Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Our “single mothers” were sometimes accompanied by Mom, or another worker, to the hospital in Aigle for the delivery. Sin was sin; but since we were all sinners who had fallen very short of the glory of God, there was no stigma attached to pregnancy. Nor was there a stigma attached to mental retardation, or mental illness.

  I saw that my parents’ compassion was consistent. Their idea of ministry was to extend a hand of kindness, and to truly practice the rule of treating others as you would be treated. It was such a powerful demonstration that it gave me a lifelong picture of what Christian behavior and love can and should be.

  My parents were not advocating compassion that someone else would carry out with tax dollars, or at arm’s length, but rather they opened their home. The result was that those gathered around our table represented a cross-section of humanity and intellectual ability, from mental patients to Oxford students and all points of need in between. My mother and father marshaled arguments in favor of God, the Bible, and the saving work of Jesus Christ. But no words were as convincing as their willingness to lay material possessions, privacy, and time on the line, sometimes at personal risk and always with the understanding that if they were being taken advantage of, that was fine, too.

  Between my sisters’ pregnancies and the several unwed girls’ pregnancies, not to mention many of the workers’ wives’ pregnancies, baby-making was something I was completely familiar with. For a woman to be pregnant seemed normal and wonderful. I loved being allowed to place my hands on those huge bellies and feel the babies kick. I never heard a judgmental, unkind, or even condescending word spoken about our unwed mothers. In fact, my parents would express fury when they talked about “some Christian parents” who were “ashamed of their daughter” and sent them to L’Abri to be out of the way during an embarrassing pregnancy. Dad let it be known that if anyone in L’Abri had a problem with his non-judgmental attitude, they could leave.

  I remember one young woman in particular. Jan was a lovely breezy twenty-year-old. She had long brown hair and a freckled face and was an old-fashioned tomboy. She used to sit with her long tan legs splayed wide open and frankly push her cotton print dress down between them to be modest but never even pretended to cross her legs.

  I was about eight or nine when she came to L’Abri. She stayed the better part of a year. Jan spent hours telling me how she had installed a truck engine in her car and used to race boys from the one stoplight to the crossroads in her small Michigan town. She loved the fact that she could always “blow them off the map” with that truck engine.

  Jan was a mechanic, and her dad was, too. Jan was at L’Abri because her father was also an elder in their local Reformed Presbyterian church and didn’t want to be humiliated by his daughter’s pregnancy. Mom and Dad were enraged against her father on her behalf. Jan was one of the best people, and certainly one of the most attractive people, I have ever met.

  After Jan came home from the Aigle Hospital—Mom went with her for the delivery—she stayed with us for about six more months. I would help bathe the baby, watch Jan breast-feed from hugely swollen breasts, and I noticed that she leaked milk. She always laughed about the way her blouse would stain. Jan would tell me all about how she planned to raise her son.

  Jan became a helper. There were some evangelicals visiting who said they were a bit shocked that a L’Abri helper would be a single unwed mother. What kind of example was that? Dad went ballistic, as did Mom.

  22

  Dad could be screaming at Mom one minute, or just bluntly muttering “I’ll kill myself one of these days,” and ten minutes later he would be down in the dining room earnestly answering questions from the guests. They never had any inkling about his state of mind—except when, once in a while, the yelling could be heard or when a tea tray or vase would be hurled down the stairs or over the balcony. But people pretended nothing was happening, except of course for Mom, who would work a sanitized version of her interminable fights with Dad into her talks as a demonstration of the way God was working in their lives “in spite of Fran’s weaknesses.”

  I once thought Dad’s ability to present two very different faces to the world—one to his family and one to the public—was gross hypocrisy. I think differently now. I believe Dad was a very brave man.

  Suffering from bouts of depression, I have come to understand that the choice is to carry on or not, no matter how I feel. And since my dad literally had no close friends, let alone a confessor or therapist to talk to, his suffering was in near-total isolation. When that bleak grayness envelops everything for a few days or hours and sucks all the joy and air out of a day, as a writer I can just shut the world out, if I want, and retire to some inner cave and nurse my depression. Dad craved privacy, too, but his work was people. And Dad never sought counseling.

  I was lucky enough to go to the same therapist (once every two weeks for about a year) who had helped my son Francis cope with, then overcome, his severe childhood dyslexia. I’ve also been fortunate to have several very close male and female friends about my age—not counting family and work-related friends—who have stuck with me through all the twists and turns of what feels like a long life. And even with the luxury of that support, I’ve found many days hard to get through.

  Dad was incredibly alone. I can’t think of one nonworkrelated friend, let alone a contemporary, who he kept up with. Dad had adoring followers, co-workers, and family, but no equals, no one who knew him who he had stayed in contact with, no friend from school days, no one to pour out his troubles to, no one to tell him he was full of shit from time to time.

  The only private space my father had was in his bedroom. And he spent every moment he could cloistered there. If he stepped out and went downstairs, a group of guests would instantly gather around him and follow him.

  “Dr. Schaeffer, I have a question. . . .”

  Dad sat in a small rocking chair pulled up to his bed, which he used as his desk. He worked on a tray, hunched over his papers. There were ink stains on the thick yellow wool bedspread. (Dad used three different colors of ink to mark his Bible and make notes in the margin.)

  Dad’s bedroom/office was invaded by the voices of the students talking in the rooms below. The more students there were staying at L’Abri, the louder Dad turned up his music. I grew up thinking that classical music always has be played so loud that the speakers bounce and that it is normal to play blasting music ten, twelve, or fifteen hours a day. My room was next to Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Dad’s wall of deafening music turned my room into a concert hall. It is rare for me to hear a piece of classical music I can’t hum along with. (Even today, whenever I hear classical music played at anything below full blast, it sounds wrong.) “Dad’s music,” as I will always think of the classical canon, became part of me, as if it had been surgically embedded in my head. I still feel close to him whenever I listen to any one of his hundreds of “favorite pieces.”

  We always knew what to give Dad for birthdays and Christmas. The trick was to sneak into his bedroom to try to find what pieces he didn’t already have or, sometimes, to check on what records were so scratched that he might like a replacement. (Dad’s method of putting a record on a turntable was to slap it down like a pancake being flipped in a skillet, then drop the needle wherever it happened to land.)

  The music would shelter Dad from students’ voices, but it didn’t lift his depressions. However, I don’t recall Dad canceling any appearances in his daily routine or on a speaking trip. But I do recall many a day when he became so grim and silent that he seemed to be dead.

  Dad did contemplate suicide. He sometimes spoke in detail about hanging himself. I went through my childhood knowing that there were two things we children were never to tell anyone. The first was that Dad got insanely angry with my mother; the second was that from time to time he threatened suicide.

  Mom was naturally gregarious. But Dad’s idea of what he had to do with his life was horribly at odds with his introverted personality. And the fact h
e carried on doing what he believed to be right—opening his home—was a brave and wholly admirable thing.

  Dad’s dedication took a toll. His basic demeanor was one of being chronically annoyed, as if his world was filled with buzzing flies he wanted to swat. He “swatted” them by being a habitual complainer. He would never go anywhere, from a vacation to a speaking trip, without a litany of moaning and groaning about how tired he was, how he would never make it, how “I just can’t do this, Edith!”

  But later, when it counted most, Dad proved that he was made of brave material. In his midsixties, after my father was diagnosed with lymphoma, he suddenly quit all his petty complaining. For the six years he was fighting for his life, Dad never said a word about the discomfort and pain caused by the interminable chemotherapy sessions, bone-biopsy punctures, lung-fluid draining, weight loss, collapses, emergency procedures, nausea, and diarrhea. His stoic silence surprised us. And Dad never once talked about suicide during his illness.

  My father met his death fearlessly, clear-eyed and with no self-pity. Dad didn’t become any more or less spiritual than he had always been. He had never laced his speech with the-Lord-this or the-Lord-that jargon. (My father always dismissed such typical evangelical pietisms as “all that superspiritual stuff I hate.”) And Dad never expressed any fear of death. He apologized for the wrongs he remembered doing, put his affairs in order, and was less demanding than he had ever been.

  23

  When I was about nine, Dad and I started taking hikes together. He reserved one Monday a month as “my day with Frank.” (Everyone called me Frankie but Dad.) I loved those times.

  At home, it was as if Dad was an actor on stage, always performing for the students, always “on,” always certain, always bold. I had almost never been alone with my father before. Who he really was—when not around the students—came as something of a shock.

  Out of the limelight, Dad was quiet. He was sweet. Above all, he was humble and considerate. And what moved him wasn’t theology, but beauty.

  “Look at the light!” he would exclaim, as a ray of sun broke through the clouds above some high valley. Or “Stop! Listen!” as we stepped over a stream, and Dad would pause to enjoy the sound of the water splashing into a rocky pool.

  Dad is clearest in my mind plodding steadily ahead on a trail, his sturdy pistonlike legs passing over the steep path effortlessly. He would turn, stop, wait for me to catch up, and sometimes hug me or tousle my hair before we walked on.

  We would set out on misty mornings when the mountains were shrouded in fog. Dew clung to the twigs; the mud on the trail would be slick. Water dripped from the pine branches, and Dad always led. I followed mile after mile as he kept up a steady pace, the same uphill as down. Years later, when Dad had cancer and told me he was getting out of breath just walking up stairs, I knew the cancer was going to kill him. Dad never broke a sweat, never gasped for breath, no matter how far we walked.

  We’d hike from about seven in the morning until five in the afternoon, then take one of the many narrow-gauge trains that crisscross the Swiss Alps, or one of the many postal buses, back to some town, then the train to Aigle, then the small train to Ollon, and finally “our” bus up to Huémoz. Or sometimes we’d use the same network to take us twenty or so miles from home, then walk back. Once in a while, we’d stay out overnight in some clean little room over a café.

  Dad always carried maps and laboriously marked where we had walked by tracing over the trails on the hiking maps with ink. One of my most treasured possessions is my collection of Dad’s tattered and heavily marked-up hiking maps. When I look at them, I sense my father much more clearly than when I open one of his books and read a few lines.

  On our hikes, we would talk about Dad’s childhood in Philadelphia, or his bitter mother and how difficult it was having her live with us, or his weaknesses and how sorry he was for them, perhaps after he’d been fighting with Mom the day before and knew I knew he had been. Left to himself, Dad never talked about theology or God, let alone turned some conversation into a pious lesson the way Mom did. Left to himself, reality seemed enough for Dad. Besides, this was a day off, and God and the Bible were work.

  We talked about the Second World War and how the Swiss mined all the tunnels and bridges so that the Germans didn’t invade. We talked about Dad when he was a Boy Scout troop leader. Dad told me about shooting rats with his .22 rifle at his college, Hampden-Sydney, about getting in a fight there with a huge drunk student and banging his head on the ground to knock him out, about the deal he cut with the “unsaved” students in his dorm: Dad agreed to put them to bed on Friday nights, after they passed out on the way back from bars, if they would go to church with him on Sunday mornings.

  Dad taught me the Hampden-Sydney football fight song, which we would sometimes sing together so loudly—“I’m a tiger born and a tiger bred, and when I die I’ll be a tiger dead! Rah-Rah Hampden-Sydney, Rah-Rah Hampden-Sydney, Rah-Rah Hampden-Sydney, Rah, Rah, Rah!”—that our voices echoed from the cliffs in many a high valley. Sometimes we’d stop for a rest and Dad would show me wrestling holds, like the half-nelson, chokeholds, or where to hit someone so they would go down, or how to get in close, grab, twist, break bones, and incapacitate someone bigger than you (a lesson in fighting dirty and for keeps that came in handy several times later in life).

  We talked about the Depression and how, as a teen, Dad had worked in an RCA factory and was part of a strike when the foreman kept speeding up the conveyor belt and forcing them to work faster and faster, and how he was paid twenty cents an hour and felt lucky to get that. We talked about the Soviets, and if America was strong enough to stop them taking over the world. But most of the time we hiked for many miles without speaking a word.

  When I was fifteen and on a hike with Dad, I confronted him over how he treated Mom. Years later, Mom said that after that he began to behave better. Maybe this was true, or maybe she was just being kind to him and to me.

  Sometimes I meet former L’Abri guests who tell me they went on a hike with my father. (He would occasionally take a student.) They tell me about the deep, long philosophical or theological discussion they had with Dad on this or that memorable hike. They say how privileged they feel at having gotten “so close to him.” I want to tell them that if Dad was talking about his usual subjects, they never did get close to him. They only saw him when he was “on.”

  Once in a while, I could tell that Dad was waiting for the right moment to instruct me. Then he would act serious and reserved until he got it off his chest.

  “Mom says you aren’t trying very hard in your schoolwork.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Are you trying at all?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Well, try harder, or I’ll have to spank you.”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  And that was it. His duty done, Dad seemed relieved. He had of course been put up to this by Mom, who sometimes would say “You have to speak to Frankie, Fran.” And Dad would wait until we were on a hike to do his duty.

  After that, he’d relax. And the mountains would seem to slowly roll past, subtly changing shape, narrowing or fattening depending on the perspective from wherever we were on the trail.

  Sometimes we had adventures.

  “Dad, that looks like a bull.”

  “I don’t think so. They wouldn’t put him here in an open field.”

  “Okay.”

  Moments later: “Frank! It is a bull! Get behind me!”

  Dad waving his walking stick, back to a tree. Me, hiding behind him.

  “We’ll need to work our way to the fence, then dive under the barbed wire!”

  “Okay, Dad!”

  Running, slipping in the wet grass, noticing a cloud of flies rising from the cow shit I’ve just landed in, the young bull running around us in circles bellowing, Dad turning to yell at it, holding his cane out like a saber, me picking up a stick and also waving it, Dad and I laughing hysterically after we get under
the fence and, moments later, both getting the shakes.

  I’d count the hours until we’d stop to eat the wonderful sandwiches Mom had made with crusty fresh bread. In the summer, she always put in big slices of peeled cucumbers from our garden, or peeled carrot slivers. They had just been picked by her, and the bread had still been warm when she sent a student to the village bakery that morning to get it.

  It was a big moment when Dad opened his little leather backpack and pulled out the sandwiches, along with the salt and pepper he always carried in two old aluminum film cans with twist-off tops, and his small sheath knife with the antler handle. If we were near a village, we’d stop at the café and order apple juice for me and a coffee for Dad, and eat our picnic while some old farmer eyed us suspiciously and sipped his white wine.

  24

  Lynnette accepted Jesus. She became one of those great salvation stories, a “true testimonial to the power of God,” because later that night, the same night her name was written in The Book of Life—presuming that she was not going to backslide and thereby prove she wasn’t of the Elect after all—Lynnette, who was a ballet dancer, danced before the Lord.

  Actually, she danced before the Lord and us on the terrace in front of the chalet, the place we had hot-dog roasts every Saturday night in the summer and outdoor discussions. Lynnette danced in the moonlight while we stood on the second-floor balcony above and watched. She danced for joy at her new-found faith in Christ. My sisters, several guests, and Mom wept.

  Usually when someone got saved, Susan just played the “Hallelujah Chorus” part of Handel’s Messiah on the record player. But in this case, Lynnette danced to the strange and disturbing music from Stravinsky’s Firebird. (Dad had the record in his collection, though it was not one of his favorites.) This piece was chosen by Lynnette because she had danced in the Firebird ballet in London. Her interpretation was particularly moving (at least to Mom and my sisters), because Lynnette announced that now that she had accepted Jesus, she was feeling led to leave the ballet and to go into “full-time Christian work,” maybe at L’Abri, or perhaps back in London where she might use her flat (an apartment with a rather swanky address at Sloane Square) as a “L’Abri base” for my dad to hold discussions in.