Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  John Sandri and Priscilla came to live with us during their summer break from Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. John built a raft for me and floated it down the small tidal river that ran through the property. I discovered gnats and black flies, something shocking to a boy raised in the Alps, where, except for an occasional horsefly, there are no biting insects. We got incredibly muddy as we made our way up a marshy bank onto some swanky estate’s lawn. A woman in a blue striped dress was very nice and let us hose off and telephoned our hostess to come and get us. John had struggled to keep my cast out of the water and mud, but it had gotten filthy. Debby cleaned it off before Mom saw it. I was sure the single stitch was done for.

  At dinner, old Mrs. Johnson would treat Mom like a social equal—but only after Mom cooked dinner and served it and then sat down to join us. When we arrived, Mrs. Johnson had let her maid go, since she was going to let the missionaries staying with her provide the domestic help. Mom, Debby, and Priscilla were treated like servants. We were guests but feeling like a family of illegal immigrants stuck without a car, money, or a means to do anything more than work off the room and board. (Susan, barely eighteen, had been left in charge of L’Abri, an experience she described later as frightening.)

  “She has oodles of money and could get new dish towels instead of making us use these old rags, and all the sheets have holes in them!” Mom would say. “It’s the way with old money, very stingy,” said Dad.

  “She could really do something for the Lord, but this is all she does, lets us live here as her servants! She has enough money so she could buy a whole new chalet for the work if she wanted, and keep her maid while we’re here so we could get a real rest from the Lord’s work!”

  One afternoon my mother asked Mrs. Johnson why there was only one peeler in the drawer after she had tried to find a second one so Debby could help peel potatoes. “Because,” Mrs. Johnson answered, “servants always lose everything and if you have two of anything it just gives them an excuse!” The summer was broiling. It was my first taste of East Coast humidity, and there was no air conditioning. My cast came up to my hip. The skin began to itch. “Something died in there,” I said after I noticed that when I’d itch my leg—with a knitting needle—I’d stir up quite a stench. At one point, it itched so badly that I tried to scratch my leg by feeding a fish hook into the cast. Debby spent her summer covering up what I was doing to the cast, taping up the heel I’d broken down walking on it and trying to get the fish hook out and worrying about what the doctor would say when he cut the cast off and saw all the added layers of tape.

  Debby would also read to me out loud for hours and hold my legs so I could “swim” in the pool by dunking my head and shoulders into the water up to my waist while keeping my legs out. My one great sorrow was that pool. We had a swimming pool at last, and I couldn’t swim in it!

  Dad went away on several speaking trips. For once, Mom stayed with us. I was eating my weight in the cereals we couldn’t get in Switzerland and drinking A&W root beer. And I was watching TV! I saw The Lone Ranger and other programs that had been described to me by American children visiting L’Abri.

  It was on that trip that I got a first inkling that our family was pitied by other people. I learned that Dr. Ferguson, “who is not even saved but has a real heart for the Lord’s work,” donated my operation when he found out Mom and Dad were missionaries. I felt embarrassed.

  It was the first time I had met people who said they were believers who had nothing to do with L’Abri. I went along with Dad on several speaking trips to local churches. I was very aware that somehow we weren’t like “them.” They had ordinary jobs and then were Christians as an added bonus, whereas Christianity was all we did. And I would watch how people in “ordinary churches,” as Mom called them, related to us and we to them.

  I was discovering that we were second-class citizens, some sort of family of beggars. At the same time, from that visit on, I became more and more aware that we were also snobs. I sensed the frosty distance that separated my parents’ idea of themselves from “these ordinary American Christians.” Unlike them, my parents were aware of culture, good art, and good music. Where these Christians sang hymns that sounded tragically like trashy music, my parents played Bach. We vacationed in Italy, whereas “most of these poor dear simple American Christians don’t have your background and have not even been to Europe!”

  We took a day trip to New York City and spent the day at the Guggenheim Museum, where—to the horror of the guards—I free-wheeled my wheelchair down the winding ramp. On another day, I was taken to Radio City and loved watching the production of sound effects for a radio drama.

  It was an odd mix. We were beggars and yet looked down on the culture and the people who made our life possible. They pitied us, donated a place to stay and a free operation, and talked about how hard it must be to “leave home” and “go back to the mission field.” And we pitied their narrow existence and compared the genteel sophistication of Switzerland favorably to these “simple American Christians.” Sometimes Mom would say “They don’t even have real tea rooms here!”

  The overall feeling was that we were somehow displaced aristocrats, former royalty reduced to being dependent on less-cultured strangers, grateful yet resentful, sorry for ourselves for the sacrifices we were making for a higher cause, yet envious of those people who could lead normal lives and who owned things, got to eat Grape-Nuts every day, watched TV, and made money from everyday jobs where you were paid instead of waiting for a series of miracles.

  We were proud that we were different from other people yet craved acceptance. And we craved this not just for ourselves, but for the Lord that we were living our lives for. Because when people accepted and helped us, when they admitted that we were living lives full of meaning and spiritual purpose that they, too, craved, when they complimented Mom on her clothes and said they didn’t know any other Christians who were so stylish, or so smart, or so kind, then we had done our job and had witnessed well for our Lord. But there was also an unintended message that I picked up, which has shaped my life: we were outsiders doing everything we could to be mistaken for insiders, so that we could be accepted by the insiders and then convert them to being outsiders, like us, until everyone became an outsider and therefore we got to be insiders forever!

  We wanted nothing so much as the respect of the people who found our ideas backward and foolish. In a fantasy world of perfect outcomes, you would write a “Christian book” but have the New York Times declare it great literature, so great that the reviewer would say he was converting. And in the Style section, they would say that Edith Schaeffer was the best-dressed woman in the world, so well-dressed that this proved that not all fundamentalists were dowdy and that “we have all been wrong about you Christians.” And if those reporters visited L’Abri, they would say they had never been served so lovely a high tea, and that they had never heard such clever answers to their questions, and that because of the sandwiches, the real silver teaspoons, the beautifully cut skirt and jacket Mom was wearing, the kindness of the Schaeffer children, the fact Dad knew who Jackson Pollock was, meant that the Very Wealthy and Very Important people all over the world would not only come to Christ, but would, at last, admit that at least some Real Christians (in other words, us) were even smarter and better-dressed than worldly people, and that you can believe Jesus rose from the dead, not drink or smoke or dance, and yet be even happier, even more cultured, better in every way!

  What I never heard Mom or Dad explain was that if the world was so bad and lost, why did they spend so much time trying to imitate it and impress the lost? But the single stitch held. And when the fishhook dropped out of the cast as he cut it off, Dr. Ferguson only laughed. God is good.

  8

  L’Abri swept up many unique and interesting people. Some stayed for a day or two, others for the better part of a lifetime. Jane Stuart Smith stayed for most of her life. And she was a great destination! When you cut across the main road, you
were looking right down on Chalet Le Chesalet’s lichen-splotched tile roof. There was a stone retaining wall right behind the chalet that I would climb down sometimes rather than walking by the path. There were lizards living in moss-filled cracks. If you caught one, the tail came off in your hand.

  Jane had been an opera singer until she accepted Jesus, stopped singing worldly music, and stayed on to be a worker at L’Abri. She still practiced every day and sometimes, when I was on the way to her house, I heard her singing scales up and down and up and down to higher and higher notes and then sliding all the way to the bottom notes and starting over.

  Jane’s father was rich and president of a railroad. Jane grew up in Roanoke. Mom said her father had once rented Carnegie Hall for Jane to sing in so she could have a New York debut.

  L’Abri owned all the houses used in the work. Jane and her roommate, Betty, had their own place. And because Jane received money from her family, she heated their house with oil that worked better than our coal furnace. So Chalet Le Chesalet was lovely and warm in the winter. And Jane ate lots of meat, chicken, and sometimes even roasts, and not just on Sundays. In our house, a wing was a big piece of chicken. Mom carved two or three little chickens up for thirty people, bulking out the meals with bread and margarine, rice and gravy, and, in the summer, mounds of vegetables from our garden. Sometimes I’d see a leftover chicken at Jane’s that she had shared with Betty, a whole chicken between just two people!

  Jane drank wine with her meals. She wasn’t bothered by our taboos. At Jane and Betty’s house none of my family’s many rules seemed to apply. Jane was a L’Abri worker, but she seemed to have diplomatic immunity.

  Jane never had guests stay with her but limited her ministry to serving meals twice a week to the guests and giving a monthly lecture on whatever was interesting her just then, from medieval art history to J. S. Bach’s theology. Sometimes other workers would complain that she didn’t share the workload of having students in her house, but of course no one ever dared to bring this up to her.

  I would get a huge welcome from both Jane and Betty. Betty was a writer who had once written a column for a newspaper in Illinois and gave up writing for a worldly paper. Post salvation, she only wrote Christian articles for evangelical magazines and, in later years, several inspirational books.

  Betty was diminutive, pale, and quiet and had very tidy hair; Jane was huge and flamboyant. Betty hovered at the edges of rooms; Jane filled rooms. Betty was incredibly kind and sympathetic and used to invite everyone to her birthday and give us all presents. And any time I had a problem, Betty would be the person to go and tell it to. She would make empathetic little growling and clucking noises interspersed with many an “Oh, dear, aw, what a shame. . . .”

  Together, Jane and Betty were as much a couple as any of the married workers in L’Abri. After meeting each other at L’Abri, when they were in their late twenties, they lived together for the rest of their lives. Betty once told me that the reason she stayed single was because she suffered from epilepsy and was worried that she might either pass it on to her children or not be a fit mother. Today it would be assumed that they were a lesbian couple, with Jane clearly the “husband” and sweet, retiring Betty the “wife.” But I don’t think they were lovers, just lifelong companions, and the notion that they could have been mistaken for anything but “godly single Christian ladies” living chaste lives would, I think, have shocked Betty and infuriated Jane.

  When Jane would say something unusually outrageous, even for her—say, loudly offering the opinion that anyone who disagreed with her talk on the symbolic meaning found in the art of the Hebrews’ tabernacle and Solomon’s temple, thereby proved they were not Christians because “Only idiots would disagree with me, and I don’t care if they are L’Abri workers, and you know who I mean!”—Betty would offer a quiet “Jane, you don’t mean that.” And Jane would yell “Yes, I do!” and flush a deep scarlet but then begin to calm down.

  Jane and Betty owned a mid-1950s Mercedes that they drove to Italy several times a year. The car loomed large: It was the only car in the L’Abri community. And between the fact that Jane had a car and wore a lot of diamond-crusted jewelry, inherited from her Southern-belle grandmother, not to mention got to eat lots of meat, I grew up sure that Jane was almost a royal personage.

  “Are those real diamonds?” I’d ask while playing with her big glittering ring.

  “Yes, honey, they are!”

  “Why, you rich, rich person!” I’d say.

  Jane would always laugh uproariously at this little ritual and hug me until I felt as if the breath of life was about to be crushed out of me.

  Betty drove the car, and Jane’s job was to read out loud to her all the way to Italy and back. When they returned, they would sit me down and tell me about the art they had seen, food eaten, and books read, and would show me the art books they had bought. The way they talked about Italy was as if they had been to heaven.

  I didn’t need convincing that Italy was the place any sane or lucky person would be if they had a choice. My favorite time of the year was the Schaeffer family holiday we took in Portofino.

  A stranger observing my visits to Jane and Betty would have thought I was a long-lost family member returned from war instead of the little boy who lived across the street dropping by for the second or third time that week. Jane told me that her flamboyant manner, her loud—“It’s Frankie! Come in! Come in!” greeting—was “Southern hospitality,” that she wasn’t “cold like you Yankees.”

  Jane would beam a huge ice-melting smile at me and bellow “MY, HOW WONDERFUL TO SEE YOU!” Her smile would linger and always seemed amplified by very red glossy lipstick.

  Mom wore lipstick, too, but she would dab it off with a tissue right after applying it so it was never glossy or red, just pale pinkish, a modest hint of beauty, never an open invitation to stare at her mouth. But with Jane, everything was vivid. She welcomed me with her big greeting while somewhere in the background Betty hovered, making little humming welcoming noises and murmuring, “Now, Jane, invite him in. I’ll bet you’d like something to eat. How nice you came to see us.”

  “I have something to show you!” Jane bellowed one morning as soon as I walked in.

  “Oh?”

  “Come upstairs and look!”

  “Now, Jane, do you really think he wants to see that silly thing?” murmured Betty.

  “ ‘Silly thing?’ It is NOT silly! Of course he wants to see it! Don’t you?” I nodded and followed Jane up the creaking stairs to the chalet’s narrow upstairs hall. Sitting at the end of the hall in Jane’s tiny office was a strange contraption that looked like the scales in a doctor’s office, only it had a thick leather strap hanging in a loop where on a scale the balance bar would be that the nurse moves the marker back and forth on till it tips the scale and shows your weight.

  “It’s my new exercise machine! Isn’t it marvelous?” bellowed Jane; then she threw her head back and screamed with laughter.

  “How does it work?”

  “Look!”

  Jane stepped up on the little platform, unhooked the strap, and looped it around the tight black skirt that was clinging to her tree-trunk thighs. The strap slipped neatly under the cheeks of her bottom. She then flipped a switch and the machine began to buzz like a giant mixer and the floor shook under my feet. The strap vibrated violently, and Jane’s bottom and hips began to quiver like a big bowl of Jell-O placed on a jackhammer.

  “It is going to reduce the size of my terribly fat huge bottom!” Jane yelled delightedly. “Come and try it!”

  Jane led me to the contraption, strapped me in, and flipped the switch. My vision blurred, my teeth rattled, and my bottom instantly went numb.

  “It just shakes the fat right out of you!” Jane yelled. “I’m supposed to stand here one half hour a day, and if I do, I won’t need to wear a girdle any more and still be able to fit into my skirts! Have you ever worn a girdle?”

  “N-n-n-n-n-o!” I
said, as I tried to find the switch to turn off the wildly jiggling belt.

  “Well, you are so fortunate! A girdle is like being wrapped in concrete! And you should see how many layers I have to peel off to even think of going to the bathroom! But when your thighs are like huge Virginia hams, what choice do you have? Without a girdle, I just bulge!”

  “Jane, I think that’s quite enough,” murmured Betty.

  “Oh, all right!” snapped Jane, and she flounced back downstairs after giving Betty an angry you-spoil-all-the-fun glare.

  After the machine was installed, sometimes when I visited and Betty would come to the door, the whole little chalet would be vibrating and humming as if we were on a ship standing just above the engine room. Jane was upstairs on her machine. Betty would hand me a cookie, smile, and roll her eyes upward in a silent comment about what she thought of “Jane’s contraption,” while we waited for Jane’s exercise to end and the socializing to begin.

  Jane was my introduction to American History. She said that the North was the aggressor in the Civil War and that her family had fought for the “dear old Confederacy.” I didn’t know anything about the Civil War or America, but I could tell that whatever this was about upset Jane. She took “The War of Northern Aggression” so personally and made her vivid declarations about it so passionately that I assumed that this war had been fought when she was a little girl.

  Jane would string a whole series of declarative statements together about many subjects. The South, opera, “colored people,” all got mixed into the short sermons she would preach to me. Jane was loyal to the South and to opera and said her family’s “colored people” had been happy and well cared for way back when “my family owned slaves,” before “everything was stolen and burnt down by those damned Yankees!”