Crazy for God

Today I finished Frank Schaeffer's book about growing up in the shadow of his famous parents. As I've read the book, it stirred-up many emotions and conflicts. One part of me was saddened by the revelations of the "feet of clay" both Francis and Edith Schaeffer hid so well from public view. Part of me cringed at Frank's, well, frankness, about his life, including more details about his sex life than I really cared to know. Another part was shocked by the revelations Frank made about the evangelical rise to power in the U.S., and the role he and his father played in it. Part of me was nodding my head and wondering how so many Christians in this country came to be so completely duped by the power-hungry, exclusivist, narrow-minded, greedy "Christian" demi-gods posing as leaders. Part of me saw myself and my faith journey all tied up in that "plastic Christian" world of evangelical super-stars. And part of me wondered how much credibility Frank Schaeffer had left, and how much I need to take with a grain of salt.

The Author's Note:
I'm sure I have placed some of the events in the wrong years or have written that something happened in one place when it happened in another. this is a memoir, not a biography. To footnote this story or to have done research into dates and places and to correct the chronology would have been to indulge the conceit that my book is objective history. It is not. What I've written comes from a memory deformed by time, prejudice, flawed recall, and emotion.

Several places in the Schaeffer repeats this in some way or another, just to let us know he knows these are his experiences and memories, and not rigid history. I appreciate his confession and the recognition of this often over-looked truth. On the other hand, the book is still mostly written as a fact-filled look at not just Frank's life, but at the characters of many evangelical leaders. Because of that, I find myself keeping some of his observations at arm's length. I don't doubt the very negative opinion he has of James Dobson, among others, is true to his experience. I simply reserve the right to nuance Frank's view with the experiences of others.

Frank Schaeffer's book is an important read, even if it isn't always pleasant or comfortable. It will make many people mad. It will help other's feel vindicated. It will confuse some people because they will try to be like Jane Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, who tried to find a way to make both Darcy and Wickham come out virtuous in their conflict. The problem is, there is no completely virtuous character in this book, or in real life. Life is messy, and Crazy for God shows one person's life at its messiest.

The look at the pro-life movement and how the Democratic Party blew the chance to gain credibility when it hardened its stance on abortion was fascinating, and perhaps some of the best information in the book. The look at how pro-life ended up a Republican party plank is so informative. Especially considering this was a "Catholic" issue for so long and most Catholics were Democrats.

How am I feeling now after I've thought about the book for a while? I don't know where I am theologically, but I know that even if I agree on specifics (like the sanctity of life) evangelical leaders don't speak for me anymore. This book only confirmed what I've been seeing for a while. Along the way someone (more than one, of course) co-opted Christianity, narrowed its scope, set the rules in stone, and built walls to exclude people and concentrate power...all in the name of "purity" and "godliness."

So take a deep breath and plunge in. It's not so much refreshing as cathartic.

On another note: I don't know much about writing, but I found Franky's book to be unevenly written and unnecessarily confusing in its timeline. It somehow fits his volatile personality. ;-) I plan to get some of his fiction to see how that reads.

Catching up...

Well, if anyone is still out there reading, I thought I'd catch you up on a few things in my life. First off, I'm failing at my New Year's Resolution to write more! ;-) Oh well!

My teaching duties (one class, one day a week) started back on the 5th of January. the past two weeks I've been teaching my class (middle school Life Science) and substituting for the teacher in the middle school Physical Science class. It's been fun. I taught most of the students in that class last year, and will probably have most of them in Biology next fall. The double preps have taken a bit more time, especially since physical science (in this case light, color and color mixing) isn't my area of knowledge. However, it's been fun to rediscover it all.

I'm also in the process of finding a book to use for my high school Biology class in the fall. The book we've been using is 7 or 8 years old now. It was published before the Human Genome Project, so I want something more up-to-date. I am looking at two possibilities right now, neither which totally thrill me. When i settle on a book I need to start prepping for the fall-- reading and making class notes, and developing my labs to go with each lesson. Hopefully I can use a lot of the labs I have now.

We decided to adopt a cat from a rescue group in our area, and ended up with two! They are both adults (1 yr old and 2 yrs old). One is a a solid grey with a white bib, several white paws, and a cute little white "comma" that goes over his nose. His name is Jasper Darlington Higgins IV. The other is a soft grey tabby with buff (very light orange) markings, plus a white bib and white toes. His name is Fiddlesticks. (If you have ever read The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede, you'll recognize the names as two of Morwen's cats.) Jasper has big round amber eyes, while Fiddles has slanted, almond-shaped eyes.

Both cats have been living in our bedroom since Sunday afternoon. They are good cats, but we haven't gotten a great deal of sleep. They're exceptionally sweet and affectionate. They purr when you look at them! Unfortunately this means that at 4 a.m. they're ready to snuggle and be petted, so they wake us up. I'm hoping we can let them have the run of the house soon.

They are "bomb-proof," meaning they don't get upset about much. They showed slight interest in our dog, and have been totally nonchalant with our resident cat, Neko. Unfortunately, to date Neko is anything but nonchalant about them! He is one angry cat. When he sees them (which has been rare, since we're trying to introduce them slowly), he puffs all his hair out to twice his normal size. this is impressive, since he is already a really large cat, weighing in at 15.5 lbs. The two cats we adopted are about 8 to 10 lbs. (In other words, normal cat size.)

Cookie, the dog, is great friends with the cats now. She was incredibly interested in them, but mostly I think she wanted to be where the action was. She always stays in my room with me when I am working or watching TV. So when the cats came, she didn't want to be left out in the hall. I think she decided that getting along with the cats meant being with us.

Yesterday was my anniversary! (24 years) It was a really busy carpool-and-school day, so we didn't celebrate, but Will brought me a card and a stuffed Beanie Baby race horse! :-D Hannah and the kids bought us a beautiful bouquet of roses. I was so surprised and pleased. This coming weekend Will and I have tickets to an art exhibit (Landscapes int he Age of Impressionism), and plan to be gone for the weekend. Our next door neighbor gave us a gift card this Christmas good for several area restaurants. Will and I plan to use that next weekend as well. (I take care of their animals when they go out of town, so this was a "thank you" gift.) We plan to take in at least one movie, too.

I'm reading Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer and enjoying it. He shoots from the hip, but doesn't pretend that his views aren't biased. I am enjoying his sometimes brutal honesty, but I am also enjoying the obvious love and respect he had for his parents, too. I plan to post some quotes from the book if I have time. Having been to Swiss L'Abri in the mid-70's, I am very aware of the atmosphere and attitudes he describes.

We've been working through some of the videos we got for Christmas. Most are re-watches, like Transformers, Harry Potter 5, and Stardust. But I have a few that I've never seen, so I'm looking forward to those.

I hope you're year is going well so far!

New Year's Resolutions??

I've never done New Year's resolutions. So maybe I'll try to come up with a few this year.

This year I want to:

1. Figure out how to work my digital camera: how to upload pictures so I can share them. Maybe do the 365 Photoblog. (Although I need to get on with that if I'm going to do it!)

2. Spend more time listening to music. I've had a great time the last two days uploading several dozen CDs onto my iPod, and even buying some new ones at B&N or on iTunes. I'm rediscovering old favorites I hadn't listened to in years (like Led Zeppelin) and trying on some new ones (like Bush, Cake, and Death Cab for Cutie). It's so much fun.

3. Get more exercise. 'Nuff said.

4. Spend less "screen time" in the evenings- watching TV or on my computer. Read more and spend more time with the kids. (Although that may mean learning to play Wii games, and more screen time.)

5. Read the Bible. I've joined and online group reading through The Bible in three years. The plan is to read a selection each month and then ahve a day for discussion. I'm hoping the slower pace and the accountability will help me stay on track.

6. Read more. I've slacked off in the past two years and I'm not sure why.

7. Pray more, even if it doesn't look like my former idea of prayer.

8. Get involved in some real, tangible ways of helping others.

9. Try and stay within our budget.

10. Be flexible about my life. I want to try to hold plans loosely so that changes don't throw me for a loop.

11. To do a better job writing down my thoughts instead of keeping them in my head. Writing them down takes more discipline and time, but I think it will be well worth it.

That ought to keep me busy for the next year! We'll see in a year how I've done.

Happy New Year!

Saying good-bye to an old friend....

At 3:30 December 26th, Will took our dear old golden retriever, Beau, to the vet to be put down. Beau had suffered a grand mal seizure Christmas evening and didn't seem to fully recover. After a long consultation with out dear, sweet vet, we made the tough decision. I've always been the one to take our animals to the vet since Will works, but I had already made plans with a friend and her children to go see the movie, Enchanted, and take Lydia. Since Lydia was very upset about Beau, it seemed wisest to keep our plans and for her and me to be out of the house when Beau left. Because of that Will had to be the one to take Beau and stay with him. It was very difficult. (Enchanted was a wonderful diversion, btw.)

Beau was over 12.5 years old. We picked him up when he was 12 weeks old in Asheville, NC, where my mom had picked him out of a litter of 8 squirming, roly-poly puppies. She picked him, in part, because he had a tiny black spot on his head, and it was the only way to tell him from the other 7 yellow fur balls. I've said many times since then that God put that black spot there so Mom would choose him. He was the perfect pet for us.

Beau was humble and gentle without being scared or shy. He was exuberant, happy, and loving. He was the quintessential golden. He also "yodeled." That always surprised people! From the earliest age, Beau understood children and that he needed to be gentle with them. Even as a puppy he never nipped or jumped up on our then 18 month old daughter. He obeyed her when she would order him in her best toddler-talk to go into his kennel. He'd patiently go inside, sit down and wait for her to let him out again; although usually she went in with him!

Several times when our youngest child was just a toddler we found Beau sit patiently in front of an open container of dog food waiting for her to feed him one piece at a time. He never tried to go through her to get to the food. About that time we also took a sweet picture of 2 year old Lydia sitting on top of Beau brushing his head with a doll brush.

Beau was never territorial, and willingly put up with a long line of dogs invading his space. A friend of mine used to drop her dog off daily while she was at work. We inherited another golden for several years, and finally we were given a terrier-mix puppy. Beau put up with being a life-sized chew toy for the puppy (named Cookie). Cookie literally used his ears for tug-of-war. From the very beginning he would lay down so she could "wrestle" with him, something that continued for the rest of his life. (Beau was about 64 lbs and Cookie is 14 lbs.)

Beau also loved people. Everybody. He was one of the few dogs I've known who seemed to think going to the groomer's or the vet's was a treat. He seemed to think any kind of attention, even shots and ear cleanings, were a form of love and affection. And no matter how painful the procedure, he never had to be restrained beyond someone holding his head. He was always full of trust and obedience.

The last thing I said to Beau was this: "You got it right, buddy. Thank you."

Unusual exercise in "walking the walk"

Thanks to Jimmy for this article:

Pastor's Challenge Shocks Church

Flannery O'Conner- It's long, but worth it.

From America- the National Catholic Weekly Dec 24, 2007

Flannery O'Connor's Religious Vision

Flannery O’Connor died during the Second Vatican Council, while the bishops were writing anew what she had always known: that the church is the body of Christ, the people of God; that laypeople are its flesh and blood; and that the clergy and religious orders are its servant-leaders. While O’Connor was a supreme artist in fiction, she was also a particularly valuable witness to the Catholic Church and its leaders in this country, especially as she appears in her collected letters, The Habit of Being, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (1979). Hers is the testimony of a watchful, honest, faith-filled and eloquent layperson; and she had much to say about the experience of living the faith within the Catholic Church, especially in a society and a culture that had marginalized genuine Christian faith and practice.

Our present age has been described as one in which people place a high value on spirituality and a low value on religion, especially organized religion. Of particular interest, then, is O’Connor’s thinking about the experience of church, of the assembly of believers. She valued the church highly and observed it acutely, warts and all. If the church made life endurable, it also provided much that had to be endured. “You have to suffer as much from the church as for it,” she once wrote. “The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed.” She went on to explain why we suffer from the church: “The operation of the church is entirely set up for the sake of the sinner, which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.” God is as patient with the entire church as he is with each lost sheep, and many of us Catholics have very little patience with either.

The church is made up of imperfect pilgrims on a long, difficult journey, and O’Connor described them well: “The Catholic Church is composed of those who accept what she teaches, whether they are good or bad, and there is constant struggle through the help of the sacraments to be good.” In “Choruses from the ‘Rock,’” T. S. Eliot says that modern people do not like the church because “she is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.” (Think of issues like abortion, euthanasia, welfare reform, capital punishment and more.) O’Connor might have appreciated Eliot’s remark.
The Human Element

Within the visible church, the Holy Spirit is constantly acting in the lives of its members, individually and collectively. Thus, the church cannot be accurately judged or evaluated by what her critics observe externally. O’Connor pointed this out to one of her friends:

You judge [the church] strictly by its human element, by unimaginative and half-dead Catholics who would be startled to know the nature of what they defend by formula. The miracle is that the Church’s dogma is kept pure both by and from such people. Nature is not prodigal of genius and the church makes do with what nature gives her. At the age of 11, you encounter some old priest who calls you a heretic for inquiring about evolution; at about the same time Père Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., is in China discovering Peking man.


The “human element” in the church was a frequent target of O’Connor’s wit, as when she proposed this motto for the Catholic press of her day: “We guarantee to corrupt nothing but your taste.” More seriously, she quoted St. Augustine’s advice to the “wheat” in the church not to leave the threshing floor of life before the harvest is complete, just because there is so much of that disgusting chaff around! In this connection, she slyly suggested what the difficulty may be for more sensitive Catholics (referring to one young woman in particular): “She probably sees more stupidity and vulgarity than she does sin and these are harder to put up with than sin, harder on the nerves.”

Meanwhile, the world goes on judging the church in utilitarian fashion, using the same standard it would apply to the Rotary or the Kiwanis. O’Connor challenged this ap-proach, writing that “any Catholic or Protestant is defenseless before those who judge his religion by how well its members live up to it or are able to explain it.” The surface is easy to judge, she was saying, but not the interior operations of the Holy Spirit. She illustrated this principle with a touching reference to the vocation of Catholic priests, whom she often found to be overworked and unimaginative:

It is easy for any child to find out the faults in the sermon on his way home from church every Sunday. It is impossible to find out the hidden love that makes a man, in spite of his intellectual limitations, his neuroticism, his lack of strength, give up his life to the service of God’s people, however bumblingly he may go about it.

While O’Connor defended her church against superficial and unfair judgments, she was neither a whitewasher nor a fatalist, and she was an implacable foe of complacency. She believed that the church must struggle toward greater virtue as surely as each of its members. She wrote quite forcefully in this regard: “It’s our business to change the external faults of the church—the vulgarity, the lack of scholarship, the lack of intellectual honesty—wherever we find them and however we can.”
Flaws in the Church

Here are three examples of faults in the church that O’Connor criticized and wished to see corrected. I think they are in order of increasing severity.

First, she condemned smugness as the great Catholic sin. Now, 45 years later, perhaps something else would head her list; but smugness would probably still be listed. Referring to the German priest and author Romano Guardini, she wrote about smugness: “I find it in myself and I don’t dislike it any less. One reason Guardini is a relief to read is that he has nothing of it. With a few exceptions the American clergy, when it takes to the pen, brings this particular sin with it in full force.” About 20 years ago a bumper sticker appeared that read: “If you feel God is far away, guess who moved?” If O’Connor had lived to see one of those signs on a Georgia road, I like to think that she would have skewered the sentiment as very smug, even as she chuckled at the rampant vulgarity of bumper-sticker theology.

Related to smugness is glibness, which she described as “the great danger in answering people’s questions about religion.” Again, a sense of mystery will give the Christian apologist a sense of humility: if I am convinced that I have the truth about God, I am much more likely to be obnoxious about it than if I am convinced that God’s truth has me.

O’Connor expressed impatience with the kind of Catholicism—and Catholic fiction—that kept everything nice, shallow, cute and safe. She described what she called “A nice vapid-Catholic distrust of finding God in action of any range and depth. This is not the kind of Catholicism that has saved me so many years in learning to write, but then this is not Catholicism at all.” Genuine Catholicism, she felt, must be as radical and demanding as its founder’s teaching.

Still another Catholic fault O’Connor described is, I believe, an evergreen reality in the church: a Jansenistic disdain for human weakness and struggle and distrust of questions, speculations and discussions of any depth. Of the pseudo-faith of such persons she said:

I know what you mean about being repulsed by the church when you have only the Mechanical-Jansenist Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. It’s never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.

In considering such people’s self-righteous judgments of others, she made an acute observation: “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.” By contrast, Christians who have struggled with their demons are better equipped to show compassion toward others.
Religion Into Therapy

O’Connor had a deep distaste and contempt for modern, sanitized, “empty” religion. Because she embraced an imaginative vision of religion as the mystery of God’s saving action intersecting with all that is earthly, O’Connor remarked to one correspondent: “All around you today you will find people accepting ‘religion’ that has been rid of its religious elements.” Elsewhere she described this development in more detail:

One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so, and that religion is our own sweet invention.

The issue of religion bled dry of its content is featured in what is probably the most famous story told about O’Connor. As a very young and unknown writer, she was visiting New York and was taken to a party at the home of Mary McCarthy, ex-Catholic and ex-believer, a sophisticated and accomplished novelist, essayist and critic. What follows is O’Connor’s description of the encounter:

We went at eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing in such company for me to say.... Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward the morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most “portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of.

In The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003), Paul Elie writes of this exchange, “The closing remark is the most famous of all O’Connor’s remarks, an economical swipe at the reductive, liberalizing view of religion.”

O’Connor even locates one important moment in the development of this religious trend in this country. With some amusement she recalls a talk she gave at a college: “I told them that when Emerson decided in 1832 that he could no longer celebrate the Lord’s Supper unless the bread and wine were removed, that an important step in the vaporization of religion in America had taken place.”
‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus’

For some readers one of the most surprising, even jarring, features of O’Connor’s fiction is its consistently comic character, even as the stories and novels pursue such serious themes of faith and grace. Elie describes an experience the author had when visiting the Cloisters, a museum of medieval art in Fort Tryon Park in New York City: “She was ‘greatly taken’ with a wooden statue on display in one of the chapels. ‘It was the Virgin holding the Christ child and both were laughing; not smiling, laughing.’” He concludes: “It was a piece to emulate as well as admire; like her own work, it was religious and comic at the same time.”

The betrayal of religion is downright diabolical in O’Connor’s view, and so it is portrayed in her fiction. For her, the crucial choice facing each of us is between the “lost” life with Christ and the worldly “saved” life without him. Thus, the most fiendish of temptations is to offer a saved, worldly life, but to offer it under the guise of being generically “Christian,” though with no Christ content whatsoever.

In this connection Elie describes a type of character that appears over and over again in O’Connor’s stories: “the middle-aged busybody who knows exactly what she thinks, who sees all and understands nothing.” One example is the character of Mrs. May in the story “Greenleaf.” At one point Mrs. May comes upon Mrs. Greenleaf in the woods, murmuring over and over again, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” O’Connor wrote: “Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building, like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.”

O’Connor had much to say about living together as church in the midst of modern culture, but finally we should turn to one simple statement she made about herself: “I write because I write well.” Nearly 45 years after her death, believers and unbelievers alike agree with her more than ever. She wrote well. But there is so much more than that to be said of her. One point will suffice here: How wonderfully different Flannery O’Connor was from Mrs. May. She thought that the name of Jesus, the reality of Jesus, belonged everywhere, indeed was everywhere. Regarding the Christian faith, Flannery O’Connor was the polar opposite of Mrs. May, because she, of course, believed all of it was true.

The betrayal of religion is downright diabolical in O’Connor’s view. The crucial choice is between the ‘lost’ life with Christ and the worldly ‘saved’ life without him.

Most Rev. George H. Niederauer is the archbishop of San Francisco. This article is an adapted excerpt from his Lane Center Lecture, delivered Sept. 28, 2007, at the University of San Francisco.

For more on Flannery O"Conner, read this archived article she wrote for America in 1957. The Church and the Catholic Writer

An Interview with Frank Schaeffer

John Whitehead from The Rutherford Institute interviewed Frank Schaeffer about his book, Crazy for God.

The whole interview is worth reading (in fact the book looks worth reading), but this part caught my attention:

JW: You note in your book that you slowly realized that the Religious Right leaders you were helping to gain power were not necessarily conservatives at all in the old sense of the word. They were anti-American religious revolutionaries.

FS: I personally came to believe that a lot of the issues that were being latched onto by the Christian Right, whether it was the gay issue or abortion or other things, were actually being used for negative political purposes. They were used to structure a power base for people who then threw their weight around. The other thing I began to understand is that in dismissing the whole culture as decadent, in dismissing the public school movement as godless, in talking about anybody who opposed them as evil, the Religious Right was only a mirror image of the New Left. Thus, the Religious Right and the New Left are really two sides of the same coin. What gets left out is a basic discussion about the United States and the reality of living here, the freedoms we enjoy and the benefits of a pluralistic culture where people are not crushing each other over beliefs. This gets lost. Thus, the kind of harshness you see in left and right-wing blogs today, for instance, such as it’s red state, blue state America, I just got sick of it. In other words, the Religious Right was as negative and anti-American as anybody I ever talked to on the Left. So the people we had coming through L’Abri in the late sixties and early seventies bashing the United States in a knee-jerk way over the Vietnam War was exactly the same kind of thing that you would hear in a different way from Falwell and Dobson and these other people.
***

I have yet to read the book, but I'm looking forward to reading more about Frank Schaeffer's look at truth, honesty and how the Religious Right has co-opted the public representation of faith in America.