19
H
ow much faith was enough? The answer was that you didn’t need much faith, only as much as a mustard seed. We didn’t have any mustard seeds, but Mom said they were very small. So how much faith was that? It was a tough equation, like trying to measure love by the pound or fear by the yard.
Well, judging by how hard we had to pray just to get some Swiss peasant on the Ollon communal town council to stamp a piece of paper approving a building or residency permit, we didn’t have much faith. If you can’t even get a perpetually drunken farmer to sign his name, how far are you from saying, to a cripple, “Take up your bed and walk!” with any expectation that they will?
I tried this a few times with my bad leg. I commanded it to grow, and it didn’t. So then I tried it on Jean Pierre over at Chalet Bellevue, the home for cerebral palsy sufferers next door. I was twelve at the time and home from English boarding school during the summer holidays. Jean Pierre was tall, angular, and a year or two older than me. He had short hair, a big long nose, and big hands that sometimes were clenched when he had spasms. He had been rescued from an abusive home and sent by the Swiss authorities to Chalet Bellevue.
There were lumps on his face from scars where his mother had beaten him with a stick.
Jean Pierre liked it when I visited, because most of the other CP kids next door were girls. (The home was started as a sister mission to L’Abri, by some like-minded American evangelical women—“The Ladies”—who were fans of my dad.) I was the only boy Jean Pierre knew who could walk well enough so we could play army.
After fighting our wars all over the Bellevue property, sometimes we shared an underwear ad and masturbated under the Les Mélèzes hedge. (In
Saving Grandma,
I put in a story about a spastic who needs help with masturbation. In real life, Jean Pierre managed just fine.)
Jean Pierre had accepted Christ after being led to the foot of the cross by Rosemary Sperry, one of the American ladies who ran the home. So he was ready to try out the healing idea. In the scriptures, various methods were used. We decided we’d try the anointing of oil that the apostles were said to have used in the New Testament church. So I went into Chalet Les Mélèzes.
“Mom, can I have some oil?”
“What for, darling?”
“I just need some.”
“How much oil, and what for?”
“Just regular oil, just enough for some anointing.”
“What?”
“I’m going to play King David, and I want to do some anointing.”
“I suppose that’s all right. Here,” said Mom, taking an empty yogurt cup out of the cupboard; “you can pour in a little of that sunflower-seed oil, but don’t spill any on the floor.”
We had our oil, though I’d lied to get it since playing King David sounded less strange than saying I was planning to heal Jean Pierre. Dad said that we
did
believe in healing, so I knew I would not be struck down or anything. But Dad said we did
not
believe in healing like those confused Pentecostals who didn’t seem to realize that in the New Testament, the point of all those miracles wasn’t the miracles themselves but to prove who Jesus was so that people would believe and the church could get started. It was started now, so healing was rare and usually unnecessary.
We believed that God still could do miracles, but that there had to be a bigger reason. For instance when he saved certain missionaries in the China Inland Mission, it was so more Chinese could hear the gospel and be saved. So that was why the missionaries were miraculously delivered from various bandits, warlords, Boxer rebels, and communists. It was for God’s greater glory, not just to save the missionaries, who, after all, were perfectly willing to be martyrs, just like Stan and Betty Stam, co-missionaries with my grandparents who had “gladly” died singing hymns as the Boxer rebels beheaded them.
I didn’t say what the oil was for because I couldn’t think of any good reason to heal Jean Pierre, except that he didn’t want to jump at loud noises. And we all already believed in God, so we didn’t need more proofs because we were like the people—in fact, we
were
the people—Christ spoke of when he said that Thomas had believed in him because he had seen him and touched him, but that certain people in the future would believe without seeing, just by faith alone. Those believers were going to be particularly blessed. That was us.
But I had doubts. It always seemed to me that what Mom and Dad assumed were answered prayers sometimes had more
mundane explanations. For instance, Mom always said: “We never ask for money. We just take our needs to the Lord in prayer.” But I also knew that she “shared” our needs in her “Family Letter” with our “praying family,” who then sent donations. I knew that Mom paid very special attention to wealthy visitors and also shared our needs with them, sometimes by mentioning the current need in one of her long prayers. I kind of had an inkling of how the living-by-faith trick worked. Perhaps this was why, when I prayed, it was with very little faith. So I thought, if Jean Pierre
is
healed, then I for one will gain greater faith and believe even more, so
that
might be the greater purpose. Anyway, it was worth a shot.
“Jean Pierre!”
“
Oui?”
“Stand still and think about how much you believe.”
“
Bien.”
“How much faith do you have right now?”
We were standing up on the back road behind Chalet Bellevue. The day was perfect, hot sun, crisp cool air, and the mountains looked so close and sharply detailed that they seemed unreal. No one was around. We were hidden by the pine hedge, so if someone did come along, all they would see was us standing there with me holding a small plastic yogurt cup. There was nothing suspicious about that: For all they’d know, we could just be collecting slugs or worms. And if it worked, then who was going to get mad once Jean Pierre began to jump for joy and thank Jesus?
“I have
le
much faith,” said Jean Pierre.
“Do you solemnly promise that you are sure this will work?”
“
Bien sur!
”
“So you’re sure that you’ll be healed?”
“
Oui.”
“Okay. Then in the name of Jesus . . . stand still!”
“I am nervous.”
“But you have to
stop
twitching! You made me spill some oil!”
“
Je m’exuse.”
“Okay; now are you going to stand still?”
“
Oui.”
“Okay, then. Now in the name of Jesus. . . . Wait. Do you think I should do it like Dad does when he baptizes new believers in the name of the Trinity?”
“
Pardon?”
“You know what the Trinity is, don’t you?”
“
Non.”
“What?!”
“What it ees?”
“Well, how can you say you accepted Jesus if you don’t know who the Trinity is?”
“Nobody deed tell me thees.”
“Dad will be furious with the ladies. How on earth can they lead people to Christ if they aren’t telling you guys that he is the second person of the Trinity? Why, you don’t even know who you believe in!”
“I am tired and must sit. Heal the oils
tout suite,
Frankie!”
“Okay. But if it doesn’t work, it’s because you have a theological problem. But here goes. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit . . . by the way, THAT is the Trinity.”
“
Bien. Je comprends.”
“In that name and of course mostly in Jesus’s name, I command the spasticness to depart and that you be
healed!”
I reached up—Jean Pierre was a foot taller than me—and
poured the oil over his head. There was more in the cup than it had seemed. It looked like a little but as it ran all over Jean Pierre’s shirt and stained his maroon corduroy pants a dark blotchy black-red, I realized that this anointing business was a lot messier than as advertised in the Scriptures where it only said it ran down over people’s heads, shoulders, and beards, and nothing about really messing up their clothes.
“Are you feeling better?”
“
Non!
”
“Well, then, you didn’t have the faith after all.”
“
Mes oui,
I have the faith! It ees
you
who did not have the faith!
Salaud!
”
“What are you going to tell the ladies happened to wreck your shirt and pants?”
“
Merde!
”
“See?! We’re in the middle of a healing and you are using profanity and you expect God to heal you? I’m wasting my time!”
“It ees
you
who have no faith! It ees because you are play with your pee-pee that
Jesu
no heal me!”
“You’re blaming
me
because we touch ourselves? What about you?!”
“Oui, you are feelthy, so God he don’t hear your prayer, so he don’t heal me.”
“Fine, then find somebody else to do it!”
I marched off in a huff. And it was a week before I went back over to Chalet Bellevue, and I only went then because Jane Stuart Smith was doing her weekly Sunday hymn-sing with the children and I liked to hear her sing. After the hymn-sing, Jean Pierre and I made peace behind the hedge, aided by several bra advertisements.
20
T
wo old ladies—rather one old lady and one middle-aged lady who seemed old—arrived. First, Gracie Holmes came to stay, and then Grandmother Schaeffer, Dad’s mom. Gracie lived in a little room at the end of the middle-floor hall, two doors down from the kitchen and next to a girl’s dormitory. Grandmother got Susan’s old room at the end of the upstairs hall.
Gracie came to live with us when I was nine or ten. She was an Englishwoman with the IQ of an eight-year-old. She had had a stroke when she was in her twenties that left her paralyzed on the right side of her body. She walked with a limp, dragging her right foot, and her right arm was almost useless. Gracie’s face was asymmetrical. She had false teeth and pink babylike skin and watery pale blue eyes. Her tongue would loll out of her mouth when she was thinking hard. Gracie had somehow gotten stranded in a Swiss home for mentally retarded adults. Susan met Gracie (where, I don’t know) and brought her for a visit to L’Abri so she could meet other people who spoke English—and, of course, have the chance to accept Jesus. Gracie came to visit every weekend after that and accepted Jesus as soon as Susan told her to. Then one day Mom asked Gracie if she would like to stay. Gracie burst into tears and said yes.
After Gracie moved in, she would lug a big Bible to church
every Sunday and sit there smiling at everyone with her Bible open and upside down. Gracie and I became good friends. It was as if she was my little sister. I teased her but never about her condition, only in the sense that she was easy to fool. She would accept anything I said at face value, either believing it or pretending to. For instance, Gracie and I prepared in various ways to meet Jesus.
“Jesus is coming back in a few minutes Gracie,” I said barging into Gracie’s room one morning.
“Very nice, darling,” Gracie said, very matter-of-fact, except she pronounced it “dalin.”
“So you better get ready.”
“Yes.”
“So get up and get dressed. You don’t want to meet the Lord in that old nightgown, do you?”
“No, dalin.”
“Okay, then hurry.”
A few minutes later, we were standing in front of our chalet. Gracie was looking up into the sky expectantly and clutching her oversized handbag, while I was trying not to burst into laughter. Gracie was in her best dress. A few minutes passed.
“Where is he, dalin?”
“I think he took the bus from Ollon.”
“Oh?”
“After he gets here, he’ll take us all to heaven.”
“On the bus, dalin?”
“Several buses.”
“Good, dalin.”
Ten minutes later. . . .
“Where IS he, dalin?” asked Gracie with a petulant edge in her voice.
“He’s late.”
“I must do the ironing, dalin.”
“We won’t need anything ironed when Jesus comes back.”
“But I MUST DO IT!”
Gracie’s tongue was protruding and she was turning a bright pink. She got upset if something kept her from her duties. Her eyes, always larger than life as seen through her thick glasses, seemed to get bigger.
“Okay, but don’t blame me if you get left behind. What will Jesus think if you aren’t waiting?”
“Well, dalin, you tell him I’m upstairs doing the ironing for Mr. Schaeffer, because he wants his nice white shirt for Sunday.”
“I will, but Jesus might be angry.”
“Never mind him, dalin.”
Mom looked over the top-floor balcony. “Frankie?”
“Yes, Mom?”
“What are you and Gracie doing?”
“We’re waiting for Jesus, but I must go iron, dalin, mustn’t I?”
“Yes, Gracie, you go do that, but maybe you’ll want to change out of your Sunday dress first.”
“Yes, dalin,” said Gracie, and she marched off.
“Frankie!”
“Yes, Mom?”
Gracie would hide the shirts she scorched. She would also count the silverware and follow guests around asking them where a missing spoon or fork was until everyone was so exasperated that people would drop what they were doing and help her find the fork. And then Gracie would beam at them and/or mutter darkly about how she knew they had been stealing
“Mrs. Schaeffer’s forks.” Sometimes I would hide silverware under a student’s pillow and then hint to Gracie that I suspected the girl or boy of theft until she searched their room. Then it would take Mom half the afternoon to get Gracie to stop following the suspect while mumbling darkly and calm the accused “thief” down. The possibilities were endless.
After a few years of being “in charge” of the house, Gracie would routinely hide all the silver, the napkins, and even the toilet paper. That way, no one could do anything without going to her and begging for whatever they needed. My parents never made her change her strange and squirrel-like habit. “She just wants to feel important,” Mom would say. “There’s no harm done.”