I forget the point Mom made with her two trees in the prayer talk. I only remember that she spoke at length about going up into the woods and putting her feet on the trunk of one tree, then switching her feet to the trunk of the other tree
while praying, something she demonstrated while lying on the living-room floor. (Mom liked to wear slacks when she spoke, because that way she could prance around, get on the floor, do whatever it took to illustrate her points.) Anyway, the trees illustrated something or other about how one trunk represented our requests to God and the other trunk was something to do with how he answered us—or, rather, answered Mom, because she was our number-one prayer warrior, the rest of us not even being a distant second.
It was amazing how everything Mom did in her personal life had such spiritual significance, even Mom’s favorite spot in the forest above our chalet where those trees were folded into the ministry. Mainly what Mom’s talk on prayer proved was that she prayed for hours and hours every day and just loved it! Sometimes I wondered if she did protest too much. Who was Mom trying to convince that she was having so much fun up there in the woods with God?
Mom drove me crazy with her pietistic spin on just about anything. She also drove my sisters and myself crazy by folding the most personal moments of our childhood lives into her talks as further illustrations of God’s hand on us, or to make points about how to raise a family.
14
A
s L’Abri grew, it became more formal. Guests were called “students.” Then students had their stay limited to three months, after too many people were being turned away and/or were trying to stay for very long periods. At some point (in the early 1960s), the students were asked to pay a minimal amount per day to stay, whereas at the beginning of the work they were considered houseguests and of course everything was free. If you wanted to stay longer than three months, you could become a “helper” and stay up to six months more. And if you felt led by the Lord (and, more importantly, if Mom and Dad really, really liked you), you could become a “worker.”
The workers were the permanent staff. Some workers would be elected to become “members.” But the members—who were supposedly our independent board—pretty much did what Mom and Dad wanted. I never knew of a decision the members took during Dad’s lifetime that went against his wishes. And this whole network of people, past students, workers, and friends were all bound together by my mother’s “Family Letters” that she sent out every few months.
Cynthia was a L’Abri worker when I was a small child. She was in and around the L’Abri work for years. Later, she became a member. Cynthia was also my homeschool tutor for a time.
Mom didn’t put me in the village school with “all those rough peasant children,” for fear that they would make fun of my polio leg. Besides, Mom wanted me in a Christian environment. So I was homeschooled, but most of the time I did little more than struggle to sound out a page or two of words then head for the forest or village. Out of sight I was also out of mind for whole blessed days at a time.
Cynthia had “a special heart” for the Chinese, with Japanese and Koreans coming a close second. Her plan was to heed God’s call to her to be a missionary to the “millions of lost souls of the Orient.” Cynthia felt that the Lord was leading her to follow in the tradition of Hudson Taylor, the pioneer missionary to China, who grew a pigtail and dressed like a native, the better to “reach out to the lost Chinese.” (He founded the mission my grandparents were in.) Cynthia planned to go Hudson one better; she planned to marry “an Oriental.”
Cynthia suffered from bad breath; at least she thought she did. I thought her breath was fine. Nevertheless, she brushed her teeth six or seven times a day and I used her imagined affliction to avoid learning to read. I pretended to be sickened as we bent our heads together over the page. Then she would excuse herself and go brush her teeth—again.
I’d never say anything, just pull away and take a deep breath as if about to charge through a smoke-filled room, then read out loud till my breath ran out, then lean way back and take another gasp of air. With any luck, when she went down the hall to brush her teeth, she would get distracted by Mom, who needed help in the kitchen making lunch for thirty guests. Cynthia wouldn’t come back for a while, and I could just stare out the window. Of course, this was when there were no Japanese, Chinese, or Koreans around. If there
were, then Cynthia was fully occupied and homeschool was indefinitely postponed while she gave the current Oriental Bible studies.
Would God answer earnest, sweet, pretty Cynthia’s prayer and provide her a husband so she could return with him to some far-distant land as a missionary with access to the “indigenous people”? I would daydream about Cynthia’s future husband out there somewhere, if only he’d marry Cynthia before “the change.”
Mom would comment, “Poor Cynthia, you know time is really running out for her! I just
pray
that the Lord brings her someone . . .
before the change!”
There was so much to worry about: God finding the man in time, God preserving a few good eggs in Cynthia’s aging insides, the man being “God’s choice for Cynthia,” and keeping the lost millions from getting sick and dying before Cynthia could get there and do her stuff and save them. All sorts of clocks were ticking: biological, spiritual, eternal . . .
and
she’d have to learn the language first! Between the babies, learning the language, finding a man—and this didn’t even address the issue of the funds to get out there—how could God do it all
before the change?
The quest for Cynthia’s husband and the state of her withering ovaries became a major obsession of my childhood.
“Have you found anyone yet?” I would ask.
“No, but there are two Koreans coming up next weekend from the University of Lausanne,” Cynthia said.
Cynthia picked up the reading book and thrust it in front of me.
“But tell me,” I added hurriedly, “how do you know that the Lord wants you to marry one of them?”
“I don’t know who the Lord will lead me to, but I have a very special heart for them. And there are signs.”
“What signs?”
“Well, for one thing I’m naturally good at languages. I’ve been learning Japanese and Chinese.”
“But now it looks like it may be a Korean.”
“Never mind that.”
“Or two of them.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Okay, what other signs?”
“Well, by God’s grace I’m small. I couldn’t marry one if I was towering over the poor little chap, now, could I?”
“If they’re really short, they can stand on a box to kiss you.”
“That is quite enough! Now open your book and read from: ‘Kate has a ball to share with Jack. . . .’ ”
“I just want to know one other thing. Are you going to have children with them?”
“Of course, if the Lord wills.”
“Mom said it will have to be soon because of the change.”
Cynthia, always slightly pink, sometimes blushed as only pale Englishwomen do, turning strawberry-red. And I was cruel the way only little boys can be cruel, especially one who knows far too much about female anatomy and uses this knowledge to distract his tutor from doing her job.
With three older sisters and a mother who liked to talk “frankly” about sex to her children, I had been swimming in a sea of female secrets and absorbing titillating inside knowledge since I could remember. Mom skipped the birds and bees and cut to the chase. By the time most boys were just beginning to wonder if girls were different from them “down there,” I was awash in menstrual cycles, ovaries, the inside dope on my
sisters’ urinary tract infections, Mom’s diaphragm—“We’re not Catholics, and spacing your children is a
good
idea!”—even intimate knowledge about how sex could help Dad’s Moods.
“Your father insists on having sexual intercourse
every single night!
That’s why I can’t be with you and
have
to go on this trip to England with him. He won’t be away from me even for
one
night, darling.”
The thousands of young women and men who passed through L’Abri between, say, 1957 and 1980 (when I moved away to America) may assume that every single private and deeply embarrassing conversation they ever had with my mother was “shared” in vivid detail with my sisters and myself, not to mention with other L’Abri workers. There was the airline stewardess whose husband said he would leave her unless she had breast augmentation surgery. She did, and he still left her, and, “on top of that, her breasts were ruined!” And there were all the single pregnant women. I knew the details of how each one got pregnant. “And she was a
virgin!
And they were in his car, and you know what, she said all she felt was
pain
and didn’t even enjoy it! And she never saw him again! And now she’s pregnant!” The average guest at L’Abri was a pretty girl in her early twenties, full of questions—“deep questions” were even better—about God, about life, and about relationships—above all, marriage. And Mom’s talk on marriage kept her female audiences spellbound. Mom told me what she was telling them, and about their “private” questions.
“If you get sent out as a missionary to darkest Africa,” Mom would say, “it’s just as important for you to bring a see-through black negligee as to bring your Bible, if you want your marriage to be good and keep your husband happy.”
The more Mom talked about how amazingly God had made
our reproductive organs, and the more she told me how I was to save those organs for marriage, the more I wanted to try them out. I was like a starving child given an endless restaurant tour by an expert chef while being commanded not to touch or taste anything until I grew up!
What was happening to my body was also monitored by Mom. Years ahead of time, I was forewarned about the “changes about to take place.” I was on the lookout for the pubic hair Mom said would soon grow and the wet dreams Mom said would soon trouble my sleep. When
at last
I spotted the first fuzz of pubic hair—I was about twelve—it was as if I was witnessing some biblical prophecy being fulfilled. And the so-called wet dreams Mom loved to tell me that God would some day “send as His way of relieving your desires until He brings you the girl he has chosen for you to marry” never materialized, probably because I never gave God the chance. I had been taking care of my needs for years on my own.
Life had two huge demarcation lines, a cosmic
before
and
after,
from which everything else flowed. There was salvation, the crossing of the line from light to dark. And there was marriage, and life
before
“the wedding night” and life
after.
Life before the wedding night was a constant battle to resist temptation; life after, a nonstop romp wherein you could become “one flesh” as much as you wanted, look up the skirt of your beloved, see her naked all you wanted, and all she had to worry about was yeast infections and urinary tract infections, “common to newlywed young women.”
I kept thinking that every pretty girl who got off the bus in Huémoz and walked up the front steps to L’Abri was maybe The One. That was one obsession; the other was that I worried that I could not remember a
specific moment
when I’d accepted Jesus.
I just always believed in him. But wasn’t that like being a Roman Catholic? They didn’t get born-again; they just trusted in men’s traditions and sacraments. I would ask Mom, and she said that we could make sure by praying right then and there, again.
I would pray the sinner’s prayer quite often: “Dear Heavenly Father, we just come to you to say we are sinners and that we are trusting in the saving grace of Jesus, who died for us on the cross. . . .” But I never got that feeling of “inexpressible joy” that other people, former pagans and Catholics and Jews and liberal Protestants and deflowered fallen women, got, or said they got, when they were saved.
When a pagan accepted Jesus, my sisters would rush down to the living room and play the scratched, much-abused “Hallelujah Chorus” from the Handel’s
Messiah
on the record player. And everyone would run around talking about how the angels in heaven were rejoicing over this or that lost sheep. Then the newly redeemed gave up smoking, or married the girl, or quit studying to be an architect and went to Covenant Seminary in St. Louis instead.
I may not have had a dramatic conversion, but I had no intention of letting the second of life’s big moments pass me by. I might not know the
exact moment
I passed from dark to light, but I was on the lookout for the right woman from the time I was about eight.
15
I
believe that my parents’ call to the ministry actually drove them crazy. They were happiest when farthest away from their missionary work, wandering the back streets of Florence; or, rather, when they turned their missionary work into something very unmissionary-like, such as talking about art history instead of Christ. Perhaps this is because at those times they were farthest away from other people’s expectations.
I think religion was actually their source of tragedy. Mom tried to dress, talk, and act like anything but what she was. Dad looked flustered if fundamentalists, especially Calvinist theologians, would intrude into a discussion and try to steer it away from art or philosophy so they could discuss the finer points of arcane theology. And Dad was always in a better mood before leading a discussion or before giving a lecture on a cultural topic, than he was before preaching on Sunday. I remember Dad screaming at Mom one Sunday; then he threw a potted ivy at her. Then he put on his suit and went down to preach his Sunday sermon in our living-room chapel. It was not the only Sunday Dad switched gears from rage to preaching. And this was the same chapel that the Billy Graham family sometimes dropped by to worship in, along with their Swiss-Armenian, multimillionaire in-laws, after Billy—like
some Middle Eastern potentate—arranged for his seventeen-year-old daughter’s marriage to the son of a particularly wealthy donor who lived up the road from us in the ski resort of Villars.