Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--And How I Learned to Love Women by Frank Schaeffer
Authors: Frank Schaeffer
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speak French. Mom and Dad always went along with this, although, because Dad never learned French and Mom spoke it incredibly badly, they would just sit silently until the danger passed.
12
I n the winters, we went to the Hotel Riffelberg. It was perched above a cliff overlooking the Zermatt Valley and a range of jagged peaks, including the famous Matterhorn. To the north, the hotel faced a steep snowfield perfect for skiing, which swept up for a mile or more to the top of the Riffelhorn and beyond that to the summit of Gornergrat Mountain. We stayed at the Hotel Riffelberg because it was less expensive than the hotels in Zermatt, and the skiing was better.
The trip from Huémoz to Zermatt began at the front door of Chalet Les Mélèzes with my mother running down the stairs while Debby acted as a kind of relay team whose duty it was to both relate information about Mom’s progress to my father and to hurry Mom along out of the chalet.
At last my sister bundled her down the icy steps, along the path cut through the snow, through the gates, then down the steep stairs to the road. Mom’s descent was watched by my exasperated father, the furious driver of the yellow postal bus, and the angry passengers who—mostly heavyset and malodorous peasant women on errands to Aigle, our “big town” in the valley—were by now ready to make good their threat to drive off and leave Mom and the rest of us “Américaines” to find another way to get to the station.
“Tell Edith,” Dad yelled, “that if she’s not here in ten seconds, everyone in this bus will miss their connections in Aigle! Tell her we’ve probably already missed the ten-forty to Visp and the connection to Zermatt! Tell her that if we miss the twelve-ten to Zermatt, there isn’t another one until five-eighteen and we’ll miss the Gornergrat train and won’t get to Riffelberg tonight!”
“Yes, Dad,” I said.
“And tell that woman that if we miss the Gornergrat connection, she can just forget the whole thing!”
The driver added a sour comment, “Non, mais! C’est pas possible! Je pars en trente secondes! Nom de Dieu! Non, mais! Merde!”
On the cog rail line that was the last step in the four-hour journey, I’d be staring at the snow-covered pine trees. Their branches were weighed down so heavily that the snow formed an almost straight white sheath, making the trees look strangely narrow. Through the trees, the high peaks could be glimpsed, dazzling white and towering above everything as the view unfolded. My heart always raced at the thought of what the slopes were going to be like, judging by the amount of deep powder piled in tall sparkling drifts along the track.
Riffelberg was only a mile or so above Zermatt as the crow flies, but the cog railway slowly meandered for twenty minutes through dense forest and over several high bridges, as well as through various glistening icicle-crusted tunnels, before it ground its way out into the open above the tree line. The forest suddenly ended, and the splendid twilit view of the town of Zermatt below and the pale mountains above exploded around us. Stars were visible in the darkening arch of sky.
13
M om used two trees to illustrate a major point in her “Talk on Prayer.” She had several standard talks. There was the “L’Abri Story,” her “Girl’s Talk,” and the famous “Talk on Prayer.”
Ours was such a “special story,” right up there with the biblical narrative of the struggles of the People of Israel, that when a new guest arrived at L’Abri, the first thing that happened was that Mom, or one of my sisters, would sit them down and tell them “The L’Abri Story.” (In later years, Mom wrote L’Abri, and it became a best-selling book, her first of many that led to a huge following of evangelical readers.) The new guest would learn about what mighty deeds God had done to raise up The Work that they might be led to us. They had stepped into an ongoing miracle. And they could
12
I n the winters, we went to the Hotel Riffelberg. It was perched above a cliff overlooking the Zermatt Valley and a range of jagged peaks, including the famous Matterhorn. To the north, the hotel faced a steep snowfield perfect for skiing, which swept up for a mile or more to the top of the Riffelhorn and beyond that to the summit of Gornergrat Mountain. We stayed at the Hotel Riffelberg because it was less expensive than the hotels in Zermatt, and the skiing was better.
The trip from Huémoz to Zermatt began at the front door of Chalet Les Mélèzes with my mother running down the stairs while Debby acted as a kind of relay team whose duty it was to both relate information about Mom’s progress to my father and to hurry Mom along out of the chalet.
At last my sister bundled her down the icy steps, along the path cut through the snow, through the gates, then down the steep stairs to the road. Mom’s descent was watched by my exasperated father, the furious driver of the yellow postal bus, and the angry passengers who—mostly heavyset and malodorous peasant women on errands to Aigle, our “big town” in the valley—were by now ready to make good their threat to drive off and leave Mom and the rest of us “Américaines” to find another way to get to the station.
“Tell Edith,” Dad yelled, “that if she’s not here in ten seconds, everyone in this bus will miss their connections in Aigle! Tell her we’ve probably already missed the ten-forty to Visp and the connection to Zermatt! Tell her that if we miss the twelve-ten to Zermatt, there isn’t another one until five-eighteen and we’ll miss the Gornergrat train and won’t get to Riffelberg tonight!”
“Yes, Dad,” I said.
“And tell that woman that if we miss the Gornergrat connection, she can just forget the whole thing!”
The driver added a sour comment, “Non, mais! C’est pas possible! Je pars en trente secondes! Nom de Dieu! Non, mais! Merde!”
On the cog rail line that was the last step in the four-hour journey, I’d be staring at the snow-covered pine trees. Their branches were weighed down so heavily that the snow formed an almost straight white sheath, making the trees look strangely narrow. Through the trees, the high peaks could be glimpsed, dazzling white and towering above everything as the view unfolded. My heart always raced at the thought of what the slopes were going to be like, judging by the amount of deep powder piled in tall sparkling drifts along the track.
Riffelberg was only a mile or so above Zermatt as the crow flies, but the cog railway slowly meandered for twenty minutes through dense forest and over several high bridges, as well as through various glistening icicle-crusted tunnels, before it ground its way out into the open above the tree line. The forest suddenly ended, and the splendid twilit view of the town of Zermatt below and the pale mountains above exploded around us. Stars were visible in the darkening arch of sky.
13
M om used two trees to illustrate a major point in her “Talk on Prayer.” She had several standard talks. There was the “L’Abri Story,” her “Girl’s Talk,” and the famous “Talk on Prayer.”
Ours was such a “special story,” right up there with the biblical narrative of the struggles of the People of Israel, that when a new guest arrived at L’Abri, the first thing that happened was that Mom, or one of my sisters, would sit them down and tell them “The L’Abri Story.” (In later years, Mom wrote L’Abri, and it became a best-selling book, her first of many that led to a huge following of evangelical readers.) The new guest would learn about what mighty deeds God had done to raise up The Work that they might be led to us. They had stepped into an ongoing miracle. And they could
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