Many years later, in 1983, the year before Dad died and when he was already very ill—he was in St. Mary’s Hospital at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota—I went out, found an art-supply store, and then sat down next to Dad and painted and drew for two days. I worked from memory, producing drawings of favorite places, the Dents du Midi at night, views of Portofino, Florence, a mother and child, and several paintings of my heavily outlined, oversized apples and leaves. (I hadn’t painted for over ten years.)
I pinned and propped up the art all around my father, turning his hospital room into an impromptu gallery. The warm friendly scent of the linseed oil overwhelmed that hospital smell. I held Dad, and we cried together. And Dad answered my thoughts when he said, right out of the blue, “We had fun in Florence, didn’t we, boy?”
34
L
’Abri was at its zenith in 1968. Hippies and other assorted “seekers” were thronging the community. Dad was traveling to lecture more and more. Mom was giving many talks at L’Abri and all over Europe and America. In imitation of some of our wilder students, I was wearing knee-high motorcycle boots in which I carried a dagger. I was painting up a storm in my attic studio. I smoked and drank wine and shandies (a mix of lemonade and beer). L’Abri was filled with backpacking young men and women not too much older than me. We all knew every word of Sergeant Pepper’s.
I wanted to be an artist, wanted to write plays, and was taking hundreds of photographs. My parents had lost control of me, yet were proud of my accomplishments as a painter when they (very occasionally) noticed I was alive. It seemed that they just thought of me as one more L’Abri guest. I certainly looked the part. But my parents did keep paying for art supplies and also set me up with Donald Drew, one of the L’Abri workers, who had been a literature teacher before he retired and took up full-time ministry.
Donald was dapper, a lifelong bachelor, white-haired and distinguished-looking, and a classical music record collector whose one possession was a monster sound system. We studied
Shakespeare, Chaucer, and the Brontë sisters. I would write essays for Donald once a week. He was a good teacher, and over the course of about eighteen months I more or less received a “great books” British university-level literature course.
Dad was wearing his hair longer and longer, and he grew a goatee. He took to wearing beige Nehru jackets, odd linen shirts, and mountain-climber’s knickers (a Swiss alpine version of old-fashioned golfing plus-fours). Dad had evolved into a hip guru preaching Jesus to hippies, a precursor to, and the spiritual father of, the Jesus Movement that some of Dad’s disciples like Jack Sparks—who a few years later, was featured on the cover of
Life
baptizing hippies in a San Francisco swimming pool—founded after they studied at L’Abri.
The last vestiges of my family’s fundamentalist taboos were forgotten. The constant stream of students and their questions and interests had changed my parents radically. The L’Abri I left to go to GW at eleven and the L’Abri I came back to at fifteen (almost sixteen) were completely different places. I could listen to any music I wanted.
On any given evening, several of the L’Abri guests were out in the fields smoking pot. By the time I was barely sixteen, I was hanging around with twenty-year-olds, mostly the bell-bottom-clad, long-haired “English crowd” that were then regulars at L’Abri.
Dad was about to become one of the most famous and influential evangelical leaders of his time, after his first book,
Escape from Reason,
was published. He was preaching against “middleclass Christianity” and used the word “bourgeois” when he talked about “plastic Christians” and the “generation gap.”
The ethos of the sixties suited my parents perfectly. Dad had dropped out of the mainstream evangelical missionary
movement in the late 1940s and then discovered the world of art. In the 1960s, he was swept up in a subculture of rebellion when he began to listen to artists like Bob Dylan. The times mirrored Dad’s individualism. He was “into” big ideas; and, suddenly, so was everyone else. Dad knew how to “speak to young people so they understand,” and suddenly other evangelicals wanted to know how to do that, too. Born-again Christians were confronted by a rebellious youth culture. Suddenly they needed Dad’s pop-culture expertise.
Dad said that middle-class values, bereft of their Christian foundation, were empty. He sided with “the kids” against their “uptight parents.” Dad warned that once the memory of the truths upon which “middle-class Western norms” were built—in other words, biblical Christianity—had been forgotten, that within a generation those values would be swept away. “Then people will want order at any price.”
L’Abri was now on the radar screen of a whole generation of backpacking bohemian travelers, on their way to or from ashrams in India, London’s trendy Carnaby Street, or San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. Dad’s answer to the rebellion of the “happening generation” was that the hippie analysis of our plastic culture was correct but that their solution—free love and drugs—would not work. Mankind had a God-given moral character. If you did not obey God’s law, you were flying in the face of reality because “The universe is what it is, no matter what we say it is.”
Dad’s answer was not to return to middle-class ways but to accept the truth of the Bible and then encourage the artists, poets, and rebels to rebel with a purpose: to restore truth to its rightful place, and to redeem all of creation through putting Christ back at the center of our lives. While they did this, there
was no need to conform to “petty bourgeois rules.” You could keep your hair long and your music hip, and smoking a little pot was no better or worse than that martini your uptight parents drank every night. Rock and roll was fine. It often told the truth about the human condition far, far better than all those American “plastic preachers” did.
On a speaking trip sometime in 1967 or early 1968, Dad took me along. (I forget if this was during a holiday before I ran from St. David’s, or just after.) We were in California, where Dad was speaking at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. I hooked up with the daughter of a L’Abri worker who happened to be a freshman at the school. I spent a pleasant evening necking with her on a bench overlooking the sports facility while she steered my hands away from her crotch.
In one lecture I did attend, Dad berated the administration for not acquiescing to the demands of a local environmental group. The school had refused to spare some trees that some local hippies were trying to save when the school built a new wing. Dad had found out about this while walking around the neighborhood. The school revisited the issue and, because of Dad, a stand of trees was saved. (Not too long after that incident, Dad wrote a pro-environmentalist book that went more or less unnoticed in the evangelical market, at least compared to some of his best-selling works.)
One night in San Francisco, Dad and I went to the Fillmore West and heard Jefferson Airplane. Dad loved the concert and stayed the whole night. When the hippies packed around us passed a joint our way, Dad smiled and mouthed the words “No, thank you” but cheerfully handed it on down the line. The next day, Dad bought several Airplane albums. After that, once in a while he played them at top volume in his bedroom.
He was the coolest dad anyone I knew had, and the only one who knew the words to “White Rabbit.”
Bob Dylan scheduled a visit to L’Abri, then at the last minute didn’t come. Mick Jagger also failed to show up at the last minute. (He and Keith Richards had a chalet in Villars and called to say they were on their way down to us several times.) My cousin Jonathan (his mother was Aunt Janet, of the Communist Party and later of the Closed Brethren) was hanging around London with Paul McCartney. Dad was carrying on a long handwritten correspondence with Leopold Senhor, President of Senegal (a famous African poet in his own right). When I met Jimmy Page, lead guitarist for Led Zeppelin (in 1969 or thereabouts), he had a paperback copy of
Escape from Reason
in his back pocket and pronounced it “very cool.” Eric Clapton had given him Dad’s book, Page told me. One of Joan Baez’s best friends was at L’Abri.
Of course, we were all hoping Joan Baez
would
come to L’Abri and get saved, because that would be a “great way to reach so many young people for Christ.” The more famous, the more hip the convert, the more “the Lord could use that person.” There was a type of unofficial aristocracy. A born-again Wheaton College student (Wheaton is a major evangelical school in Illinois), who showed up just to do Bible studies and to “deepen her walk with the Lord,” was low on the totem pole compared to, say, a British heroin addict-artist who was hanging out with Keith Richards.
When former Harvard professor and LSD drug guru Timothy Leary came to Villars and stayed in a hotel for several days to meet with Dad, we canceled everything and had a special day of fasting and prayer. “Just
think
of what it will mean if
he
gets saved!” Mom exalted. When Bob Dylan
didn’t
show up, “the Devil won a victory.”
According to Dad, Samuel Becket, Jean Genet, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, et al., were doing God’s work. They were preparing men’s hearts, in “pre-evangelism,” and “tearing down the wall of middle-class empty bourgeois apathy.” Jimi Hendrix was
right
to scorn that plastic business, man! All we needed to do was provide the answer after the counterculture rebels opened the door by showing people that life without Jesus was empty.
The great thing was that since Jimi Hendrix saw the problem—“the problem” was materialistic middle-class life without eternal values—listening to Jimi became essential to “understanding our generation” and “reaching them.” As Dad said, “We have to speak their language.”
Since that language was rock and roll, art and movies, it suited me perfectly. Not only had the fundamentalist taboos of my childhood lapsed; they were reversed. In fact, during our many arts weekends I was encouraged to play the latest records, and then we would have discussions on what it all meant. Dropping out and turning on was cool now, so I was going with the flow, no longer an oddity.
The twenty-year-olds I was hanging out with were not interested in necking, but in having sex. They weren’t smoking a little dope; those on drugs were addicts or had hitchhiked through India and arrived at L’Abri like backpacking private pharmacies. There were some who had attempted suicide, girls who talked about the multiple abortions they had had. Everyone wore clothes like a badge. How long your hair was defined who you were.
I grew my hair past my shoulders and organized shows of my art and photography in the L’Abri chapel from time to time, as did other artists visiting L’Abri, as did the poets who read at poetry evenings, as did the composers and musicians who
performed at the many concerts, from Jane Stuart Smith’s classical recitals to protest songs. The art was not some Christianized pablum; it had an edge. Poems were often pornographic, my paintings were sometimes of nudes, and the music was loud.
It was imperative that we “go into the world” and paint, compose, write, and direct movies. I was not only
allowed
to go to movies but organizing film festivals for L’Abri, including Fellini and Bergman. And there were a host of Schaeffer clones who were starting to get into the be-cool-for-Jesus business, too. Os Guinness, Dick Keyes, and many others who were at one time or another L’Abri workers, learned their I-can-explain-everything-to-modern-people strategies for evangelical intellectual renewal while sitting at Dad’s feet.
The dorms were full. Discussions in the chapel were packed. At two AM on any given day, we were up discussing the world and everything in it. And my studio was a great place to chat up a bird.
Mom and Dad had completely abandoned even a pretense of parental guidance. They were now so busy writing books, getting famous, and working night and day in L’Abri, or on the road speaking, that had I died they might have gone a week or two without noticing. (As a parent, I look back at this time with stunned wonderment.)
I found stability in my friendships within the ever-changing kaleidoscope of guests, helpers, and workers. One sweet young woman provided my transition from childhood crushes to almost-grown-up love. (Years later, when I saw the movie
Rushmore,
I completely understood and identified with the protagonist and his hilariously humiliating quest to be taken seriously by a woman ten years older than him.)
Kathy was a student at L’Abri, then became a worker. I think
she got to L’Abri when I was about thirteen, and left when I was almost sixteen. For a year or so, I was wildly, madly in love with her. She was about twenty-five, had a rounded kindly face, bright blue eyes that glittered when she laughed, dimples to die for, and frosty gold-blonde hair. And Kathy was kind, and yet frighteningly virtuous.
She let me tag around after her, but she kept a very appropriate physical distance from this lusting man-boy. Kathy kept me so busy with unrequited longing that she prevented me from chasing many more available but—in retrospect—much less wholesome young women. (I probably
didn’t
contract syphilis, herpes, or gonorrhea from the hitchhiking crowd that year because of Kathy.)
I have a “snapshot” of Kathy pleasantly fixed in my brain: the-endlessly-frustratingly-wholesome-pietistic-super-evangelical-female in our vegetable garden, brushing a strand of golden hair out of her face with the back of her hand as she picked peas, while looking as if she was in some scene cut from
The Sound of Music,
my very own Julie Andrews.
I recently tracked Kathy down via e-mail (we had been out of contact for forty years) and asked her how she remembered my parents. Her reply is a good representation of the absolute devotion that so many evangelicals have to them even today, and also of their disapproval of me, or anyone, that might do anything to diminish their worshipful regard for my parents.