Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  I think my problem with remaining an evangelical centered on what the evangelical community became. It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American Christianity, the sheer stupidity, the paranoia of the American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture, all of it . . . that made me crazy. It was just too stupid for words.

  The Greek Orthodox Church is the least-changed continuous body of Christian worship and tradition. So what? The average pebble in my driveway predates human existence by a hundred million years or so. On the other hand, if you want to try to live as a Christian, maybe it makes sense to attach yourself to a body of faith that bears at least a passing resemblance to what Christians everywhere, from the beginning of the Christian era, believed and, more importantly, did.

  Perhaps there is a more substantive point: Once you buy the evangelical born-again “Jesus saves” mantra, the idea that salvation is a journey goes out the window. You’re living in the realm of a magical formula. It seems to me that the Orthodox idea of a slow journey to God, wherein no one is altogether instantly “saved” or “lost” and nothing is completely resolved in this life (and perhaps not in the next), mirrors the reality of how life works, at least as I’ve experienced it.

  One thing I do not regret is that I missed the “opportunity” to be the so-called big-time evangelical leader I could have been. I was good at speaking. We would never have run out of paranoid delusions with which to stir up the ever-fearful and willfully ignorant. But the idea of “passing up” a chance to become a cross between Pat Robertson, Elmer Gantry, and Ralph Reed never bothered me.

  The basic prayer of the Greek Orthodox Church, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!” has become a personal mantra. It is almost like breathing, an answer to any situation, from waiting for a call from a son at war, to hoping I’ll sell a book, to moments when I have, for the hundredth time, been rude, mean, and a bad husband. The prayer belongs to the historic church, but the impulse that drives me to say it was bred into me before I could talk.

  It doesn’t matter what I think. It is a question of what I am. And I am grateful. There is plenty to feel guilty about. I don’t see guilt as a hang-up to be cured, but a truthful statement of my condition. And prayer seems to me to be the only logical response, not the cure but an answer.

  63

  Honesty is the only thing that is satisfying about writing. And honesty is always filled with inconsistency. Since our opinions change, to be “sure” about anything—as if that opinion is fixed and will last forever—is to lie. Anything we say is only a snapshot of a passing moment.

  Honesty is what was missing from my evangelical writing and my evangelical and secular movies. How could I make an honest documentary when I had to replace stunning footage of David with stock dreck so that I wouldn’t offend idiots? How could I make a good Hollywood movie when I saw everything as just a steppingstone to another deal? How could I be honest when I was a different person to different groups?

  Most of the time, I was biting my tongue. If I wanted to be invited back, I couldn’t go on the 700 Club and tell people that the host was a lunatic. I couldn’t go on Dobson’s Focus on the Family and tell the truth: The host was a power-crazed political manipulator cynically abusing his followers. And I couldn’t tell my Hollywood producers that they were full of shit when they cast their girlfriends to star in their movie. I wanted the next job!

  By playing along and keeping my mouth shut, I was selling out to be able to find integrity later, something like going to whores to find a faithful wife. But whores just led to more whores.

  Once I freed myself from a political and religious agenda, I was able to find inspiration in some very unexpected places. After John joined the Marines in 1999, he and I wrote Keeping Faith—A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps. It generated a huge correspondence. Our new readers were barely aware of me as a novelist, let alone as a former evangelical activist. I had stumbled into yet another subculture. Judging by several thousands of e-mails, my new military readers thought of me as one of their spokespeople, telling their story at a time when most Americans didn’t even know someone in the military.

  Being part of the military family changed me. I found myself connected to a community that believes in service and sacrifice and that lives by what they believe. They contrasted sharply with the leaders of the big-time evangelical world. We evangelical “leaders” had talked about saving America but never made any sacrifices for our country. We left the sacrificing to our “ordinary” followers.

  After 9/11, I wrote several more books about being the father of a Marine who was at war. My credibility on the subject of the military family didn’t come from my writer’s credentials, but from the fact that my son was serving. The reason military parents read what I wrote, and responded to it, was because we shared a profound pride and anguish. It wasn’t about politics or who we voted for or whether we approved of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; it was about solidarity, brotherhood, and being humbled by the fact that our children were willing to be sent into harm’s way for our country. After having spent years talking about America, while knowing almost nothing of our country, I was finally talking about something I actually had a stake in: my country, which my son was risking his life for.

  Being exposed to people who led by doing, typified by the Marine Corps drill instructors I got to know on Parris Island (while researching Baby Jack), was a turning point for me. It is one of the reasons I wrote this memoir.

  After John joined the Marines, I found that I gradually began to understand my life in a new way. I wanted to try to come clean. I wanted to admit my mistakes. I wanted to try to be the same person to everyone I met. I wanted to try to write with the same level of honesty that the Marine Corps drill instructors demand of their recruits and live by themselves.

  64

  One night Genie and I came back from our walk on Sandy Point, the beach at the southern tip of Plum Island. At low tide, extreme low tide during a full summer moon, Sandy Point opens up to a vast half-mile-wide tidal flat. We walked on the hard-packed rippled ocean’s floor late in the afternoon. There was no one there besides us.

  We came home at about six-thirty PM, after midnight in Switzerland where John, Francis, and Jessica had all just met up the day before, along with Becky, John’s girlfriend. Jessica had flown down from Finland (where she lives with her husband Dani and her children Ben and Amanda), and they were all staying in a L’Abri guest apartment at Chalet Les Sapins, up the back road from Chalet Les Mélèzes. Francis flew over to visit at the same time and was staying with John and Priscilla Sandri.

  My son John had traveled to Paris meet Becky. She was there as a chaperone with the Waring School French trip, when the juniors go to France for six weeks to soak up a little European culture. All three of my children, as well as Becky, had made this Waring trip as high school students.

  Before John flew over, he had been staying with us, having just returned from his first year at the University of Chicago. It was a triumphant turn of events for the former Marine, who had made it home from war, alive, uninjured, home to be held, loved, spoiled, home to leave dirty socks and scattered running shoes, evidence that he was alive.

  John had asked Vincent Hawley, the son of my friend and neorealist painter Steve Hawley, to design the ring. Vincent only had three days. Only at the last moment did John remember that Vincent, who had just completed his training as a jeweler, might be the person to ask. Anyway, there was the ring, produced as if by magic, a band of white gold with eight little diamonds sprinkled through it like a slice of the Milky Way, lovely and small to fit Becky’s delicate hand.

  She plays the flute beautifully. She will move to Chicago in the fall. Becky is in love. So is John. He asked her in Paris; three days later, she said yes in Switzerland, standing on the back road, my back road, looking at the Dents Du Midi, next to Priscilla and John Sa
ndri’s chalet.

  As we walked in the door from our walk, the phone rang. It was John telling us that he was engaged. They are with my family, with Priscilla and John and Debby and Udo. They are in my mountains, in fields full of my wildflowers where I first kissed my Genie. They are in love where I found my love. They are in my life. And I am in theirs.

  65

  At the Metropolitan Museum of Art (while strolling as if in a dream through an ethereal exhibition of eighteenth-century Japanese screens), I read a poem that seemed to sum up so much about my restless mother and her relationship with the world:To love

  Unloved

  Is more futile

  Than to write

  On a flowing stream

  Mom is ninety-two. Sometimes she talks wistfully about the time when a “real Broadway producer” saw her dance while she was at college. This producer asked her to come to New York. “I had talent. I could have made it,” Mom says. “But my parents forbade it. In fact, when I asked them if I could go, they were so shocked that I had been dancing in a school production that they threatened to take me out of college.”

  In my mother’s second childhood, as a very old lady with memory loss, her greatest pleasure, one that literally seems to raise her up, is not Bible study but dancing. When I take her out during my visits back to Switzerland, I have to guide her as we walk. Macular degeneration has robbed Mom of sight, except for a little peripheral vision. And she is unsteady on her feet. But her favorite destination is to go to the Hôtel Trois Couronnes in Vevey.

  We head for the piano bar, where Mom orders tea or sometimes buys us both a glass of champagne. But the main attraction is the Italian man who plays the piano. When he sees Mom, he starts playing her favorites, tunes by Cole Porter, some Gershwin, and plenty of Duke Ellington. Then Mom dances.

  All of a sudden she doesn’t seem old, or blind, or helpless. She stands by the baby grand and sways to the music in an old-lady version of Isadora Duncan free-form dancing, combined with the Charleston. Everyone in the bar watches, and she always sits down to a round of applause.

  I have never loved or admired Mom more than when she dances as the oldest of old ladies. And I wish she had been dancing when I was a child. And although this may sound like a cliché, when Mom dances, she literally looks young again. Her face lights up and she smiles at the world she can’t see any more. And all the frail uncertainty leaves her body for a few minutes and she is steady on her feet again.

  Mom is old, radiant, at peace, and unafraid when she dances. And the paradox is that the woman who I remember no longer exists. The woman who rejoiced that Lynnette was giving up dancing to serve the Lord is gone.

  Sometimes I think that maybe the reason that all Mom’s heartfelt prayers for her family seem to have been answered is because the old woman, whose life has become so simple, is the woman God saw when he looked at Edith Schaeffer during all those crazy years.

  Perhaps God answered the prayers of Edith as she might have been and deep down wanted to be but did not know how to be, because she was working so hard to conform herself to an idea that was false. The sense I have that Mom’s prayers for her family have been answered does not seem far-fetched when I meet my mother now, meet her as perhaps God made her before her idea of herself—or her parents’ long reach—obscured her.

  I am curious about the fact that all those tunes are so familiar to Mom. She has forgotten so much, say where she had breakfast or who she just met, but she sings the old show tunes as if she had spent a lifetime on Broadway. That “jazzy music” was banned from our home when I was young; if we were changing radio stations and hit upon any of the tunes she sings so gleefully in old age, Mom would turn off the radio with a snap and reproachful glare. In the early unreconstructed fundamentalist years, Mom always said “Real Christians don’t dance. It isn’t pleasing to the Lord.”

  I never knew how sad that belief must have been making her. And she must have been so torn up inside as she expressed such fierce joy over Lynnette giving up dancing, when buried deep there was the memory of the day she also gave up, or was forced to give up, her talent for God.

  EPILOGUE

  My son John wrote:Although I didn’t understand it when I was growing up I’ve realized since, that my father lives and works on almost everything he does with a kind of frenetic desperation.

  In the prologue, I said that the only answer to “Who are you?” is “When?” What was true for prologue is doubly true of epilogue. We never arrive. There are no final answers, only a series of snapshots taken along the path of “frenetic desperation.”

  Movies

  In the mid-1990s, I almost made it through the front door of the movie business again. I co-wrote a screenplay adaptation of Portofino with Frank Gruber. We signed on with a producer friend of Frank’s. He claimed he had the money lined up. He hired Malcolm Mowbray, a BBC TV and film director who had directed a movie I liked (A Private Function starring Maggie Smith and Michael Palin). Malcolm cast John Lithgow to play the father and Dianne Wiest to play the mother and we had a lead on Haley Joel Osment to play my alter-ego “Calvin.”

  I had breakfast with Lithgow in Beverly Hills, got nice notes from Wiest via her agent, including one saying that Portofino was the best script she had read since Bullets Over Broadway. I was flown to Italy to scout locations. I got paid top dollar for the option on my novel. There was a double full-page ad in Variety announcing the start of principal photography.

  Then the German financiers backed out. Lithgow had to shoot the next season of Third Rock from the Sun. The window of opportunity closed, just as a new paperback edition of Portofino was published with “now a major motion picture” printed on the cover.

  I still get e-mail from readers asking me where the movie is. I ran into Lithgow at the Whitney Museum in New York (he was in town starring in the stage production of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). He said that he was sad the Portofino deal fell through, and that Malcolm called from time to time trying to get it going again.

  The producer gave me a coffee mug with the cover of the original hardback of my novel printed on it, which I use as a paperweight. I never heard from him again until several years later, when he e-mailed me after he saw me on Oprah, talking about Keeping Faith.

  After the United Artists-Steve Bach debacle, I was stunned. I had thought Steve was one of those gods who had “made it” and that with him behind me I was “in.” After Portofino-the-movie fell apart, I wasn’t surprised, merely resigned. Ten years of knocking around making movies meant that I never allowed myself to get excited about a project. I knew that nothing ever turns out the way you hope, if at all. No one is ever “in.” So when a producer at DreamWorks called me in mid-2006 about wanting to option the movie rights on my novel Baby Jack, and then after we talked almost every day for several weeks and I didn’t hear back from him, I didn’t bother to even try to find out why. To give it a second thought would have interrupted that day’s writing.

  Any time I find myself fantasizing about trying to get one of my novels made into a movie and almost pick up my phone to try to revive old contacts and “get something going,” I think about the good advice the movie director Sergei Bodrov gave me. We were at a dinner party, and it was right after Sergei’s movie Prisoner of the Mountain was nominated for an Oscar. I said I sometimes considered trying to direct again, to get my novels made into movies. Sergei, who had recently read Saving Grandma, looked at me as if I were crazy.

  “Why would you want to sit in all those hundreds of stupid meetings that never result in anything?” he asked. “You have the luxury of being at home, writing books that are actually published and read! If I could write novels successfully, I would never waste another moment on trying to put movie deals together. Don’t let anything distract you!”

  I didn’t need much convincing.

  Art

  In 1980, when we were about to move to America, I had to pack up everything in my studio in Chalet Regina. It was as if I was packing the bel
ongings of a beloved relative who had died six years before. I hadn’t touched a brush since 1974. Everything was lying just as I’d left it when I followed Billy Zeoli into a life that changed everything for me and made me almost forget who I had hoped to be.

  There was an unfinished painting still on the easel. As I packed up dozens of tubes of paint, jars full of brushes, my woodcut blocks, sketchpads, charcoal, and pencils, I tried not to look at anything too closely. After we got to our new home in America, I left everything in the boxes.

  It was over thirty years before I unpacked my paints. Before that, I hadn’t had the courage to face the evidence of my treason. Abandoning painting made everything else I was doing seem half-assed until I had worked hard enough at my “secular” writing to feel that I had rehabilitated myself.

  Genie once asked me if I was ever going to paint again. My answer: “I made one false start. I want to be good at something. I’m sticking with the writing for now.” But once I had four novels published, and four nonfiction “secular” books, too, it was as if I’d built a wall to keep out the memories of those evangelical pieces of propaganda I’d written so badly and hastily, and the crappy movies I’d made in Hollywood.

  That was when I decided I could unpack my art supplies. When I did, I felt as if the brushes, unused canvases, paints, and the old crusted palette were shouting “Where the fuck have you been?”

  Most of the thirty-year-old tubes were still okay. I dragged my old easel out of the barn and set it up in the renovated wood-shed attached to our house. I write at one end of the room and paint at the other. I write every day, seven days a week. And sometimes I paint. Not every day, but fairly regularly.