The people who “got saved” were not just any old kind of English people. I never heard a Cockney accent until I was in English boarding school and I talked to Peg and Fred, the embittered, downtrodden and perpetually angry working-class
caretakers. The only British accents I heard at L’Abri (at least in the early days) were the plumy upper-class tones honed in Oxford and Cambridge, where Mom and Dad often went, as well as to London, to conduct discussions hosted by students who wanted to share what they had learned with their friends.
25
M
y parents would begin or end any conversation of any length or seriousness, any event, meal, or get-together with prayer. They would meet people on trains and buses, or just in the hall of the chalet, talk for a while, perhaps learn of some problem, and, nine times out of ten, suddenly exclaim “Do you mind if we take this to the Lord?” or “Would you like to pray about this?” or just issue a declarative “Let’s pray!”
Then they would launch into a prayer that was earnest and full of theological content, and in Mom’s case unbelievably long, so long that Dad would often shoot her annoyed glances. People would shift from foot to foot, and if there were several people standing with Mom when she was praying, and I was lucky enough to be on the fringe and not stuck next to her, I might sidle away.
Mom sometimes would hold forth in prayer for—
literally!
—forty-five minutes or more. And sometimes, if I kept my eyes closed the whole time the way I was supposed to, when I finally opened them and looked up, I was dizzy.
The excuse for the prayer, for instance the information that someone was ill, would get briefly mentioned. Then a lot of solid theology would also be mixed in. And since presumably my parents believed that God already
had
correct theology, and
didn’t
need instruction, it was clear that they were praying
at
the person with them, not
to
God, because God didn’t need to be told he was sovereign, the Creator, loved each of us but hated sin. Nor did he need to be reminded that we are all sinners, and that only his son’s “finished work on the cross” could save us.
Prayers began “Dear Heavenly Father” and continued with a litany of requests. When prayed out loud, the prayers were often a not-so-subtle vehicle for sermons. These sermons (masquerading as prayer) were for the good of those here on earth who were eavesdropping on what was purporting to be a conversation with God but was really a way to say things to Dad, that Mom didn’t dare say out loud, or a way for Dad or Mom to preach
at
an unbeliever.
Praying out loud was also a way of advancing one’s case, the advantage being that no one dared interrupt you or argue back. Moreover, prayer was a way to tell God to behave, to stick with being the God we said he was, and a way to remind God of his “many promises” so he wouldn’t try to do anything odd or theologically inconsistent.
“Dear Heavenly Father, we just come to Thee to thank Thee for the fact that Thou art a Sovereign Lord Who has seen from before the beginning of time who You wouldst ordain to save. We just thank Thee that Thou art a good and loving Father Who has chosen us to serve Thee and to demonstrate Thine existence to an unbelieving world. . . .”
All the basic precepts were right there in my parent’s prayers. Now God knew what he was supposed to be doing—predestining each individual to be saved or lost and doing this from before creation—so we could relax. Prayer was a way to remind God not to let his attention wander or forget that we,
and we only, really understood what he was supposed to be doing. So we prayed
at
him, too. The logic of those prayers, if one was reading between the lines, was something like this:
“Dear Heavenly Father, in Your Word You say that when two or three are gathered together, You will be in the midst of them. Well, we’re gathered here, so do what we’re telling You to do because we have You over a barrel and can quote Your own book back at you! And in case You’re thinking of weaseling out of this deal, we claim Your promises, and because You can’t break any of those since You wrote it all in the Bible, You’ll do what we say, and You’ll do it NOW! Amen!”
On days of prayer (Mondays), Mom signed up for several hours, but Dad only put his name on a half-hour box on the prayer chart posted in the kitchen. Mom would dismissively say “Poor Fran just prays from his little list, but that is certainly
not
enough for me! I mean, my dear, I
really
want to
TALK
to the Lord! Would you only want to have half an hour of conversation with your best friend?!”
I sometimes wondered if God ever tried to duck out of the room when he saw Mom coming. We each took at least a half hour; Susan and Debby took more than me, more like a whole hour. The workers signed up, and some of the guests did, too. That way, someone was constantly praying from seven AM to seven PM. But during my half hour, I just sat in my room and stared at the wall and couldn’t figure out why it was a good idea to tell God stuff he already knew.
Theologically speaking, we believed in an absolutely powerful omnipotent and sovereign Lord. But in practice, our God had to be begged and encouraged to carry out the simplest tasks, for instance to keep moving the hearts of the local Swiss authorities to renew our residency permits.
How exactly was this supposed to work? God was in charge, but he wouldn’t do anything for us unless we believed he would do it. But if he didn’t do anything, what reason was there to believe?
We lacked the faith to pray effectively and make God do stuff. So we prayed for the faith to make God give us faith to make him do stuff. But getting enough faith was the biggest problem, so we prayed for the faith we needed to pray for faith. But how much faith did it take to pray to have enough faith to pray for faith? And if God knew you wanted faith, why didn’t he just give it to you? It was like spending all your time calling directory information for phone numbers that you aren’t allowed to call unless you can guess the number right without asking.
What is strange is that today, in my totally “backslidden” state and long after I rejected the faith of my youth, or rather the faith I was supposed to have had in my youth, and have become “horribly secular” and write for “liberal publications” and have “questioned everything,” I
do
pray a lot. The habit of faith can’t be rejected so easily. Mom won.
It doesn’t matter what I think. It is a question of what I am.
PART II
EDUCATION
26
W
hen I was ten, my parents despaired of trying to home school me. Susan pushed them to send me to school, any school. And since it was far too late to put me in the rigorous Swiss public school system, they sent me to a local private school, the ludicrously misnamed Gai Matin (Happy Morning).
I went there because the school offered a class taught in English. The school was owned and run by Madame Moraz, a robust tweed-clad, child-hating, wide-hipped French woman married to a small subservient Swiss husband who trotted at her side, the way a worried pilot fish accompanies a shark. The school was in Chésières, a village a couple of miles up the road from Huémoz next to the ski resort of Villars. Chésières was mostly chalets and barns, but my school was a five-story stone-and-stucco building with big picture windows and a stupendous view of the mountains. An old red tram ran from Villars to Chésières and made its final stop in front of the school.
There were about forty or fifty of us. The student body was mostly made up of the absentmindedly conceived offspring of globetrotting euro-trash, children of Milanese businessmen who once a year drove up to Switzerland from Milan to visit their mistress’s sons or daughters and check on their Swiss
bank accounts, and half a dozen or so Arab oil-sheiks’ children, as well as a few French and Swiss boys and girls too dim to succeed in the Swiss or French public schools. There were also the sons and daughters of a few American diplomats and international businessmen, and some kids who had been institutionalized virtually from birth, when they were dumped into local homes for children at the age of six months and later “graduated” to Gai Matin. (There was even a school in Les Ecovets, half a mile from Chésières, that took kids as boarders from three months of age.)
Unlike the boarders at Gai Matin, I lived at home and walked the thirty minutes up the road every morning, or sometimes hitchhiked. It took fifteen minutes to walk/run down the mountain on the way home. And in winter, I’d bring my sled and careen home in about five minutes, using the footpath that ran steeply down our mountain cutting a straight line through the big lazy hairpins of the main road.
The best part of going to a “real school” was that we got to ski in Bretaye above Villars every afternoon, from mid-December through late April. From Bretaye, on clear days, which, at least in golden memory, was every day it was not snowing, you could see Mont Blanc peeking up over the range of mountains that sat directly across from our chalet, dominating the lower part of the Rhône Valley. There were almost always several meters of fresh powder, a dazzling blue sky, hot sun that would burn you faster than summer sunshine, and no lift lines because we were skiing on weekday afternoons.
Except for the whirr and jingle of the cable running over the lift’s pulleys, the silence was almost complete. If the lifts stopped, which they did from time to time if someone fell and was being dragged by a T-bar or had trouble getting into a
chairlift, all you would hear was the cry of mountain ravens, skiers’ voices floating up from below, and far distant sounds from the Rhône Valley, maybe a train whistle if the wind was right, but so faint that it sounded as if it were coming from another universe.
On some days I wouldn’t bother to ski back to the school but asked permission to head down through the forest and skied right up to my front door, through new unbroken snow, absolutely alone for a blessed hour, completely free. Sometimes I would play a little game with God. I would radically alter my path, make illogical and sudden turns and stops, just to see if I could momentarily get ahead of predestination, do something God wasn’t expecting. But I always had the feeling it wasn’t working. And out in the wilderness I was glad enough to believe that the Lord was watching over me. I knew that if I fell and broke my leg, I might be stuck outside for a night or worse.
Skiing was a great equalizer. On skis I was very fast, didn’t limp, and never even thought about my bad leg. In fact, I always hated to take off my skis and take that first step, feel my left leg stomp down on the heel, earthbound after I had been flying down the mountain free as if I was already in my perfected resurrected body that Mom told me I’d have some day.
When I was four and just beginning to recover from polio, Dad, against doctor’s orders, took me skiing before I could balance again on my atrophied left leg and walk. I literally learned to ski before I could walk, at least the second time around. Dad gave me confidence. From then on, I assumed that I had no disability, just a nasty-looking left leg and a limp, something I could overcome with a little effort.
When I taught my daughter Jessica to ski, and we were snowplowing our way down the slopes above Villars, the
memory of Dad teaching me flooded back. I actually couldn’t remember his teaching me to ski, but the feel of holding three-year-old Jessica and placing her skis inside mine, and guiding her down the slope while I gripped her between my knees, revived a kind of kinetic memory. Suddenly I knew just how my father had felt, teaching his little boy. I could sense the tenderness as he held me up, bracing me against his legs, showing me how to compensate for a leg that wouldn’t work, to put my weight on the right leg, turn, and pull the other leg around by shifting my body weight.
At Gai Matin, I took ski lessons with the advanced class. I won several downhill and giant slalom races against other schools. I also learned to skate and played ice hockey, the only drawback being that my bad ankle would wobble even in a specially reinforced skate boot.
Except for a couple of miserable and exceedingly fat Saudi brothers, I got on well with the other children. As for those fat Saudis, they would sometimes spit. Why they spit on me and the other children, I have no idea.
I cured their nasty habit after they had been spitting on me every time they passed while we were skating at the Villars rink. I cornered them in the locker room and punched each of the Arabs in the solar plexus, hard. They looked surprised, as if it had never occurred to them that anyone would do more than yell back. They both landed with a plop on the floor and began to wail like babies.
The sports-master-hockey-coach-math-teacher, a tall, forty-something bald and cadaverously wiry Frenchman, asked the fat Saudis why they were crying. When they told him, he grabbed me, spun me around, then kicked me in the bottom as hard as he could, sending me flying into the lockers as if I had
just been drop-kicked through a goal. Then he asked for my side of the story. I told him that the boys had been spitting at me. He lit a cigarette and sucked down a huge drag—he was a chain-smoker and even smoked when coaching hockey, and in class—and stood staring down at me and blowing smoke through his enormous and widely flared nostrils that looked like the blackened openings to twin train tunnels. He asked several other students for their account and they said yes, the fat Arabs spit at everyone. Then he gathered about a dozen of us in a circle and told us to spit on “
Ces sale Arabes
” (these filthy Arabs), and after we all did, he kicked them hard in their fat behinds—they, too, went flying—and that was that.
The private Swiss “schools,” tucked away by the dozen in practically every valley and on every mountainside, were crazy little fiefdoms with their own laws and were completely off the map as far as any normal discipline went. Madame Moraz played favorites. If you were on her good side, you could do anything you wanted. If you were on her bad side, she would organize elaborate public humiliation spectacles and laugh a barking grim laugh at the child being punished. One good way to gain her favor was to mock the offender as loudly and gleefully as possible.