Genie mortgaged our home. (We had paid cash for it in the flush old evangelical days.) She did a brilliant job of managing our money, paid off our debts, started a successful small business, and, over a few years, pulled us out of a steep financial nosedive.
After my second novel was published, I was starting to feel almost sane. On a visit back to LA (I was there doing a reading at Dutton’s from
Saving Grandma
), I went to a nearby Ralph’s, bought fifty dollars’ worth of pork chops, and then put them back into the meat display case. I could have just sent the company a check, but I enjoyed the symbolism of this theatrical bit of penance.
Where my evangelical books had once sold a hundred thousand copies in weeks—for instance, during the period when Dobson bought, then gave away, tens of thousands of copies of
A Time for Anger
—
Portofino
sold a mere several thousand over several months. Nevertheless, it had good hardcover (and later paperback) sales for a first novel by an unknown writer (unknown to the fiction-buying secular public, that is).
Saving Grandma
did fine, too. And over the years since, some books have done better than others. (Oprah helped one make the best-seller list.) But the earnings from my secular writing feel genuine, not like some sort of Monopoly money, which was the way my Jesus-dollars always struck me.
There were a few final and strange little moments on my
way out of the evangelical world. At first, Macmillan (who published the original hardcover) foolishly thought they could sell
Portofino
in the Christian Booksellers Association market, given the family name and my evangelical “track.” As soon as the word got out that
Portofino
was funny at the expense of the fundamentalist subculture, not to mention that there was sex in the book, Macmillan got cartloads of CBA returns. I received a handful of irate letters from a dozen or so evangelical bookstore managers, all of whom, a few years before, would have killed to have me come to their stores for an event.
When
Portofino
was published, my sister Susan was very upset and wrote me a barely coherent seven-page letter. She faulted me for both making my novel too fictional—“We never did anything like that!”—and not for not being true to life—“
Why
don’t you tell what it was really like?” Her reaction was couched in pietistic terms.
I didn’t feel like explaining that writers write about what they know and that if I’d been the son of a steelworker, I probably would be setting my novels in a steel town. I also knew I wasn’t alone. François Truffaut infuriated his family when he made
The 400 Blows.
His relations with his parents became intolerable as the autobiographical film was released in the early ’60s. Artists are like creatures who swallow themselves. We process our lives into what we make.
Susan and I didn’t speak for a while. We had no dramatic reconciliation, just began talking about our mother’s needs. I think we are friends again.
Debby didn’t like
Portofino
either, but her reaction was mild since she is an inveterate reader of fiction and appreciated my writing, if not the thinly veiled biographical side of my novel. Priscilla had no problem with the novel, laughed, and at one point said “Be
sure
you
don’t
show this to Susan!”
My mother and I never talked about my first or subsequent semiautobiographical novels, but I did learn that she’d given away half a dozen or so copies of
Portofino
to friends. So I think she was at least as proud of me for my “secular success” (something she had always wanted for her writing that eluded her) as she probably was annoyed to find herself reincarnated as the character “Elsa.”
My children were tracking, too. I think they were glad that the years of turmoil were winding down. John writes:
I can remember sitting down to read my dad’s first novel,
Portofino
. It was during the summer of 1992 and I sat outside on the deck eating bread dipped in hot chocolate. (Dad has a picture on his desk of me sitting there reading his novel.)
If I remember correctly I finished the book that afternoon having sat there for the better part of the day. I knew that
Portofino
was based on his childhood and not completely biographical. But it was much more fun for me to treat it as a strict family history. It was an eye-opening experience for a twelve-year-old.
I think most people have a moment in their lives when they finally see their parents for the first time outside of a selfish utilitarian worldview. Reading
Portofino
was the first time I saw my father. I saw him as a child through Calvin Becker (the protagonist of the novel) and for me Calvin will always be the picture of my father as a child, sitting between his parents with the look of thinly veiled mayhem in his eyes. Perhaps more importantly, I saw my father as a man for the first time in the way he worked on and promoted his book, as someone who deeply wanted to create something that was artistically valid and that would outlast him.
62
A
fter Jim Buchfuehrer and I quit working together (and shut down Schaeffer V Productions in the mid eighties), and after I left the evangelical fold, Jim joined an Orthodox church. I would call him and complain about how lost I was feeling. Then in 1989, I visited Jim in Los Gatos and went to church with him. (There are Greek, Russian, and Antiochian Orthodox in America, as well as some others. The Orthodox groups all share the same liturgies and theology but happen to come from various national emigrant backgrounds. Jim was going to an Antiochian church.)
I loved the liturgy. Somehow, in my mind it connected to everything I had loved most about Italy. There was nothing logical about this. For whatever reason, the liturgy made me feel as if I was standing in a warm piazza surrounded by milling friendly crowds. Sermons didn’t seem to be the point. The liturgy wasn’t an exercise in theology, but an unexplained and mysterious act of worship. In Orthodoxy, in the saints’ lives, in the beauty of the liturgy, in the respect for tradition I rediscovered what I had briefly experienced in my earliest childhood: faith couched in the most beautiful terms.
When I converted to the Greek Orthodox Church (around Christmas of 1990), I was chrismated: anointed with oil, had a bit of hair trimmed off, and a gold cross put around my neck.
I read the Nicene Creed out loud, spit on the Devil, renounced some things, affirmed others.
My family reacted to my conversion in different ways. Genie, Jessica, her husband Dani, Francis, and John joined the Orthodox Church at different times a year or so after me and for their own reasons. John was ten, so he grew up serving at the altar. Jessica was already living in Finland and started going to the Finnish state Orthodox Church there. Francis sometimes drives up from where he lives (about forty-five minutes away) and joins Genie and me for church. These days, I don’t know what my children believe or don’t. I don’t ask. It’s none of my business. Genie’s family was pleased when we left the evangelical world and joined something that seemed more “Catholic” and therefore more familiar. My sisters and brothers-in-law were dismayed. Udo wrote several pointed articles about the “failures” of the Russian Orthodox Church and put them in the newsletter of the Francis Schaeffer Foundation. Susan dropped out of sight for a while. John Sandri was kind. I never heard a word from my oldest friends within the evangelical community.
For a couple of years, I had the zeal of a convert and stuck my conversion in my sister’s faces. I was obnoxious. Of course, my ranting was ironic since Orthodox tradition teaches a transcendent mystery of faith, so that the type of heated historical (hysterical) “theological” arguments I was having were far more Protestant than Orthodox. Obviously I had missed the point.
My conversion didn’t instantly turn my life around or fix every problem. Soon after I joined the Greek Orthodox Church, I was making
Baby on Board
and then marooned in Hollywood stuffing pork chops down my pants. And this was
after
I had spit on the Devil! On my sorties to Ralph’s, I’d sometimes wonder how my new Orthodox friends would take it if Genie had to ask them for bail money.
The Greek Orthodox have access to the sacrament of confession. As the years went by I found that confession helped me draw a line under sins that had more or less tortured me. For instance, I confessed about the times I had slapped Jessica. Then Jessica and I had several talks that ended in tears, forgiveness, and all those things that faith is supposed to do.
I received more spiritual edification out of working on the annual fund-raising food festival, shoulder-to-shoulder with some remarkably lovely people, as we prepared lamb shanks and trays of pasticcio and swept up the church hall, than from speaking, let alone being a “Christian leader.” It was better than parading around in front of audiences, talking about things I barely understood. And I liked deepening my relationship with the people I passed on the street every day in our town. I felt as if in some ways I was back living in my old village. I had a deep local connection to my time and place again.
Genie is the “Ladies’ Aid” treasurer. I’m just her husband. There are a few people in the congregation who read my novels and, at coffee hour, sometimes ask me questions. Unlike my old evangelical friends, real life doesn’t seem to upset them. I never have to “explain” about why I put sex in my books, swear words, or characters who don’t seem to be able to find Jesus.
Genie and I like the fact that in our community, half the congregation comes to church late, so we can wander in at any time and still feel like we participated. And I don’t have to go to church more often than I can stand. When it starts to feel like religion again, I just drop out for a few months, then wander back.
Perhaps I converted to the Greek Orthodox Church (rather than simply abandoning religious faith) because spirituality is a way to connect with people and might even be part of a journey toward God. (If there is a God.) According to Jesus, community
is
spirituality: “Love one another.”
To me, the Greek Orthodox Church is not
the
community but
a
community. Community is an antidote to the poisonous American consumerist “me” and “I want” life that leads to isolation and unhappiness.
Even if spirituality is an illusion that doesn’t resolve our longing for transcendent meaning or our need for other people, maybe the fact that we hope for more means that there is more. Perhaps we are somehow more than the sum of our brain chemistry. Maybe science explains the “how” of the brain but not the “why,” in the same way that a chemical analysis of the pigments used by van Gogh only explains what a painting is made of, not why we like it, much less what it
is.
When I left evangelicalism, it certainly was not because I was disillusioned with the faith of my early childhood. I have sweet (if somewhat nutty) memories of all those days of prayer, fasting, and “wrestling with principalities and powers.” We might have been deluded, but we weren’t unhappy. And there are a lot worse things than parents who keep you away from TV, grasping materialism, and hype, and let you run free and use your imagination.
I think my problem with remaining an evangelical centered on what the evangelical community became. It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American Christianity, the sheer stupidity, the paranoia of the American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture, all of it . . . that made me crazy. It was just too stupid for words.
The Greek Orthodox Church is the least-changed continuous body of Christian worship and tradition. So what? The average pebble in my driveway predates human existence by a hundred million years or so. On the other hand, if you want to try to live as a Christian, maybe it makes sense to attach yourself to a body of faith that bears at least a passing resemblance
to what Christians everywhere, from the beginning of the Christian era, believed and, more importantly, did.
Perhaps there is a more substantive point: Once you buy the evangelical born-again “Jesus saves” mantra, the idea that salvation is a journey goes out the window. You’re living in the realm of a magical formula. It seems to me that the Orthodox idea of a slow journey to God, wherein no one is altogether instantly “saved” or “lost” and nothing is completely resolved in this life (and perhaps not in the next), mirrors the reality of how life works, at least as I’ve experienced it.
One thing I do not regret is that I missed the “opportunity” to be the so-called big-time evangelical leader I could have been. I was good at speaking. We would never have run out of paranoid delusions with which to stir up the ever-fearful and willfully ignorant. But the idea of “passing up” a chance to become a cross between Pat Robertson, Elmer Gantry, and Ralph Reed never bothered me.
The basic prayer of the Greek Orthodox Church, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!” has become a personal mantra. It is almost like breathing, an answer to any situation, from waiting for a call from a son at war, to hoping I’ll sell a book, to moments when I have, for the hundredth time, been rude, mean, and a bad husband. The prayer belongs to the historic church, but the impulse that drives me to say it was bred into me before I could talk.
It doesn’t matter what I think. It is a question of what I am. And I am grateful. There is plenty to feel guilty about. I don’t see guilt as a hang-up to be cured, but a truthful statement of my condition. And prayer seems to me to be the only logical response, not the cure but an answer.
63
H
onesty is the only thing that is satisfying about writing. And honesty is always filled with inconsistency. Since our opinions change, to be “sure” about anything—as if that opinion is fixed and will last forever—is to lie. Anything we say is only a snapshot of a passing moment.