Crazy for God (9 page)

The families my sisters married into were headed by bonvivants. There was Ranald’s dad, the South African judge, a whiskey-and-soda man. (Some years later, when this lovely man stopped by and visited us while we were on vacation in Italy, he surreptitiously poured me a glass of Chianti, my first taste of wine.) There was John’s dad, the Swiss industrialist with his fondness for chamber music and first-class alcoholically
well-lubricated ocean travel. And there was Udo’s cigar-smoking, schnapps-drinking German diplomat father, more at home in the halls of UN power politics and embassy parties than any church.

At the weddings, our new in-laws looked somewhat distracted as the full weight of just what their sons had married into sunk home while my mother prayed at them and Dad preached at them, literally. And they were surrounded by earnest pale “seekers” and theologians, all of whom were exuding an unctuous concern for the wedding guests’ souls. It must have been a tough day.

T
he mountains were beautiful, the conversation all about everlasting life. Our guests’ parents or wives or husbands, sisters and brothers, were far away, and we were right there with the new member of our eternal family, embracing them with an all-encompassing love that outshone anything they had ever encountered before. When someone who got saved was headed back to a “hostile situation,” say to “secular parents who will not understand” or to a family of “nominal very social Christians, you know, Episcopalians,” or to “a very anti-Christian secular Jewish mother, you know, dear, typical of New York,” we would gather around the soon-to-depart convert and pray that the Lord would give them the strength to withstand the “very real persecution” they would be facing. We could not have been more fervent if we had been sending them off to the lions. There were many exchanges like this:

“She will have to face her difficult mother,” Mom said, shaking her head sadly.

“Her mom isn’t a Christian?” I asked.

“Oh, no, darling, far from it! Joan comes from a VERY secular background. Her father is a top lawyer, a top Harvard man. And Joan went to Wellesley.”

“But is she going to be able to stand for truth at home?” asked Debby.

“We’ll just have to pray she does,” said Mom.

“I’ll bet she’ll face all sorts of temptations,” Susan said with grim relish.

“They are VERY worldly, aren’t they, Mom?” said Debby.

“My dear, they are top Harvard New England sorts. And they have real money, old money, very New England.”

“If they all got saved, then they could really do something for the Lord, couldn’t they?” asked Susan.

“Yes, dear, but you know it is almost impossible for Episcopalians to trust Christ as their Savior. They think they’re already saved.”

“But how can they be?” asked Susan. “They drink and smoke, don’t they?”

“Yes, dear. They also have a very Roman Catholic view of communion.”

“And Joan said that they even allowed her to go to dances!” said Susan.

“Well, we need to pray very hard that she is not lured back. And then there is the boyfriend,” said Mom with a significant grimace.

Debby and Susan moaned. A non-Christian boyfriend or unbelieving girlfriend was the worst lure to backsliding.

“Well,” said Susan with a shudder, “we can only hope she breaks it off right away.”

“And we can pray that the Lord leads her to a boy who
is
saved!” said Debby.

In Joan’s case, I hoped the Lord would do no such thing. I had a big crush on her. She had been taking me swimming down at Lake Geneva several times a week during the summer.

I was always in love. I can’t remember a time I didn’t have my eye on one or more L’Abri women. In early childhood, it was about generating more of that warm feeling I got in their presence. By the time I was eight or nine, it was about marrying them. By the time I was thirteen, it was about wanting to have sex with all the women in the world. And by fifteen, it was a matter of finding a place in the woods in summer, or attic in winter, where I could fumble to get the clothes off my nineteen-or-twenty-year-old “date.”

Long before I got anyone’s clothes off, but well into my crush-of-the-moment phase, sometimes Mom would help out by giving one of the young women the job of taking care of me, tutoring me, taking me to swim, going for a walk with me. Some of this related to therapy for my polio leg, or to being homeschooled, or to just keeping an eye on me. I made sure that if I liked the girl she had an easy time. If I didn’t, she was soon begging my mother to be allowed to do other work.

In Joan’s case, I liked her a lot. And she looked fine in that late-fifties one-piece bathing suit! It was navy blue with tiny white polka dots and had a little skirt fitting tightly around her slim hips. Joan would change on the pebble beach at Villeneuve, modestly managing to shed her swimsuit from under a towel. It would fall wet and mysterious to the pebbles and leave a mark when she picked it up.

Joan had tanned, freckled breasts, and her cleavage was plumped up above the rigid corsetlike support. She had been a competitive swimmer in her women’s college and walked smoothly like the athlete she was. She was sweet, breezy, and easy to get on with. I was absolutely besotted by her, and very put out when a British friend of my brother-in-law-to-be, Ranald, showed up and soon was engaged to “my” Joan.

They were an “ideal L’Abri couple,” Dad said. They were both saved at L’Abri, and she had gone to Wellesley! And he had gone to Cambridge! “Top people!” Mom declared, “top people serving the Lord!”

They became L’Abri workers, and Joan’s husband later went on to teach at a famous evangelical seminary and was a fearsome one-man bastion of the most severe brand of Reformed theology, a firebrand anti-Catholic and antiliberal defender of truth. And when I left the evangelical world and wrote about my departure obliquely in
Portofino
(my first novel) though I had not heard from him for years, he wrote me several furious and personal letters denouncing my “apostasy.”

Mom would often talk about the fact that people like Joan and her husband, not to mention my brothers-in-law, were so accomplished, such “top people.” They had gone to “top universities”; they each could “be anything”; but they had “given it all up to serve the Lord.” And this affirmed Mom’s ambition for her daughters, both socially and spiritually. But for all my mother’s addiction to winning “top people” for the Lord, she could also be found every day in the kitchen cooking up huge meals for the guests.

Mom was often on her hands and knees scrubbing the floors, rising at four in the morning to pray and then to type up the dictation she’d taken from Dad as his secretary the day before, or spending hours talking to and counseling the guests and students. She always paid as much personal attention to whomever she was with, from a hotel chambermaid to some new guest, as to the President of the United States, when, in later years, she became an evangelical “star” and was a guest in the White House.

My parents’ compassion was sincere and consistent. And
they never allowed belief to make them into bigots. I grew up in a community where homosexuals (the term “gay” was not in use) were not only welcomed but where my parents didn’t do anything to make them feel uncomfortable and regarded their “problem” as no more serious (or sinful) than other problems, from spiritual pride—a “much more serious matter,” according to Dad—to gluttony. And I never heard any of the nonsense so typical of American evangelicals today about homosexuality being a “chosen lifestyle.”

My parents weren’t given to calling their friends liars. So when our friends who were homosexual—Mom was always open, as was Dad, about which students were or weren’t gay—told my parents that they had been born that way, not only did they believe them, but Dad defended them against people who would judge or exclude them.

Dad thought it cruel and stupid to believe that a homosexual could change by “accepting Christ”—or, for that matter, that an alcoholic could be healed by the same magic. Dad often said “Salvation is not magic. We’re still in the fallen world.”

Dad always counseled gay men and women against getting married to a heterosexual if they were doing it in the expectation that it would change them, let alone to impress their parents. This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when few people in secular circles, let alone evangelical circles, would even admit that there
were
gay people.

There were guests of all races at L’Abri. We had a steady stream of African students and African-Americans, Asians, Chinese, Japanese; representatives of every nation. My parents spoke hotly against racism and practiced an all-encompassing love for every human being.

Dad went out of his way to tell his children that if we ever
wanted to marry a black person, he would support us. He didn’t say that in response to a specific question but spelled it out as a matter of principle; again, this was in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The best friend I ever made who was a L’Abri student was Mus Arshad, a Malaysian who came to L’Abri, converted from Islam to Christianity, and was therefore completely cut off from his family. (His family let him know that—in accordance with Islamic law—if he ever came home, they would have to kill him.) Mus was like a big brother to me. (Many years later Mus worked as a cameraman and photographer on several of the documentaries I made.)

Dad and Mom were tough on intellectual ideas they disagreed with, but not on people. Ideas interested Dad, not theology per se. If he was lecturing on art, music, cultural trends, he stuck to the subject. He hated circular arguments that depended on the Bible when used against secular people who didn’t acknowledge biblical authority. He believed that you should argue on a level playing field, where both people stay on common ground.

“What’s the point of quoting the Bible to people who don’t believe it’s true?” Dad would say.

In later years, when he started to argue for the pro-life cause, Dad always disagreed with the Bible-thumping approach that quoted verses (usually out of context) about the sacredness of life. He believed that you argued on the merits of ideas that both sides could agree on—for instance, on what the genetic potential of a fetus was, or what direction we all can agree that we want society to go in.

Above all, Dad’s sensitivity was disarming. Bishop Pike, the famous self-proclaimed liberal minister and writer, told me that my father was one of the most compassionate men he ever
debated. And after Timothy Leary had several long discussions with Dad, he said, “If I thought your father is typical of other Christians, I’d reconsider my position.”

There were many sincere conversions at L’Abri that had a life-changing effect. There were drug addicts who got off drugs. There was a prostitute who converted, married, and settled down, and sent back baby pictures. There were African students who converted during their holidays from various European universities, and went back to Africa; and the last I heard, a few were ministers and even bishops in several growing denominations. And there were intellectuals who converted, and remained in the academic community and became leaders in their fields.

When I was about fifteen, I asked Dad how come he was so good at turning people’s lives around, particularly in his one-on-one sessions of counseling. Dad answered very matter-offactly, “It isn’t what you say to someone that matters, as much as the fact you are listening. Knowing how to listen to people is what helps them.”

During a discussion that left, say, some clever Yale philosophy major breathless, or a young English artist wondering how it was that this preacher knew more about the surrealists than he did, Dad’s sparring partner of the moment would be stunned by my father’s kindness. Guests often left L’Abri loving Dad even while disagreeing with him. But I also know quite a few people, for instance an old friend of mine, a Harvard comparative literature graduate and master furniture maker who converted and then, later in life, began to wonder if he had been brainwashed.

I have sometimes wondered, when my parents “converted” people, if those people really accepted Christ, or if
they had just fallen under the spell of my energetic and attractive parents.

There were many converts who “fell away” after they got out of my mother and father’s powerful orbit. For many, the Christian world they went back to never measured up. They had a hard time finding churches they liked. It left many wondering if L’Abri was the only place where “true Christianity” was being put into practice. If so, what did that say about the claims that Christianity was universal truth?

My parents perpetuated this problem with often-repeated (not so subtle) hints that when you left L’Abri, there would be few other places as close to ideal in both theology and daily Christian practice. My parents were always talking about this or that student who wrote back saying they couldn’t find a “good church.” Dad warned converts: “Look for a good church. But I’m afraid you’ll have a hard time finding one. There aren’t many.”

M
y parents took three weeks of vacation each year. In the summer, we spent two weeks in Portofino, Italy, at that time an inexpensive place to go on holiday. In the winter, we went to Zermatt to ski for a week. We went to the same places year after year and got the “off-season” rates.

We stayed in the Pensione Biea in Paraggi every year till I was twelve, then switched to the Hotel Nazionale in Portofino. The Hotel Nazionale was on the main square of Portofino, overlooking the horseshoe-shaped harbor and side-by-side pastel buildings accented by green louvered shutters that lined one side of the bay. The buildings provided a stage-set-like backdrop for the yachts, the fishing boats, and the jet-setters.

The Pensione Biea was on the beach at Paraggi. Paraggi and Portofino were a twenty-minute walk apart in adjoining bays, separated by a spit of rocky coast. We took a walk between Portofino and Paraggi every day to and from the beach, when we were staying in Portofino; and to and from our evening ritual stroll around the piazza in Portofino, when we stayed in Paraggi.