Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  The universe bent, then changed form as everything centered on that child eating, gaining weight, what a doctor said, if another doctor said something else, if Jessica would be home soon. No one said she would die. They all said she would be fine sooner or later, maybe with surgery, maybe without it. But from that moment at age eighteen, I learned that this force, this love, was going to override every other emotion, every other fact. In that moment, I had the first taste of days and nights thirty-two years later when another child, my son John, would be in Afghanistan, a young Marine on back-to-back combat tours in a war that started on 9/11, but never seemed to end.

  With Jessica not keeping her food down, I learned the prayer that has no words, the one I’d be praying forever after I became a father, whatever I called myself, or converted to, or abandoned, when the feeling of dread is prayer—prayer and longing for what I could never give a child in danger, or myself: the guarantee of joy.

  When Genie and I had gotten back to L’Abri (and the gossip spread about the fact that she was pregnant), several of the more Calvinistic, pietistic workers told Dad that they thought he should denounce Genie’s and my sin. They wanted him to state publicly that what we had done was wrong and that we repented and were getting married, but that Dad (and L’Abri) in no way condoned such behavior. They thought that as a pastor and L’Abri’s leader, Dad had to “make an example.”

  Dad threw a fit. From then on, it was as if Dad was Genie’s and my second in a fight. He was in our “corner” and ready to literally tear off the head of anyone who so much as looked at us funny.

  When Dad preached at our wedding (in the medieval Ollon church where my sisters also got married), he delivered his normal wedding sermon with no mention that Genie and I were so very young or that she was pregnant. The church was packed with everyone from L’Abri, as well as many of the villagers from Huémoz who I had known all my life.

  My heart leapt when I saw Genie coming down the aisle. She had a crown of daisies in her hair and was wearing the simple white eyelet cotton dress I had designed for her and that Mom sewed. But other than that momentary spark of joy, I was out of it.

  I spent our wedding feeling overwhelmed, cold, nervous, numb. I don’t know how Genie felt. All she says is that it was “a blur.”

  Jane Stuart Smith sang “Ruth” at our wedding. I insisted that wine be served at the reception. And as Priscilla toasted us with a glass of good Swiss white Aigle, in a quiet and rueful aside she whispered that wine would never have been served in her day.

  There was fog blanketing the mountains across from where we held the reception above Montreux. It matched my mood: everything-is-happening-too-fast. This mood of confusion continued through our honeymoon in Venice. That was where Genie’s morning sickness really kicked in.

  Living in a community with two sisters on the same mountainside, a father and mother upstairs, and (mostly) friendly L’Abri workers around us was a perfect place to be a young foolish couple in. Everything that had previously driven me crazy about community life became the lifeline that was the difference between Genie and me surviving as a young penniless, immature couple and splitting apart.

  We lived on the bottom floor of Chalet Les Mélèzes. The year before I met Genie, I had commandeered the living room as my studio; now Genie and I were given the whole floor as our rent-free apartment. One end of the living room remained my studio, the other end was our bedroom. My mother’s old office down the hall became Jessica’s room. We had a little kitchen across from our studio bedroom.

  I was painting; and since there was no other way for me to earn a living, Genie and I became L’Abri workers for a few months. Our “job” was to serve some students a meal several times a week in our apartment. During those meals, we, like the other workers, were supposed to have a discussion that consisted of students asking questions and of me holding forth, honing my bullshit skills and trying to articulate all those things I’d grown up hearing my parents hold forth on. It was pretty silly. The students must have been biting their tongues. I was insecure and loud; and being sent to my table for dinner, when a student could have been with Dad, Udo, or John, must have been like winning a milk-shake while the guy next to you won the lottery.

  Genie and I spent lots of time with my sisters. Debby and Priscilla were incredibly kind. Each week, we’d go to dinner with Debby and Udo on the evening when they read out loud to their students from all sorts of wonderful books like John Updike’s Turkey Feathers. We would bring Jessica, and she slept upstairs while we sat downstairs with Debby in the kitchen, as she prepared the meal for twenty or thirty students. After dinner, Debby and Udo would wait for the students to drift off, then sit with Genie and me and talk for hours.

  We also hung around Priscilla and John’s chalet. No matter how many times we’d show up, Priscilla would welcome us. We’d sit in her kitchen and drink tea. And as the shadows grew long over the mountains, Priscilla would inevitably ask us if we wanted to stay for dinner. We always did.

  Debby and Udo, and Priscilla and John exuded a sunny pro-marriage-in-spite-of-everything optimism that was infectious. They were rooting for us, and at the same time treating us as grownups, on a good path where the expectation was that we’d succeed.

  My daughter got the benefit of being raised where her aunts could keep an eye on her. They also helped and advised Genie and me. They encouraged Genie in her new-mother role, answered my questions about married life, helped us heal wounds after our many tempestuous fights, and told us that they had “been through all this, too.”

  My mother turned out to be the kindest and best mother-in-law. She never interfered, only came downstairs to our apartment when Genie asked her to, took Jessica any time Genie asked her to watch the baby, provided endless gifts for us. And any time we didn’t feel like cooking, we could go upstairs at mealtimes, help ourselves, and take the food back down to our apartment.

  With my mother and dad upstairs and my sisters down the road, not to mention health insurance from L’Abri, our “worker’s” hundred-franc-a-month stipend, and a rent-free apartment, Genie and I were living in our own little paradise. It was like a miniature Scandinavian socialist state, with layers of safety net providing a sense of balmy security.

  Genie’s parents also began to help. They sent a monthly check for several hundred dollars. And when we went to visit Susan and Ranald in England, we got a lovely welcome. However harsh Ranald had seemed when I ran away from school, he made sure I knew that he was completely on our side now. Susan and Ranald were also very encouraging of my painting. They purchased some work and were enthusiastic about the work itself.

  If every couple received such love and care, the world would be filled with a lot more happy young families. In that sense, my parents’ idea that Christianity, or at least their version of it, could be proved is true. When it counted most, my parents stepped up for Genie, Jessica, and me. Mercy, grace, generosity, love, unconditional support were given us “pressed down and running over.”

  Nevertheless, I was an immature asshole. I’d nitpick Genie and then we’d argue. We fought in our galley-sized kitchen in the Chalet Les Mélèzes basement. I took a swing at Genie, she saw it coming and picked up a magnum of red wine to deck me with. I grabbed a soup ladle. Ladle and bottle crashed over our heads, drenching us in red wine and splinters of glass. We slipped on the wine and slammed, clawing and screaming, onto the slippery floor.

  I was violent in other ways, too. Jessica intruded immediately into our lives, arrived when we were so young, almost literally crashed our honeymoon. While she was growing up, I pulled her hair sometimes and slapped her, not every day, not every week, not every month, but enough times so that when I see a parent lose control with a child, I want to tell them not to do anything that, years later, they will feel sick about, so very sick.

  I lavished Jessica with love, too. I got up in the night with her, held to my shoulder for hours, her cheek plastered to mine, almost drunk with glee at the fact that I had t
his daughter, this child, something real that did not depend on anyone’s ideas about me, just was.

  Sometimes it was hell, a hell of my making. In thirty-seven years, Genie has never started a fight. But she has certainly won most of them. And our children always know whose side they are on. “Mom is right!” has been the family motto. I’m glad.

  In any place but our tight-knit community, we would have divorced fifty times over. But within L’Abri, divorce was not an option. The only option was to talk to Mom, Dad, Debby, Priscilla, and a few of our friends among the other L’Abri couples, to hear how they had survived their worst fights, to repent, learn, and move on.

  I remember some good advice I got from gospel singer Gloria Gaither, of the Bill and Gloria Gaither Gospel Trio. “We didn’t have good sex for the first ten years of our marriage. You have to work at it,” said Gloria.

  I have no idea why she told me this. We were standing in her kitchen in Texas or Indianapolis, wherever, somewhere in the vast nondescript middle, while I was touring with Dad several years after Genie and I got married. Gloria was advising me after we got talking and I told her how bad some days were, what a lousy father I was, how much I loved Genie, but how things didn’t seem so good a lot of the time. And that was what she blurted out.

  Gloria was smart. The idea of working at a marriage was something that, for some reason, stuck after what she told me, although of course I’d heard the marriage-is-work advice many times before.

  Stan and Betty Walsh, Genie’s parents, had asked us if we would rather that they come to the wedding, or for a longer visit later. We chose the longer visit. I was immensely relieved to not have to meet them right away!

  A few months after Jessica was born, they came to Switzerland, along with Genie’s little brother and sister, Jim and Molly. I was incredibly nervous. I had stolen their daughter away. I had gotten her pregnant. I had “ruined her life.” Anyway, that was how I was sure they saw the matter. Meeting my father-in-law seemed about the worst nightmare I could imagine. But I needn’t have worried.

  Whatever they were really thinking, Stan and Betty Walsh could not have acted more loving. Genie’s mom was a trim, handsome, down-to-earth woman who never mentioned her distinguished blueblood family history. She was the opposite of my mother in almost every way. Betty wanted to avoid fuss, and the last person she ever wanted to talk about was herself. (One of Betty’s ancestors, as I said before, had been a signatory to the United States Constitution, another was the first marshal of Arkansas. Betty steadfastly refused to join groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution. It was years before I could pry any family history out of her.) Stan Walsh was a tall, strong, second-generation Irish-American, self-made rags-to-riches lawyer.

  Genie’s parents exuded down-to-earth common sense and calm. I was accepted into their family and began a friendship with Genie’s brothers Tom and Jim, and with Pam (who was already a friend ever since she had walked into the chalet with Genie). And, on that first visit, I met Molly, who was then twelve, and I became close with her even though she was forlorn because her big sister had suddenly disappeared. Remembering how sad I had been when my big sisters got married and were whisked away, I felt a stab of guilty empathy.

  A year or two after we were married, my parents moved out of Chalet Les Mélèzes and we all decamped to Chésières, two miles up the road. Mom and Dad had bought Chalet Chardonnet, a big old rambling four-story chalet that had been the home and office of a doctor. (My parents didn’t own Chalet Les Mélèzes, L’Abri did, so Chalet Chardonnet was the first house they ever owned.)

  There was plenty of room for them on the top three floors and a big apartment for Genie, Jessica, soon-to-be Francis, and me on the basement floor that had been the doctor’s offices. At about that time, L’Abri also bought the chalet next door to my parent’s new home, and Debby and Udo moved in with about twenty students.

  Soon after that, Genie and I borrowed money from my father and bought a barn that sat between his chalet and the new L’Abri house. Over the next few years, Genie and I fixed it up into a wonderful little gem—“Chalet Regina.” We moved in after we had been married for about six years.

  L’Abri was growing. And I was more and more aware that my life was being defined by my parents’ choices. I was very grateful for their kindness to Genie and me, but also conscious that I was like some asteroid caught in the orbit of a giant planet. I had several fights with my mother, accusing her of folding her children into her ministry by using us as an illustration in her talks and books and by “volunteering” us to be raised in a small weird community after inviting a horde to invade our home.

  “Did you ever ask us if we wanted to be part of this?” I said more than once.

  Mom never had an answer, other than to claim that the Lord had led Dad and her. That always seemed to excuse everything.

  Genie and I took several trips to see her parents. It was such a relief to visit the Walsh family. They were blessedly ordinary, liberal-leaning Democrat-voting Roman Catholics.

  Unlike my family, the Walsh children seemed to have lives independent of their father and mother. Genie’s mother seemed pleased when her children made their own ways. The frantic talk about the Lord’s leading, or the “direction of the work,” and the constant wrangling and positioning between family members over what amounted to the family business—L’Abri—was absent. And my admiration for Genie’s sensible family was one of the reasons that I began wondering if the ideas I’d grown up with were really the only good ideas to live by. The Walsh clan didn’t believe what we believed, and yet they seemed to be doing just fine.

  PART III

  TURMOIL

  40

  When Billy Zeoli, the president of Gospel Films, came to L’Abri in 1972 (or thereabouts), L’Abri was known for its defense of the “inerrancy of scripture” in a minor way, its appreciation of art in a major way, its ability to give answers to Big Questions, its penchant for connecting the dots of popular culture and explaining the failures of modernism and the triumph of the gospel. Dad was holding forth on issues such as the hippie movement’s inability to realize its promise or to provide an alternative social and moral model because “While their analysis of the problem of our plastic society was right, they had no answer.” Dad also spoke prophetically: “You wait,” he said; “the hippies are going to wind up more middle-class, bourgeois, and materialistic than their parents.”

  Dad would often say “The next generation will follow anyone who will promise personal peace and affluence. If they are asked to make a choice between freedom and security they’ll choose security. It will be the new fascism.”

  Billy Zeoli was a heavyset, swarthy, handsome fast-talking man with a strong chin. He was charming and generous in a godfather-wanna-be way. And Billy paid top dollar (actually top franc) and didn’t seem to care what he bought, just as long as I noticed how fat the wad of cash was that he pulled out when he came to my studio to buy a painting.

  Billy and I got to talking. In a series of conversations over the next few weeks, we cooked up the idea that Dad should take his lectures about art and philosophy and make a documentary series to answer the BBC-produced series by Lord Kenneth Clark—Civilization—and another called The Ascent of Man narrated by Jacob Bronowski.

  Lord Clark’s “secular humanist” series portrayed the Renaissance as a triumph of Reason over Christian medieval superstition. Bronowski’s was about evolution. Both were smooth, well-made BBC productions. From Dad’s point of view, they were belittling evangelical faith.

  In a series of lectures, Dad strapped on his armor and defended Christ against the BBC and Christendom against modernism. Dad’s argument was something like this: The art of the Renaissance was beautiful, but gradually religious meaning had been stripped away. All that was left was the hubris of humanism shaking its fist in the face of God. Conversely, the golden age of Dutch seventeenth-century painting proved that you could produce a brilliantly lovely Protestant Reformed al
ternative to proud Renaissance humanism. Great art could be created but be about a Christ-centered worldview, where the simple and beautiful was exalted as a way of pointing back to the Creator who gave everything, even the smallest daily chores and activities—say, in a Dutch household as portrayed by Vermeer—transcendent meaning.

  Dad said there was a “line of despair” that separated modern secular man from all who came before. Moreover, the fruits of Christianity created the rule of law and human rights as we now understood them. For all the talk about the so-called Dark Ages and the evils of Christendom, from the Spanish Inquisition to the burning of witches in Salem, to the slave trade, the twentieth century—a virtual textbook experiment in godlessness—was the most inhuman and bloody of all centuries. So, Dad argued, before secularists glibly critiqued religious and especially Christian culture, perhaps they should take time to explain Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, not to mention the Gulag and Auschwitz.

  On a good day, the social and political results of secularism made the horrors of Christendom look like a Sunday-school picnic, Dad said. And, unlike secularism, Christian culture had a self-correcting impulse. For instance, it was Wilberforce (and other evangelicals like him) who had fought to free the slaves. And it was the Common Law of Christian England that was the basis of our Western, especially our American, freedoms we now took for granted.

  My father taught that if the idea of biblical God-given absolutes was abandoned, there would be a real question as to where a new morality would come from. Since humankind did not like chaos, Dad warned, either we would turn to authoritarian systems (some sort of technocratic elite), or we would be ruled by the “tyranny of the majority, with no way to challenge the popular will, nothing higher to appeal to.”