Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  “I’ll never dance again,” said Lynnette.

  “But oh, Lynnette,” answered my Mom with tears streaming down her face, “the Lord says that what we give up for Him will be returned to us tenfold! Someday you will dance again in Heaven before the Throne of God! And you will dance forever with your new incorruptible body, and you will fulfill all that talent He gave you!”

  Lynnette and my sisters wept some more. It was one of those many beautiful moments my mother shared with the Praying Family in her next “Family Letter.”

  Lynnette’s use of her London flat was the beginning of another chapter in the Lord’s work. Lynnette was a wounded and desperate young woman when she came to L’Abri. Her mother had committed suicide. And that was how Lynnette got her lovely flat at the good address: She had inherited it. And so that was also another example, as Mom explained of how everything, even tragedy, seemed to help our work in God’s great plan.

  Mom and Dad’s English trips became more and more frequent, and I collected a whole album of postcards from all over the British Isles. And Lynnette teamed up with Cynthia—my sometime tutor—and Hillary Schlesinger (the pretty younger sister of the famous English movie director John Schlesinger) to organize discussions Dad would preside over. And a few years later, Susan and Ranald moved to London and opened a branch of L’Abri at 52 Cleveland Road. Then, a few years after that, they moved to a country manor house in Greatham, an hour south of London, and started a full-blown English L’Abri and soon had almost as many students staying with them as there were in the original Swiss L’Abri.

  In the early days of the “English work,” Mom and Dad always used the same method. They would go to the home of a L’Abri convert like Lynnette. The convert would then “open their home” and invite their friends to talk with this remarkable American Christian. The result was that Mom and Dad were setting up what amounted to cells of followers all over England. And because there was always someone opposing the Lord’s will in these matters, an anti-Christian parent, a scoffing academic community, a Church of England liberal priest, who tried to undermine someone’s faith after Mom and Dad left, these forays into England had a somewhat clandestine air about them. Mom and Dad would come home and report as if bringing news from behind enemy lines.

  Englishmen and Englishwomen began to “become Christians.” And looking back at that time, I am amazed at how little I knew about the fact that maybe, just maybe, there were already Christians in the British Isles, before my parents got there. As a child, the way I took what was being said about my parents’ English trips was that before my parents went to England, there were no Real Christians there. In the misty past, there had been Puritans and some notable martyrs, when the evil Roman Catholics killed people for believing right; but today, in the present, we and we alone were taking the Truth to lost England.

  The people who “got saved” were not just any old kind of English people. I never heard a Cockney accent until I was in English boarding school and I talked to Peg and Fred, the embittered, downtrodden and perpetually angry working-class caretakers. The only British accents I heard at L’Abri (at least in the early days) were the plumy upper-class tones honed in Oxford and Cambridge, where Mom and Dad often went, as well as to London, to conduct discussions hosted by students who wanted to share what they had learned with their friends.

  25

  My parents would begin or end any conversation of any length or seriousness, any event, meal, or get-together with prayer. They would meet people on trains and buses, or just in the hall of the chalet, talk for a while, perhaps learn of some problem, and, nine times out of ten, suddenly exclaim “Do you mind if we take this to the Lord?” or “Would you like to pray about this?” or just issue a declarative “Let’s pray!”

  Then they would launch into a prayer that was earnest and full of theological content, and in Mom’s case unbelievably long, so long that Dad would often shoot her annoyed glances. People would shift from foot to foot, and if there were several people standing with Mom when she was praying, and I was lucky enough to be on the fringe and not stuck next to her, I might sidle away.

  Mom sometimes would hold forth in prayer for—literally!—forty-five minutes or more. And sometimes, if I kept my eyes closed the whole time the way I was supposed to, when I finally opened them and looked up, I was dizzy.

  The excuse for the prayer, for instance the information that someone was ill, would get briefly mentioned. Then a lot of solid theology would also be mixed in. And since presumably my parents believed that God already had correct theology, and didn’t need instruction, it was clear that they were praying at the person with them, not to God, because God didn’t need to be told he was sovereign, the Creator, loved each of us but hated sin. Nor did he need to be reminded that we are all sinners, and that only his son’s “finished work on the cross” could save us.

  Prayers began “Dear Heavenly Father” and continued with a litany of requests. When prayed out loud, the prayers were often a not-so-subtle vehicle for sermons. These sermons (masquerading as prayer) were for the good of those here on earth who were eavesdropping on what was purporting to be a conversation with God but was really a way to say things to Dad, that Mom didn’t dare say out loud, or a way for Dad or Mom to preach at an unbeliever.

  Praying out loud was also a way of advancing one’s case, the advantage being that no one dared interrupt you or argue back. Moreover, prayer was a way to tell God to behave, to stick with being the God we said he was, and a way to remind God of his “many promises” so he wouldn’t try to do anything odd or theologically inconsistent.

  “Dear Heavenly Father, we just come to Thee to thank Thee for the fact that Thou art a Sovereign Lord Who has seen from before the beginning of time who You wouldst ordain to save. We just thank Thee that Thou art a good and loving Father Who has chosen us to serve Thee and to demonstrate Thine existence to an unbelieving world. . . .”

  All the basic precepts were right there in my parent’s prayers. Now God knew what he was supposed to be doing—predestining each individual to be saved or lost and doing this from before creation—so we could relax. Prayer was a way to remind God not to let his attention wander or forget that we, and we only, really understood what he was supposed to be doing. So we prayed at him, too. The logic of those prayers, if one was reading between the lines, was something like this:

  “Dear Heavenly Father, in Your Word You say that when two or three are gathered together, You will be in the midst of them. Well, we’re gathered here, so do what we’re telling You to do because we have You over a barrel and can quote Your own book back at you! And in case You’re thinking of weaseling out of this deal, we claim Your promises, and because You can’t break any of those since You wrote it all in the Bible, You’ll do what we say, and You’ll do it NOW! Amen!”

  On days of prayer (Mondays), Mom signed up for several hours, but Dad only put his name on a half-hour box on the prayer chart posted in the kitchen. Mom would dismissively say “Poor Fran just prays from his little list, but that is certainly not enough for me! I mean, my dear, I really want to TALK to the Lord! Would you only want to have half an hour of conversation with your best friend?!”

  I sometimes wondered if God ever tried to duck out of the room when he saw Mom coming. We each took at least a half hour; Susan and Debby took more than me, more like a whole hour. The workers signed up, and some of the guests did, too. That way, someone was constantly praying from seven AM to seven PM. But during my half hour, I just sat in my room and stared at the wall and couldn’t figure out why it was a good idea to tell God stuff he already knew.

  Theologically speaking, we believed in an absolutely powerful omnipotent and sovereign Lord. But in practice, our God had to be begged and encouraged to carry out the simplest tasks, for instance to keep moving the hearts of the local Swiss authorities to renew our residency permits.

  How exactly was this supposed to work? God was in charge, but he wouldn’t do anything for us unless
we believed he would do it. But if he didn’t do anything, what reason was there to believe?

  We lacked the faith to pray effectively and make God do stuff. So we prayed for the faith to make God give us faith to make him do stuff. But getting enough faith was the biggest problem, so we prayed for the faith we needed to pray for faith. But how much faith did it take to pray to have enough faith to pray for faith? And if God knew you wanted faith, why didn’t he just give it to you? It was like spending all your time calling directory information for phone numbers that you aren’t allowed to call unless you can guess the number right without asking.

  What is strange is that today, in my totally “backslidden” state and long after I rejected the faith of my youth, or rather the faith I was supposed to have had in my youth, and have become “horribly secular” and write for “liberal publications” and have “questioned everything,” I do pray a lot. The habit of faith can’t be rejected so easily. Mom won.

  It doesn’t matter what I think. It is a question of what I am.

  PART II

  EDUCATION

  26

  When I was ten, my parents despaired of trying to home school me. Susan pushed them to send me to school, any school. And since it was far too late to put me in the rigorous Swiss public school system, they sent me to a local private school, the ludicrously misnamed Gai Matin (Happy Morning).

  I went there because the school offered a class taught in English. The school was owned and run by Madame Moraz, a robust tweed-clad, child-hating, wide-hipped French woman married to a small subservient Swiss husband who trotted at her side, the way a worried pilot fish accompanies a shark. The school was in Chésières, a village a couple of miles up the road from Huémoz next to the ski resort of Villars. Chésières was mostly chalets and barns, but my school was a five-story stone-and-stucco building with big picture windows and a stupendous view of the mountains. An old red tram ran from Villars to Chésières and made its final stop in front of the school.

  There were about forty or fifty of us. The student body was mostly made up of the absentmindedly conceived offspring of globetrotting euro-trash, children of Milanese businessmen who once a year drove up to Switzerland from Milan to visit their mistress’s sons or daughters and check on their Swiss bank accounts, and half a dozen or so Arab oil-sheiks’ children, as well as a few French and Swiss boys and girls too dim to succeed in the Swiss or French public schools. There were also the sons and daughters of a few American diplomats and international businessmen, and some kids who had been institutionalized virtually from birth, when they were dumped into local homes for children at the age of six months and later “graduated” to Gai Matin. (There was even a school in Les Ecovets, half a mile from Chésières, that took kids as boarders from three months of age.)

  Unlike the boarders at Gai Matin, I lived at home and walked the thirty minutes up the road every morning, or sometimes hitchhiked. It took fifteen minutes to walk/run down the mountain on the way home. And in winter, I’d bring my sled and careen home in about five minutes, using the footpath that ran steeply down our mountain cutting a straight line through the big lazy hairpins of the main road.

  The best part of going to a “real school” was that we got to ski in Bretaye above Villars every afternoon, from mid-December through late April. From Bretaye, on clear days, which, at least in golden memory, was every day it was not snowing, you could see Mont Blanc peeking up over the range of mountains that sat directly across from our chalet, dominating the lower part of the Rhône Valley. There were almost always several meters of fresh powder, a dazzling blue sky, hot sun that would burn you faster than summer sunshine, and no lift lines because we were skiing on weekday afternoons.

  Except for the whirr and jingle of the cable running over the lift’s pulleys, the silence was almost complete. If the lifts stopped, which they did from time to time if someone fell and was being dragged by a T-bar or had trouble getting into a chairlift, all you would hear was the cry of mountain ravens, skiers’ voices floating up from below, and far distant sounds from the Rhône Valley, maybe a train whistle if the wind was right, but so faint that it sounded as if it were coming from another universe.

  On some days I wouldn’t bother to ski back to the school but asked permission to head down through the forest and skied right up to my front door, through new unbroken snow, absolutely alone for a blessed hour, completely free. Sometimes I would play a little game with God. I would radically alter my path, make illogical and sudden turns and stops, just to see if I could momentarily get ahead of predestination, do something God wasn’t expecting. But I always had the feeling it wasn’t working. And out in the wilderness I was glad enough to believe that the Lord was watching over me. I knew that if I fell and broke my leg, I might be stuck outside for a night or worse.

  Skiing was a great equalizer. On skis I was very fast, didn’t limp, and never even thought about my bad leg. In fact, I always hated to take off my skis and take that first step, feel my left leg stomp down on the heel, earthbound after I had been flying down the mountain free as if I was already in my perfected resurrected body that Mom told me I’d have some day.

  When I was four and just beginning to recover from polio, Dad, against doctor’s orders, took me skiing before I could balance again on my atrophied left leg and walk. I literally learned to ski before I could walk, at least the second time around. Dad gave me confidence. From then on, I assumed that I had no disability, just a nasty-looking left leg and a limp, something I could overcome with a little effort.

  When I taught my daughter Jessica to ski, and we were snowplowing our way down the slopes above Villars, the memory of Dad teaching me flooded back. I actually couldn’t remember his teaching me to ski, but the feel of holding three-year-old Jessica and placing her skis inside mine, and guiding her down the slope while I gripped her between my knees, revived a kind of kinetic memory. Suddenly I knew just how my father had felt, teaching his little boy. I could sense the tenderness as he held me up, bracing me against his legs, showing me how to compensate for a leg that wouldn’t work, to put my weight on the right leg, turn, and pull the other leg around by shifting my body weight.

  At Gai Matin, I took ski lessons with the advanced class. I won several downhill and giant slalom races against other schools. I also learned to skate and played ice hockey, the only drawback being that my bad ankle would wobble even in a specially reinforced skate boot.

  Except for a couple of miserable and exceedingly fat Saudi brothers, I got on well with the other children. As for those fat Saudis, they would sometimes spit. Why they spit on me and the other children, I have no idea.

  I cured their nasty habit after they had been spitting on me every time they passed while we were skating at the Villars rink. I cornered them in the locker room and punched each of the Arabs in the solar plexus, hard. They looked surprised, as if it had never occurred to them that anyone would do more than yell back. They both landed with a plop on the floor and began to wail like babies.

  The sports-master-hockey-coach-math-teacher, a tall, forty-something bald and cadaverously wiry Frenchman, asked the fat Saudis why they were crying. When they told him, he grabbed me, spun me around, then kicked me in the bottom as hard as he could, sending me flying into the lockers as if I had just been drop-kicked through a goal. Then he asked for my side of the story. I told him that the boys had been spitting at me. He lit a cigarette and sucked down a huge drag—he was a chain-smoker and even smoked when coaching hockey, and in class—and stood staring down at me and blowing smoke through his enormous and widely flared nostrils that looked like the blackened openings to twin train tunnels. He asked several other students for their account and they said yes, the fat Arabs spit at everyone. Then he gathered about a dozen of us in a circle and told us to spit on “Ces sale Arabes” (these filthy Arabs), and after we all did, he kicked them hard in their fat behinds—they, too, went flying—and that was that.

  The private Swiss “schools,” tuck
ed away by the dozen in practically every valley and on every mountainside, were crazy little fiefdoms with their own laws and were completely off the map as far as any normal discipline went. Madame Moraz played favorites. If you were on her good side, you could do anything you wanted. If you were on her bad side, she would organize elaborate public humiliation spectacles and laugh a barking grim laugh at the child being punished. One good way to gain her favor was to mock the offender as loudly and gleefully as possible.

  The most routine punishment was to have to sit cross-legged outside Madame Moraz’s study door while balancing a big Larousse dictionary on your head while every student who walked past was encouraged to jeer. Then there were the more extravagant public executions, including standing on your chair to show the class—in the case of the very little children—your wet pants, if you had wet yourself. Or she would make you stand up in the dining room and eat food you hated like liver or sauerkraut that you hadn’t finished. Then she would ask the other students to take whatever food was left on their plates—the favorites, of course, didn’t have to eat anything they didn’t like—and pile those leavings on the offender’s plate, while he or she tried to eat it all and got sick. And, of course, slapping, kicking, and pulling hair was par for the course, though ironically there was no formal spanking and in the school brochure—printed in at least a dozen languages, accompanied by lovely pictures of the mountains and wide-angle photographs of the school’s interior that made all the rooms seem three times bigger than they were—it stated that corporal punishment was “against the founder’s principles” and never used because she was “a follower of Gandhi,” something my mother read to me by way of warning me to be on the look out for “Hindu influences.”