Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  I was an avid soccer player, and this was a “rugby school.” About every other rugby match, I would be pulverized. My parents had forbidden me to play rugby on the logical grounds that if I broke my bad leg, it might not mend. I disobeyed them. Being the “Yank” was bad enough without drawing more attention to myself. The contemporary Lord Mostyn showed up once a year to shoot pheasants; he kept a gamekeeper in the gatehouse lodge a mile from the school. We boys were allowed to volunteer as beaters, to drive the game from the woods. There would be about twenty guns (tweed-clad hunters) and thirty beaters.

  Driving the pheasants was one of the only things we were competent to do. We were a school of failed boys, some thick, others mean, some bitter, others kind but not hard-working, and a few real delinquents. The staff often reminded us that we were “third-raters” and lucky to be in any public school. Mr. Walters, the math and science teacher, told me repeatedly that I’d be a failure.

  At GW, we had been taking mock CE exams; at St. David’s, we began to take mock O-levels, the mid-high school exams that you had to pass to take A-levels (the exams that got you into university). In GW, I had been one of the only boys failing the mock CE. In St. David’s, I had lots of company while failing mock O-levels.

  The Head and his wife didn’t care about education. What they cared about was that each boy had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Their Jesus was a meek and mild savior (at least when he wasn’t caning boys!) who, they said, would have refused to fight in both the first and second world wars. Chapel services were no longer low-church Anglican with lots of jolly singing of robust traditional hymns, but long, free-form sessions of guitar-strumming and earnest pleadings to be peace-loving, gentle, mild—just what a room full of sullen dyslexic thirteen-to-nineteen-year-old boys wanted to hear. I gained an abiding loathing of all folk music.

  The staff was so ineffectual—a few erratically applied and bloody canings aside—that they more or less let the prefects run the school. (Prefects were senior boys given the responsibility of monitoring the younger students.) To get the job, the prefects had to pretend to be Jesus-hugging milksops, but in fact were mostly vicious bullies who took out their frustrations on the rest of us in quiet corners and leafy glades.

  I saw one new boy thrown naked from a second-floor window deep into a bramble-and-nettle patch, where he struggled for over an hour to extricate himself. I was shoved, punched, and slapped until one day I got hold of one prefect after he tripped and kicked me, a tall gangling seventeen-year-old with red hair and pale almost-white eyebrows who always sang loudest in chapel, and I got in close, got him down, and broke his finger. He threw up and fainted.

  After that, I had the reputation of being a “nutter,” and the bullies kept away. He never told on me, because even in that depraved place, the code of not “sneaking” held sway, and besides, he wasn’t about to advertise the fact that a boy a head shorter, with a bad leg, and a bloody Yank to boot, had beaten him.

  Even our masturbation sessions were cheerless at St. David’s. There was one titled boy at the school. He used to provide us with Danish black-and-white pornographic postcards for a fee. This future member of the House of Lords would rent you a card for five minutes for a shilling.

  “And no bloody splatters! If you ruin my card, you’ll jolly well owe me a pound!”

  On days out, his parents would arrive in a chauffeur-driven Rolls. He said that it was the family chauffeur who got him the cards.

  Our Lord/pornographer would stand outside the “bog” (toilet) timing you.

  “You’ll owe me another shilling if you don’t hurry!” he would bellow.

  Somehow, this took the fun out of our sex lives. And he made us use the cards one at a time.

  “No group rates, you sods!”

  My second winter term, the Head decided we needed “toughening.” From then on, there was a window removed in each dorm. After that, we used to sneak empty squash bottles up to the dorms and fill them with hot water and clutch them under our covers. Once in a while, we’d share a bed.

  The several boys who were homosexuals sometimes paired off even on warm nights. And we heard a lot of scuffling in the dark. But the line between who was wanking with another boy, merely for good company and warmth, and who liked other boys “that way” was never drawn.

  Anyone who went to a boys’ school (at least in England) has probably had openly gay friends and has seen boys in bed together. You were “that way” or not. Either way, it was not a big deal. No one seemed to care about what kind of sex stimulated you, if any. I never heard any “faggot jokes,” though the term “queer” was sometimes used, as in “sod off, you queer!” But it was applied to everyone.

  Since St. David’s was new and run by goofs, it didn’t attract a good staff. The only good teacher was Mr. Stark. He was also the only teacher who graded our essays based on content, not spelling. He taught history and English and had been a tank commander in the war. Stark was large, wide-shouldered, tweed-clad, had a long sharp hooked nose, and drove an antique Bentley. He could throw a cannonball from below the battlements up to the lawn, about fifteen feet, an impossible thing to do, we boys said, until Stark did it.

  Stark was fired after he had one too many run-ins with the Head, and after he hit one of the students—Stapleton. Actually, Stark banged Stapleton’s head into his desk, after Stapleton repeatedly flicked ink all over Stark’s jacket. Stark also told fabulous war stories, which was what really got him in trouble.

  Stark was the only teacher who was honest about the school. A few weeks before he was fired, he gave me a lift into Llandudno to get a haircut.

  “Sir?” I asked.

  “Hmmm?”

  “What do you think of this place?”

  “Llandudno is a miserable little pimple.”

  “I meant the school.”

  “Is that what you call it?” He chuckled. “A bit lacking, wouldn’t you say, Schaeffer?”

  “I don’t like it much.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Everything in moderation, eh? They take everything a bit far in the religion department, don’t they?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bit less talkie-talk, bit more common sense wouldn’t hurt the place, would it?”

  “I wish you were the Head, sir.”

  “As Jeeves would say, ‘the contingency is remote,’ ” Stark said with a laugh.

  When Stark was gone, there remained nothing but the insipid Head, the feckless masters, and roving gangs of prefects. That was when Stapleton, Carter, and I decided to run away.

  The night we ran, I had been at St. David’s just under two years and was about to turn fifteen. Our idea was to make it to London and live on the streets until I could look up a young woman who I’d met during the summer holidays at L’Abri. I knew the address of her flat, and I assured my friends that she would be glad to see us.

  “Maybe we can live there for a few months,” I said, somehow believing this insanity.

  We left in the night and walked for two hours to the Llandudno station, where we bought tickets to London. We split up on the train so that if they were looking for three boys—who “they” were was some vague paranoid idea about the police—they would not find us. When we went through stations, we hid in the toilets.

  The girl in London was cool about us showing up, although my friends chickened out immediately, called home, and went to their families. They also betrayed our hiding place. Two days later, Ranald came to get me.

  Ranald said “You have put a noose around your neck. If you were my son, I would give you a good caning and send you back. Your parents have foolishly said you may go home.”

  Dad was furious with me. Mom was sad. Dad and I screamed at each other for several hours.

  “You never even went there to check it out!” I yelled. “Do you know what it was like?”

  “You could have told me!” said Dad.

  “I did tell you!
All you ever said was it might get better!”

  Dad was trying to talk me into going back to St. David’s. On the other hand, he would not force me. And for several months I just hung around L’Abri. That was when I began to paint and draw almost every day. Then Mom and Dad put me in the Commonwealth-American School in Lausanne, a dumping ground for the usual suspects from the “international community.”

  I lived in Lausanne (an hour bus and train ride from home) in a rented room five days a week, in the Berthoud family’s apartment. (Their son was a L’Abri worker, one of the few Swiss there besides my brother-in-law John Sandri.)

  The Berthouds were two middle-aged spinster sisters and their elderly mother. Food was boiled or baked into pale oblivion. I spent my free time roaming Lausanne, looking for girls and sneaking into softcore porn movies presented as heavily subtitled “documentaries” with titles like Mysteries of Love or Women of the Night with voice-overs by “experts” who sounded like Swedish versions of Dr. Strangelove.

  33

  After about six months, I quit going to school in Lausanne. One morning sometime in 1967, Dad woke, came to my room, banged on the door, and announced: “I have cheated you! When the girls were your age, I took them to museums. I’ve been too busy with L’Abri. It is time we did something about this.”

  I was stunned and nervous. What on earth would it be like to be alone for weeks with Dad? I had been in boarding schools for the better part of six years, and I was starting to see him more as Francis Schaeffer, the leader of L’Abri, than as my father. Our hikes had been getting infrequent during the holidays from school. Recently they had stopped. Dad was just too busy.

  When my father and I took our father-son trip, it was an art pilgrimage. I never saw Dad so happy as when he was looking at and discussing art. His face literally changed. He looked younger. At night when we ate in restaurants, Dad never said grace over meals. It was as if Dad and I had a secret agreement that away from L’Abri, we would pretend we were secular people. Anyone overhearing our conversations would have assumed that Dad was an art historian. If God got mentioned, it was as a subject of art. Dad left his Bible at home.

  We’d check into a small, inexpensive hotel. Dad would sort out his tattered pile of city maps and dog-eared art books and plot a course. We would always comment on the pitifully tiny bars of soap, the strange little dishtowel-like “bath towels,” the low wattage of the bedside reading lamp, the precariousness of the small, slow, dimly lit elevators, and the joy of being in Italy, anywhere in Italy. The next morning, we’d set out on a pilgrimage to places like the Carmine Chapel to see Masaccio’s Eve.

  Dad was a great art history teacher. We looked at the art in Florence, Rome, and Venice in chronological order. Dad would insist that I tell him what I liked and why, before talking about a piece. (My sister Susan told me that she remembers how grateful she was that when she was a child visiting museums, Dad always let her pick out something she liked to look at, before he told her what she should pay attention to.) Dad would gently guide me to the best works from some period, explaining the evolution of style, of subject, something about the period the art came from. We would start with Etruscan and Roman art, look briefly at the Byzantine and pre-Renaissance works in churches and museums, and then take the Renaissance painters in order, beginning with Giotto. We might as well have been on a tour arranged by Vasari, as we followed the Renaissance from its beginnings all the way up to Leonardo, and beyond to the baroque, to “crazy old El Greco” and the mannerists.

  What is interesting is to note that, in theory, Dad was opposed to the “humanism of the Renaissance” and was a champion of “Northern European Reformation art,” the works of the good Protestants. But in practice, it was the art of the Italian Renaissance that we spent much more time soaking up. We stood in front of pictures like the Birth of Venus and the Primavera as if before altars. And we looked, really looked, having waited to reward ourselves with these ultimate Renaissance visions of loveliness, order, and idealism as we plodded through countless pre- and early Renaissance Virgin and Childs in lovely dark old churches where we’d insert fifty-lira coins in a slot to turn on the lights that would illuminate faded frescos. Dad would build up a verbal picture of the rediscovery of perspective, of the lost methods of the Romans, point out at what moment Renaissance painting surpassed Roman and Greek inspiration.

  In his L’Abri lectures, and later in his books, Dad would explain and even lament all this “humanistic art” that placed “man, not God, at the center of the universe.” But when he was looking at the art with me, all we talked about was how beautiful it was, how remarkable it was that competitions were held to design Florence’s baptistery doors, how stunning the achievements were: Brunelleschi’s dome for the cathedral, Giotto’s bell tower, the Della Robbia family and their blue and white glazed terra-cottas, not to mention our favorite, the choir stall carved by Della Robbia and preserved in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

  I saw Dad as he might have been, free of the crushing belief that God had “called” him to save the world. And my father became my biggest fan when I began to paint more and more seriously. Along with Mom, he backed me to the hilt after I began to show and sell paintings.

  On our Italian trips, I always had a sketchpad along, and sometimes I painted small oils, as I always had done while we vacationed in Portofino. Dad would sit, reading, next to me while I drew or painted, and he traipsed around with me looking for locations to shoot my 8-millimeter movies. When I wanted to make a film of some of the statues in the Loggia in Florence and said I would like some young pretty girl to walk through the shots as part of my movie, Dad hired a beautiful young Dutch girl we met in San Marco’s and paid her for several hours of work so I could get my shots.

  Many years later, in 1983, the year before Dad died and when he was already very ill—he was in St. Mary’s Hospital at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota—I went out, found an art-supply store, and then sat down next to Dad and painted and drew for two days. I worked from memory, producing drawings of favorite places, the Dents du Midi at night, views of Portofino, Florence, a mother and child, and several paintings of my heavily outlined, oversized apples and leaves. (I hadn’t painted for over ten years.)

  I pinned and propped up the art all around my father, turning his hospital room into an impromptu gallery. The warm friendly scent of the linseed oil overwhelmed that hospital smell. I held Dad, and we cried together. And Dad answered my thoughts when he said, right out of the blue, “We had fun in Florence, didn’t we, boy?”

  34

  L’Abri was at its zenith in 1968. Hippies and other assorted “seekers” were thronging the community. Dad was traveling to lecture more and more. Mom was giving many talks at L’Abri and all over Europe and America. In imitation of some of our wilder students, I was wearing knee-high motorcycle boots in which I carried a dagger. I was painting up a storm in my attic studio. I smoked and drank wine and shandies (a mix of lemonade and beer). L’Abri was filled with backpacking young men and women not too much older than me. We all knew every word of Sergeant Pepper’s.

  I wanted to be an artist, wanted to write plays, and was taking hundreds of photographs. My parents had lost control of me, yet were proud of my accomplishments as a painter when they (very occasionally) noticed I was alive. It seemed that they just thought of me as one more L’Abri guest. I certainly looked the part. But my parents did keep paying for art supplies and also set me up with Donald Drew, one of the L’Abri workers, who had been a literature teacher before he retired and took up full-time ministry.

  Donald was dapper, a lifelong bachelor, white-haired and distinguished-looking, and a classical music record collector whose one possession was a monster sound system. We studied Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Brontë sisters. I would write essays for Donald once a week. He was a good teacher, and over the course of about eighteen months I more or less received a “great books” British university-level literature course.

  Dad
was wearing his hair longer and longer, and he grew a goatee. He took to wearing beige Nehru jackets, odd linen shirts, and mountain-climber’s knickers (a Swiss alpine version of old-fashioned golfing plus-fours). Dad had evolved into a hip guru preaching Jesus to hippies, a precursor to, and the spiritual father of, the Jesus Movement that some of Dad’s disciples like Jack Sparks—who a few years later, was featured on the cover of Life baptizing hippies in a San Francisco swimming pool—founded after they studied at L’Abri.

  The last vestiges of my family’s fundamentalist taboos were forgotten. The constant stream of students and their questions and interests had changed my parents radically. The L’Abri I left to go to GW at eleven and the L’Abri I came back to at fifteen (almost sixteen) were completely different places. I could listen to any music I wanted.

  On any given evening, several of the L’Abri guests were out in the fields smoking pot. By the time I was barely sixteen, I was hanging around with twenty-year-olds, mostly the bell-bottom-clad, long-haired “English crowd” that were then regulars at L’Abri.

  Dad was about to become one of the most famous and influential evangelical leaders of his time, after his first book, Escape from Reason, was published. He was preaching against “middleclass Christianity” and used the word “bourgeois” when he talked about “plastic Christians” and the “generation gap.”

  The ethos of the sixties suited my parents perfectly. Dad had dropped out of the mainstream evangelical missionary movement in the late 1940s and then discovered the world of art. In the 1960s, he was swept up in a subculture of rebellion when he began to listen to artists like Bob Dylan. The times mirrored Dad’s individualism. He was “into” big ideas; and, suddenly, so was everyone else. Dad knew how to “speak to young people so they understand,” and suddenly other evangelicals wanted to know how to do that, too. Born-again Christians were confronted by a rebellious youth culture. Suddenly they needed Dad’s pop-culture expertise.