Crazy for God (8 page)

“I will.”

Jane had chickens, too. I killed my first chicken at Jane’s. And later, in imitation of Jane, my mother got chickens, too. But Jane had them first and would say how good the eggs were compared to anything we ever got from the store. Many of them were double-yolked. I knew because Jane fixed me fried eggs and bacon and sometimes let me take eggs home. But one chicken got sick and Jane decided I should cut off its head.

“In the South, real men hunt! My brother is a great squirrel hunter. You
must
kill something! He began to hunt when he was seven, and you’re ten!”

“Oh?”

“When we all get to Heaven the lion will lie down with the lamb. But right now, regretful as it is, killing is part of life! I’m GLAD for the Fall! I couldn’t live without meat! Have you ever tasted roasted squirrel?”

“No.”

“It’s
marvelous!”

Betty held the feet and Jane counted to three. And with my heart pounding, I swung the hatchet and did the deed and the chicken really did run around with its head cut off.

“Now you are a Southern gentleman!” Jane declared, as the chicken bled out at our feet. “A lady asked for assistance, and you gave it!”

“My pleasure,” I said, hoping that my response was sufficiently gallant and that my voice didn’t sound too shaky.

“I am going to give you a marvelous book as a reward.” Jane marched up to the chalet, and I followed her to Jane and Betty’s book-lined bedroom, where Jane took a little hardcover copy of
Black Beauty
off a shelf.

“This was one of my favorite books when I was your age.”

“Thank you.”

“In another year or two, I will give you an even better book!”

“What will that be?”

“Never you mind, honey, but it’s called
The Decameron,
and it is filled with stories
some people
don’t approve of, but they’re wonderful! They are
art!
They are about Italy, and Italy is the best place on earth! A very great man wrote them! He was a fine Christian! All Italian artists are fine Christians!”

“But they’re all Roman Catholics, aren’t they?”

“Oh, dear, you just don’t understand! That is just what they have to say they are, but underneath they are all
real Christians!”

“Oh.”

“Do you think Bellini could have written something as wonderful as the Casta Diva without the love of Jesus in his heart?”

“I guess not.”

“Well, don’t you ever believe anything different, honey! Italians are
all Christians!”

“Oh?”

My mind would reel delightedly at Jane’s heresies. And sometimes I wondered how she was allowed to say things that were just not right at all, things that were the opposite of what my parents and the other workers said. But Jane wasn’t like anybody else. And when Mom talked about Jane, even she made excuses for her.

“Jane has some confused ideas, dear, but she is a wonderful person,” Mom would say. Jane’s personality seemed to overwhelm any criticism. There was nothing right or wrong about Jane; she just was Jane, a force beyond all the normal categories.

Jane may have “left the world” to serve the Lord, but thankfully she brought a lot of the world with her. With her love of art, music, and literature, not to mention her eccentricities and flamboyance, visiting Jane was something like taking a bath in a car-wash,
sans
car. I would tumble out of her chalet, my ears ringing with opera, full of expensive food, dazzled by Rubens and Dali or an illuminated Book of Hours, or Lorenzetti’s frescoes in Siena. And my mind resounding with Jane’s anti-Yankee propaganda.

Jane’s way of rationalizing who was saved and who was lost was very personal. If you knew about art and loved it, or loved music or the South, everything was forgiven. If someone painted “wonderful pictures” or composed “wonderful music,” they suddenly had become “Real Christians,” no matter what they said they were. In their hearts, Jane knew that they knew the Lord. It was a lovely and circular argument. Jane would have made a great goddess, terrible in her wrath and forgiving of all sinners, as long as they created something beautiful.

I wrote to Jane recently. She is very old and back in Virginia, caring for Betty, who has Alzheimer’s. I wrote to tell Jane what she and Betty meant to me. I thanked her for being one of the people who shaped my life and made it so much richer than it would have been. Jane wrote me a lovely letter back, and she enclosed a fistful of yellowing clippings. They were of articles I’d written over the years and reviews of my novels. Jane had been watching over me even though we hadn’t been in touch for more than twenty-five years. She said she was proud of me. It meant a lot.

C
halet Les Mélèzes—big as chalets go—was originally built to comfortably house a family of eight, maybe with a spinster aunt or two thrown in, or a maid and cook tucked away in one of the smaller back rooms. It was not like the older small squat peasants’ chalets clustered in our village.

Our chalet had been built by some upper-class Swiss in the 1920s, probably as a big summer home. Chalet Les Mélèzes sat about a quarter mile from the village center, out in steep open fields with just a couple of other houses nearby. It had a “Venus II” woodstove on every floor, as well as a big old coal furnace that almost warmed our ineffectual radiators. Sweeping balconies wrapped around each floor, and every room facing the mountains had large multipaned windows and/or a glass door that opened onto the balconies. And every window and door had thick wooden shutters that we closed at night during the winter, to provide a little insulation from the cold.

When the shutters were closed, my room was completely dark except for one small shaft of light that, once the sun was up, would pour through the tulip-shaped cutout that decorated the shutters. Everything was beautifully made and fit snugly, with all the doors and windows exquisitely crafted. The tulip
pattern was repeated on the pine boards that provided a solid railing for the balconies.

When I opened my curtains, if the sun was shining at a certain angle, a brilliant beam of light shot through the cutout tulip and across my bedroom, picking out glittering dust particles. If I smacked my pillow a couple of times, I stirred up a dazzling explosion of dust and it seemed as if a whole universe had suddenly sprung to life, complete with galaxies, suns, and worlds swirling and twinkling in the light that cut through the thick dark.

I’d wedge myself between my bed and the wood-paneled wall—my bedroom was very small, only about five feet by ten—on the narrow patch of faded blue linoleum. I stared up at the mote-filled light. Maybe, I thought, our Planet Earth is nothing more than a dust mote floating in some huge bedroom.

What if on one of my dust planets there was a boy lying on his back watching dust glitter in
his
sunbeam? What if his mother was downstairs preparing to lead the Monday Morning Bible Study and telling her young people—assuming other universes had lost people, too—that God was watching over them and had a wonderful plan for their lives?

By the time I was seven or eight, on any given weekend there were about fifteen guests packed into our house. By the time I was eleven or twelve, L’Abri had “grown so wonderfully” that there were twenty or more guests staying with us all week. In summer, there were even more, with the overflow sleeping on the balconies that ran around the second and third floors, protected by the wide eaves.

If I got up in the night to go to the kitchen downstairs to grab a snack, I’d be stepping over young men and women
spread out in sleeping bags all over the middle-floor hall, filling our chalet with the intimate musty flesh-smell of warm breath and bodies that mingled with the faint scent of pine.

Pine paneling covered the thick solid squared timbers from which the chalet had been constructed according to the old custom, wherein the wood walls were solid, much like a log cabin, only the beams were squared into magnificent six-inch-thick perfectly interlocking timbers. In the winter, I could hear our chalet “breathe” when it changed temperature outside and those timbers creaked. In the summer, I could smell the pine.

Many years later, when I moved to America and tried to hang up my paintings, I was stunned to learn that I could not just nail anywhere. The idea that I had to find where the stud was under the sheetrock was like being told I was living in a cardboard box, a fake building, a swindle. “What would the Swiss think of this?” I’d mutter, as a nail disappeared into a wall with a hollow thud.

By the time I was fifteen, there were eighty to a hundred guests with us year-round, though no longer just in our chalet. Over the years, other chalets were added through a series of “miracles,” each one part of the growing list of proofs of God’s hand on us, each with its own inexplicable list of attending coincidences as to how the money came in so amazingly that “even a New York atheist couldn’t explain this away,” as Mom would say.

All the L’Abri chalets had married couples running them. About half the time, those houseparents were my sisters and brothers-in-law. When my sisters married, they roped their husbands into serving the Lord, or rather “God put His hand on them.” By the time I was on the cusp of my teen years, my three sisters were all back and living in chalets near ours,
receiving L’Abri guests in their homes and raising their children as we had been raised: child missionaries press-ganged into the Lord’s work.

Priscilla met her future husband John Sandri at the University of Lausanne, and more or less started L’Abri by witnessing to him. John was one of our first guests. My sister invited him home for a weekend to ask Dad all those questions about God that she couldn’t answer. Maybe John was also interested in spending the weekend with us, then another and another, due to the fact that Priscilla looked like a fortunate blend of Grace Kelly and Jackie Kennedy.

John was a tall, handsome, olive-skinned Swiss-American and had been a basketball star in high school in Scarsdale, New York. After he moved back to Switzerland—his Swiss-American industrialist father brought the family home when John was eighteen—John played for the Swiss national basketball team. John always treated me like a favorite little brother, and I would eagerly wait all week for his weekend visits. By the time he married Priscilla, John had graduated from the University of Lausanne. Then he was offered a job in the Swiss-American company his father ran. He followed the Lord’s call instead, gave up his worldly ambitions, and went to seminary.

My sister Susan—home from Oxford, where she was studying occupational therapy at Dorset House—met her future husband Ranald Macaulay when he visited L’Abri after hearing Dad speak. This was while Ranald was a law student at Cambridge. Ranald was a tall, athletic, piano- and rugby-playing South African-Scot, with bright red hair and a scar on his face where a wild dog had bitten and almost killed him as a child. Ranald’s father was a QC in South Africa, and then later a judge in Rhodesia.

My mother was thrilled by “Cambridge converts” like Ranald. How could what we believed be ignored or called stupid when people from “the top universities” were coming to Christ though us?

Debby met Udo Middelmann at L’Abri when he came as a guest for a weekend, then came back several times. Udo, also tall, handsome, and extremely bright and accomplished, was the son of a German diplomat. He was a law student in Germany when he first visited. By the time of his later trips to L’Abri, he had graduated. He met Ranald, and Ranald “led Udo to Christ.”

All three brothers-in-law got their theology degrees. And all three thereby went against the wishes of their families. John and Udo graduated from Covenant Seminary in St. Louis. Ranald went back to Cambridge for his theological degree.

My future brothers-in-law had to become
our
kind of people before my sisters could marry them. My sisters were very good at training their husbands, just as Mom had trained Dad.

After my brothers-in-law had converted, the ultimate power struggle with unseen and far-away “non-Christian” in-law parents was won. My brothers-in-law chose us over their own flesh and blood, in the ultimate in-law rivalry victory. The Schaeffer clan’s grandchildren would be raised “in The Work.” They would be spending every Christmas with us. When they went to a family reunion, it was to the Schaeffer reunion. And at those times when my brothers-in-law would visit their families, we would pray for them that the “difficult time” would soon pass and that they would come home unscathed.

Everyone working at L’Abri was a disciple of my parents, including my brothers-in-law. Theoretically they could have been led to another Christian work—my parents grudgingly
allowed that
some
“other Christians” did good work—but in practice we all knew that anyone
really
hearing the Lord’s voice would never settle for a lesser calling than L’Abri.

Mom got to have her cake and eat it, too. Her daughters had married “truly cultured and refined men,” and then they joined L’Abri and denied their worldly standing that had made Mom so pleased to fold them into our family. The more successful in the world you were
before
you got saved, the greater the triumph when you “turned from these worldly things to serve the Lord.”

There was some awkwardness at my sisters’ weddings that I remember noticing even as a child. Mom and Dad were in charge, so no alcohol was served. I could see our new in-laws visibly withering under the strain of being in close proximity to the Schaeffer family without any benefit of the fortification provided by what must have been a dire need for several stiff drinks.

Dad presided at the weddings, except for Priscilla and John Sandri’s. Another famous evangelical, Dr. Martin Lloyd Jones, preached at their wedding. This meant that Dad, and/or Dr. Jones, had the opportunity to “clearly preach the gospel.” In other words, the parents of my brothers-in-law were treated to hour-long sermons about how, without a faith in Christ, a personal faith, a real faith, a faith like ours, no marriage could last. Of course there was no dancing.