Switzerland. It was her first and last ride in a plane.

  Years later, just after she broke her hip a second time, Genie and I visited Grandmother in the Aigle hospital on our wedding day. She glared and snapped: “How can that fool boy be married? He’s only twelve!” She wasn’t demented, just being her usual insulting self. I had it coming. I had teased her—a lot.

  When Grandmother died, Birdie, a L’Abri worker who was a retired nurse, washed and dressed her body. (There were few undertakers in Switzerland in those days.) But Grandmother’s mouth kept falling open. I found the solution in my art supplies and sprayed fixative, the liquid spray glue used to “fix” charcoal drawings, into her mouth, over her false teeth and lips. It worked very well. My only problem was that I couldn’t figure out what expression to give her. To make her smile gave Grandma a false look, different than she ever had in life. On the other hand, to give her the frown that was so familiar seemed a mean thing to do. So I settled on flat, pursed lips, a quizzical what-now-in-the-afterlife? expression.

  Knowing Grandmother Schaeffer explained a lot about Dad. For one thing, Mom wasn’t lying when she said that she had more or less saved Dad. His mother’s idea of a good time was reading the obituaries and muttering gleefully, “Outlived him, too!” She hated any food she was not familiar with, and Grandmother was familiar with two dishes: chicken soup and corned beef hash. She hated the classical music Dad played all day to create a wall of sound to block out the voices of the guests and—after Grandmother came to live with us—the sound of Grandmother talking to herself, often about the wrestling she had loved watching on TV and now missed.

  Grandmother Schaeffer provided some unintentional insight into my family history in another way. Priscilla said that when she was a little girl (back in America), that her best times were when Mom and Dad dropped her off to stay with Grandmother Schaeffer. If being with Grandmother contrasted so positively with life at home with Mom and Dad, it told me a great deal about the quality of life in the early, oppressive strict fundamentalist days of our household. Priscilla always said how free she felt with Grandmother.

  Gracie had been living with us for several years before Grandmother arrived. And there was an instant rivalry between them that extended to them both trying to cheat while playing Pacheesi, arguing loudly, and my grandmother occasionally throwing Gracie out of her room with a “Git outta here, ya damned moron!”

  Gracie called Grandmother “the bad lady.” And after my Grandmother broke her hip again and spent the last three years of her life stuck in bed or in her chair, Gracie would walk into Grandmother’s room clutching a pile of freshly ironed laundry in a triumphant show-and-tell, demonstrating how she was living a productive life while Grandmother was stuck. Grandmother would stare down at her paper and pretend she didn’t see Gracie. And of course I’d play one off against the other.

  “Gracie?”

  “Yes, dalin?”

  “Grandmother says you don’t iron very well.”

  “She is a bad woman! I iron lovely, dalin.”

  “I know you do, but she says you should not be allowed to iron any more.”

  “She is wicked.”

  And: “Grandma?”

  “Git outta here, ya brazen brat!”

  “Okay, but Gracie said you cheat.”

  “I don’t care what some retard says!”

  Gracie was my coconspirator. When I was fourteen and got a Super-8 movie camera, Gracie was my main actress. The dramatic scene where Gracie got hit by the car worked fine, except that the blood mix accidentally got in Gracie’s eyes, and since it was red oil paint thinned with turpentine, I had to abandon filming, though her initial reaction fit my plot well since she was screaming very realistically. But that ruined her ability to “die” because she kept yelling at me that I’d blinded her and to “take me to Mei Fuh,” and wouldn’t lie still. Mei Fuh was what Gracie called my mother. (It was Mom’s name in Chinese, and for some reason Gracie learned it and always called her that.)

  When the spastics next door got a small swimming pool installed on their property, The Ladies forbade anybody but the spastics to use the pool. This seemed grossly unfair. The pool was ridiculously small, but it was the only pool anywhere near us, and being banned disappointed me. So I would sneak over at night to swim. And once I took Gracie.

  It was about 11 PM. Gracie d
idn’t have a bathing suit, so she went in her underwear; a large white bra and a pair of bloomer-type panties. Gracie panicked once I got her in, though the pool was barely four feet deep. Her bloomers floated up around her and seemed to suddenly have the volume of a parachute. She began to shriek. I tried to haul her out. She slipped on the ladder. When she came to the surface, she let out a loud yell followed by “You are so naughty, dalin!” repeated furiously at increasing volume. Then her false teeth came out and I had to dive to look for them in the dark.

  Lights went on in Chalet Bellevue. I tried to tug, push, and pull Gracie out, but her wet soft flesh, her limp leg and arm, and my panic made it impossible. So I bolted and hid under the hedge. Moments later, Rosemary, one of the fiercest of the three ladies, found Gracie more or less naked and spluttering incoherently in the pool. Rosie demanded explanations and didn’t get any, because Gracie was being loyal to me. Rosie had to go back inside to wake one of the other ladies up to help her fish Gracie out.

  They got her back to our chalet and, of course, moments later Dad was looking for me. By then I was in bed pretending to sleep, but Dad knew. I told him what I’d done and he laughed. And Dad refused to punish me, other than making me promise not to endanger Gracie again. Dad was as resentful of the ladies as I was for not allowing me to swim in their pool.

  21

  Most L’Abri students were bright balanced people. A few were not. People with mental problems were the minority at L’Abri, but they found a welcome. I grew up experiencing a series of friendships with the sorts of people living in our house (or in the other L’Abri chalets) that most boys would only meet in the street when accosted by a homeless man or woman. There was Mr. Hamburger from England, who had been lobotomized and who would periodically throw himself down the mountainside in a half-hearted suicide attempt. There were the several students who were convinced that they were demon-possessed and heard voices. There were some who would sit and cry for no reason, or yell out in church. A few had done time in prison. So it seemed normal to have Gracie and other less-than-perfect people in our house, just as it seemed normal to have the occasional unwed mother stay with us.