Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--And How I Learned to Love Women (5 page)

I always wondered why she had to pray that the doctor would change his mind and “spare” me. Couldn’t she just have said no, with or without God? Twenty-five years later when I told this story to Dr. Koop, a family friend who was about to be appointed by President Reagan as Surgeon General, he said that you couldn’t design a better method to murder a small child.

Throughout my childhood, Mom often repeated the story and said it was the hardest decision of her life, but “Who knows, perhaps that old doctor’s ideas really did save your other leg because you walked again and they all said you wouldn’t.”

“I have monkey blood in me?” I asked, feeling strangely delighted.

“Not monkey
blood,
darling: chimpanzee spinal fluid. Thank God the doctor relented!”

When I arrived at the stage of life, around eleven years old, when teasing Mom became one of my favorite pastimes, I would bring up the “monkey story.” A good time to wind Mom up was at bedtime when she came up to read to me and then we’d pray together, and moments later she would be about to close my bedroom door, having tucked me in. I didn’t want to go to sleep.

“Mom?” I asked just as my bedroom door was closing.

“Yes, dear?” Mom answered, opening the door just wide enough to pop her head back into the room.

“Mom, if monkey serum cured me, then maybe it proves we really are evolved from monkeys.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, dear.”

“But would lizard blood have worked?”

“It wasn’t blood, dear, and you are just trying to tease me.”

“I’m not, Mom. I’ve been thinking about my polio, and I really do think that maybe this proves the atheists are right.”

“I hope you are joking,” said Mom, opening the door a little wider.

“No, I really do think that maybe we should change what we believe, because it looks like my treatment proves evolution.”

Mom stepped back into the room and turned on the light so she could read the expression on my face, tell if I was serious or not. She gave me a hard look and sighed.

“You might be joking and you might think this is funny, but you are coming awfully close to joking about things we never joke about.”

“Monkeys?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean! We
don’t
joke about the Things of The Lord! Now
good night,
dear!”

Mom flicked off the light, turned, and took a step back and started to close the door.

“I think this means that Darwin is right.”

“I said good night, dear!”
Mom said through the door.

“And I think Dad should change what he teaches about creation!”

The door opened. Mom was standing there with her hands on her hips.

“Now you
really
are being absurd!”

“No, I am not. Dad says that Christianity is so true that if anyone can show it isn’t true, that he’ll give up his faith!”

“Well, the Bible
is
true, and you know that!”

“But I have monkey blood in me, so I’ve become a missing link!” I said, as I lost my struggle and burst into laughter.

Mom started to smile even though she was trying hard not to.

“Darling, this really is NOT funny! God created us each for a purpose, and I know you might only be joking; but there are some things far too serious to joke about, and this is one of them.”

Mom shut the door. I heard a muffled laugh.

“I evolved!” I shouted triumphantly.

“YOU DID NOT!” Mom called back from halfway down the stairs. “Now that is quite enough!
Go to sleep!
You have crossed the line and are perniciously close to taking God’s name in vain!”

“I didn’t say
God
has monkey blood!”

I heard the rush of her steps back up the stairs, and the door flew open. Mom’s face was flushed.

“That’s IT! One more word and I’m getting your father! And you know that will put him in a Mood! So don’t you
dare
make me!”

W
e were earnest and my parents were sincere. Dad had a vicious temper. Mom was a high-powered nut. But so what? Given the range of human suffering, I had a golden childhood. My sisters remember things their own way. I asked each for her thoughts. Priscilla and Debby responded. Susan declined.

Priscilla wrote:

Susan wrote:

Debby wrote:

My Childhood . . .

Being fully aware that these are my memories, which are highly personal and thus made up of distortions, as well as half-remembered stories, I will attempt to give some clearly recalled events and impressions.

My remembered life begins in a Swiss pension, in Lausanne, with a beloved old man, Monsieur Turrian, sitting in an old-fashioned kitchen, swinging me on his foot. My pneumonia that year, watching the doctor draw blood from my father, to mix with penicillin, so that the injection would hurt less, made a deep impression on my three-year-old self. Being carried on my father’s strong shoulders feeling jubilation that I was so high up and, a few years later, the comprehension of the true sorrow of passing time, as he announced that I was getting “too heavy” and that this would be the last time he could carry me, stands out as a milestone. Swinging on his hand and running to keep up with his stride, as well as riding in the child-seat on the back of his bike in Lausanne, in 1948, on the bikes he bought in Holland, stand out clearly. I still feel the soaring joy.

My village life in Champéry was filled with gladness: living in our chalet, walking to school across fields and in the winter skiing every lunchtime. A big part of that period of my life was sleeping at the little school as a boarder, for weeks as my parents traveled [on their missionary speaking trips]. However, though I remember some sadness, mostly I loved the two odd ladies who ran it, Tante Lili and Mademoiselle Huguenin. One was angular and strict, the other puffy and fat and lovely to hug.

My earliest and most abiding memories and view of my father, which never changed, was of a man brutally honest about himself and profoundly humble. The year I was four or
five, my father having lost his temper, though not at me, came to me and asked me to pray for him as he had done wrong. Also, that year as we walked home from church, up the village street, he so reassuringly held my hand and said we had two relationships: father and daughter and brother and sister in Christ. Before God, we stood as equals one next to the other.

Thus my parents’ often stormy relationship was a factor of strength in my own life, as admission of fault, repentance, and forgiveness was a reality I saw my father practice daily. This relationship of two equal human beings was constantly present, beginning as a very young child all the way to my father’s death, as time was always made to discuss and debate the subjects that mattered to me, not only for my sake, but because my father loved to be presented with a new idea. So although my parents were very busy and intensely occupied, I treasure the importance of my person and ideas bestowed on me.

Too many other memories crowd in: of skiing, vacations on the Mediterranean, and most preciously there the afternoon walks alone in the hills with my father, museum visits, and two treasured times in Florence, reading aloud as a family, dinners, so much information and love for history communicated as we walked, ate, or traveled.

The decisions I took alone, that my father felt I should decide for myself, were indicative of what we would today call a “parenting style,” that I now feel left too much up to me. However, the legacy of my father was the freedom to look at what I had experienced and reject or change things in my own life, as I was never led to believe by him that these were ideal.

My mother’s legacy was in stark contrast, as she singlemindedly pursued her ideals, often blinded to the realities of life or of our lives. As a dreamer and a highly artistic individual
my mother created her own life with passion and hard work. I compare her to early discoverers of the North Pole. She pursued her objectives with determination, though bits of bodies all around her were lost to frostbite. The havoc she caused to all around her, as they were dragged in to help her meet self-imposed deadlines and goals, was phenomenal and scarring to me as a child. The force of her personality was such that I, at least, never even thought of refusing. Also, I would say, that though my father taught me the love of the Real, my mother’s idealism has taken years to peel away.

Much love,

Debby

W
hen I was six, I went to America for an operation on my polio leg. (I turned seven in America.) In 1959 we crossed the ocean on a freighter, the
Coroveglia.
She was owned by the André Shipping Line, a Swiss company that belonged to the André family. They were the wealthiest people we knew, a special subject of awe and resentment. Amazingly for “dark post-Reformation” Switzerland, the Andrés were born-again evangelical Christians. They were rich, and from time to time they gave a gift to L’Abri, but never one large enough to impress Mom. “They could give
so much more
if they wanted to!” she would say. “Are they the richest people in the world?” I asked.

“No, dear, but they are probably the richest people in Lausanne, and some of the wealthiest people in Switzerland, and that is saying something,” said Mom.

“They don’t seem rich,” said Debby.

“That is because they aren’t like some rich people who flaunt their wealth.”

“Do they have their own plane?” I asked.

“I don’t know, dear, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”

“What else do they have?” I asked.

“Who knows what else, places in South America I think and
offices everywhere for the shipping line, but when you visit them in Lausanne they’re just in their ordinary nice middle-class home and Mrs. André is peeling carrots like any Swiss housewife and Mr. André comes home for lunch like anybody else and they don’t even have a maid, just someone to help clean. At least I didn’t see a maid. It is really admirable, in that Swiss way.”

When we traveled on the
Coroveglia,
Mom pointed out that “We
still
have to pay for the tickets, only less than we would otherwise.” The idea was that because we were in the Lord’s work, any person with a lot of money who was truly discerning would have given us the boat passage and to do less was something like Mary and Martha charging Christ for supper.

We sailed from Hamburg. The ship was carrying coal dust. I rolled in the dust and got covered from head to toe. I remember the crew urging me on and Mom being angry and my eyes stinging.

When I was two, I had traveled to the States and returned on the
Ile de France,
the ship I got polio on. But the voyage when I was six was the first I made where I discovered that life on shipboard, even a small old freighter, is wonderful. The feel of the engine vibrating under my feet, the roll of the ship, the sense of inexorable forward motion day and night, the lash of the moist wind on deck and the stale interior air down below, the dramatic moment each day as we moved our clocks forward: I loved it all, even the ubiquitous yellow linoleum that the cabins and narrow passages were covered with.