Crazy for God (3 page)

Mom was a music lover, too. And she could not enjoy anything unless she shared it. If my parents were going to a
concert, we children were taken along. Each year, Mom bought tickets to three or four concerts at the Montreux classical music festival. She also took our family to several ballets over the years, to several operas and many chamber orchestra concerts, and to all sorts of recitals. And she did this even back when we had very little money, when we were sometimes eating meatless meals for months if giving to the mission was down. We had no car and often couldn’t afford a taxi ride to the station after a concert. But my mother got us there somehow anyway.

My first encounter with opera was watching
Don Juan,
which my parents took me to at the Paris Opera House when I was seven and traveling with them on one of their speaking trips. We were in the cheap seats, what seemed like miles from the stage. But Dad handed me his binoculars and, though I fell asleep, I woke up in time to see Don Juan sinking into the flames of hell, singing his way into oblivion. I was hooked.

There was a tension between what Mom believed and her wider interests in art, music, and culture. Mom could not ignore the sorts of people who were most certainly
not
fundamentalist: the artists, composers, and choreographers she so admired, or the sorts of secular people she might bump into at concerts and in museums. So I think my mother spent a lifetime trying to change the image of Bible-believing Christians. She decided she would be so wonderful in every way that her example would undo all the damage done to the image of what it was to be a Bible-believing Christian set by those other, all-too-ordinary Christians.

Mom wanted her children to know that she could have done lots more glamorous things than “just be a missionary.” And Mom never wanted to look like what she was: a pastor’s wife.
She dressed with taste and style for every occasion. And Mom was never more animated than when she was talking about the cultured, wealthy, or important people she met. She would not just mention their names but would go into detailed stories of their lives, as if she was reading (or writing) a novel about them. I think Mom wanted to
be
one of them.

My mother’s favorite people were those who were famous for some cultural achievement. She met the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin on the beach in Italy once and was more or less in a swoon for weeks while telling us in detail what he had said, what she had said. . . . And more than half a century later, when B. B. King gave her a backstage pass for a concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Mom—at age ninety—wore that laminated security pass around her neck for the better part of a year, as if it was priceless jewelry.

My mother saw her mission as nothing less than repairing the image of fundamentalism. Sometimes this image-repair just involved serving exquisite high teas or reading good books. At other times it got complicated. For instance, in 1986, to launch her book
The Gift of Music,
Mom raised fifty thousand dollars—“To reach out to the kind of New Yorkers that no other Christians ever reach”—and rented Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, hired the Guarneri Quartet, and invited her friends from all over the country to join her for a concert followed by a reception.

When Mom met people, then told her children about her encounters, the story line was always the same: They were lost, and Mom saved them. Or at least she had changed them. Mom’s favorite phrase was “Before he met me, he said he never knew there were Christians who were so. . .”—fill in the blank—cultured, knowledgeable about art, music, food, clothes, compassionate, and refined.

My mother took Dad to his first art museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Now Fran talks all about art, but when I met him he knew nothing, my dear, nothing!” Mom helped Dad “deepen his faith” after he became a Christian. Mom showed Dad how to have an always-use-real-silver-and-good-china-and-put-candles-on-the-table-at-dinner, cultured family, since his parents had been “so working class.”

My mother became the basis of “Elsa,” the mother in my first novel,
Portofino,
and the rest of the
Calvin Becker Trilogy (Zermatt
and
Saving Grandma).
And I still see the world through her eyes. She was there at every stage, including mop-ping up my vomit—without recrimination—when I took some bad peyote buds after smoking pot when I was fifteen.

Whatever I believe, or say I believe now, the shape of my life is defined by my mother’s prayers—whether these have actually been answered or whether the force of her personality was enough to make it so. In that quietest inner place, my mother is still young, beautiful, and present, leaning forward listening with rapt attention at a concert, or with a book on her lap, eyes sparkling and opening up the universe of
Treasure Island,
or as poor Oliver picks his way though the harsh Victorian urban underworld.

I
f Dad had been an actor, he might have been cast to play James Cagney’s little brother, maybe in some 1930s movie set down by the docks. But by the time I was a teenager, a lifetime of intellectual work had given Dad a craggy, bags-under-the-eyes Einstein look and softened his face.

My father was my mother’s opposite. Born and raised in Germantown, Philadelphia, he grew up hard, in hard times. Dad was short and stocky. He had thick leg muscles and heavy forearms with strong wide-palmed hands. His legs just kept getting thicker as he hiked all over the Alps. His Moods—they deserve a capital letter—dictated everything about our daily lives. Dad suffered from bouts of fury punctuated by depression. All Mom needed to say was “Fran is in a Mood,” and we crept around trying to stay out of sight till Mom gave the all-clear.

Dad’s brooding face reflected his early life as a working-class son of poor parents. He had a little scar on his cheek where he’d been stabbed in a street fight when he was delivering ice off a horse-drawn cart. When I was ten or eleven, Dad taught me to fight. He was very matter-of-fact and said: “You need to know how to defend yourself.” Dad’s idea of fighting was this: just get in close, break something, and run.

While Mom was being served breakfast in bed by her Chinese
servants, then later by her genteel parents, who cut her toast into buttered “ladyfingers” and boiled her “a perfect three-and-a-half-minute soft-boiled egg each morning,” Dad was eating corned beef hash warmed over, being beaten with a strap by his mother, and selling ice from the time he was ten or eleven off a wagon.

Dad’s father ran away from his home when he was twelve years old. My grandfather served in the Navy in the Spanish-American War, when, as he told Dad, “The ships were made of wood but the men made of iron.” And while raising Dad, his father worked as a “stationary engineer” in a large office building maintaining the heating and electrical plant. He got this job even though he only had a third-grade education. Dad told me about getting into the huge boilers and chipping out the lime deposits with his father.

My father heard his first classical music when the Boy Scouts took his troop to a concert. He loved it, and from then on Dad would argue with his mother to let him listen to broadcasts of symphonies when she wanted to hear popular music, played on the old crystal set Dad’s father built.

Dad got “saved” in 1929 in a tent revival; he was seventeen. This was after reading the Bible. Sometimes Dad said he got saved “just reading the Bible.” Other times he said it was in that tent revival. Other times he would explain to the students that it was while he was studying Greek philosophy and at the same time giving the Bible a “last chance” by reading it, and that it occurred to him that the Bible answered the philosophical questions raised by the Greeks.

About two years after Dad got saved, he met Mom when he stood up in a church meeting to challenge a “liberal” pastor who was questioning the literal truth of scripture. Judging by
my mom’s account, Dad’s real salvation was when he met her. Dad’s reward for accepting Christ was to get a saint for a wife, a sexy saint.

Dad’s newly converted zealot heart twined with Mom’s zealot heart, though Dad was but a mere “newborn babe in Christ.” And Dad became a pastor, called by God, or pushed by Mom, or both.

By the time I came along, Mom and Dad were thriving and making a living on propagating their ideas and defending them. And the verbal images they spun out of thin air had to be strong. They were describing a world you can’t see, the invisible link between mortality and immortality. They were bringing alive the biblical epoch to twentieth-century young people, competing with modernity by talking up a storm, convincing smart people that the spiritual world is more real and essential than the evidence of one’s eyes. And they were good at it.

Dad had one big idea: God has revealed himself to us through the Bible. And he spent a lifetime trying to fit everything into that one idea, and explain away anything that didn’t fit. Dad’s apologetic method—combining scripture, theology, and culture—became his trademark, a kind of rationalist approach to the mysteries of faith, as instantly recognizable to his millions of evangelical followers as a Rothko is to anyone who has seen more than one canvas painted after he hit his blocks-of-color stride. (“Apologetics” being defined as the method and means and content of one’s argument for the faith, a way of reasoning, one’s method of evangelization.)

Dad was also a dedicated hiker and camper, a starter of campfires “even with wet wood,” and a man who could fix and build things. Dad always kept his father’s tools handy. His
father’s hammer, plane, and chisel were like sacred objects in our home, along with his father’s old Lionel train set.

Dad passed on one saying of his father’s to me. It related to how to survive working high in the rigging of a wind-tossed sailing ship.
“Keep one hand for yourself, boy!”
Dad would often exclaim, applying his father’s wisdom to all sorts of situations in life, from how to argue, to hiking and tree-climbing safety rules.

Dad had a reverence for the way his father had done so much with so little. Everything my grandfather learned was something he taught himself—the engineering knowledge needed to run a building’s heat and electrical generating plant; how to wire his house, which he did with Dad helping; how to build his first radio. You never called the repairman in the household Dad grew up in; you did it yourself.

My father kept his old Boy Scout manual, his father’s tools, and his father’s Navy shaving mug next to his bed on a little shelf behind a curtain. It was like a little shrine. As a child, I often looked at my father’s precious mementos, but I never took them out of Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Dad also kept his own metalwork “exam pieces” from high school shop class behind that curtain. They included a stained-glass monogram of the letter “S” and several pieces of beautifully crafted wrought iron.
“I
made those,” Dad would say.

When Mom would talk about how wonderful her father was and how he could speak and teach Mandarin, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, Dad never said much. But later he might quietly mention to me that his dad could fix anything. And sometimes there would be tears in his eyes when he would talk about how his “Pop” wired that old house while laboring to read the electrical manual he was learning from.

“Pop never had the opportunities I had,” Dad would say, “but you would have liked him, boy.”

When Dad turned in his first philosophy paper at Hampden-Sydney College, his professor invited him over to his house a few days later. Dad found him sitting in a rocking chair next to an old pot-bellied stove and smoking a pipe. For a while the man said nothing, just smoked and watched Dad and smiled inscrutably. Then at last the professor spoke.

“Schaeffer,” he said, “I have a problem with you. I don’t know how to resolve it. This is the best philosophy paper from a first-year student that has ever been turned in since I’ve been teaching. It is also the worst spelling I’ve ever seen. What should I do with you?”

“I have a suggestion,” said Dad; “I suggest you always grade my papers on the ideas and pay no attention to my spelling. I’ve never been able to spell. And I can’t fix that.”

There was a long pause. Dad said he was nervous but tried not to move, or even take his eyes off that old professor’s face.

“You know what, Schaeffer, I think I’ll do just that,” said the professor at last.

This was a big break for my father. He spoke of the incident with such emotion that his voice would shake. It was an unusual thing for a professor to do, back in the days when spelling and grammar, even handwriting, still figured heavily into a college grade.

Dad was very aware of each step in his journey to a “bigger world,” as he called it. There were the Boy Scouts and that symphony, and then there was one high school teacher who Dad recalled with tears. She had “opened all the doors” for him by encouraging him to start to read books for pleasure. She “opened my eyes,” Dad would say. And years later, my father
tracked her down and wrote to her, and remarkably she was still alive, and in 1968 (or thereabouts) Dad sent her a signed copy of his first book,
Escape From Reason,
and a letter telling her that she was why he had “done anything” with his life.

D
ad was pastor of several small churches in the Northeast and in St. Louis. Then he became a missionary in 1947. Sponsored by his mission board, Dad located in Switzerland because from there he could get anywhere in Europe to do his mission work with young people in war-torn cities. The next year, Mom and my three sisters joined Dad.

The Swiss had sat out the Second World War as neutrals, trading security for the lives of the Jews they turned back to the Nazis, banking for all sides, selling weapons to everyone, and waiting for other countries to send their young men to die to make them safe from the Nazi empire. So in 1947 the Swiss infrastructure was intact. And Dad would travel almost every week to the cities all over Europe where he was helping to start youth ministries. And on those trips his quest for self-betterment continued, and he would visit the art museums, buy guidebooks, and study what he was seeing.