Free Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer

with opera, full of expensive food, dazzled by Rubens and Dali or an illuminated Book of Hours, or Lorenzetti’s frescoes in Siena. And my mind resounding with Jane’s anti-Yankee propaganda.
    Jane’s way of rationalizing who was saved and who was lost was very personal. If you knew about art and loved it, or loved music or the South, everything was forgiven. If someone painted “wonderful pictures” or composed “wonderful music,” they suddenly had become “Real Christians,” no matter what they said they were. In their hearts, Jane knew that they knew the Lord. It was a lovely and circular argument. Jane would have made a great goddess, terrible in her wrath and forgiving of all sinners, as long as they created something beautiful.
    I wrote to Jane recently. She is very old and back in Virginia, caring for Betty, who has Alzheimer’s. I wrote to tell Jane what she and Betty meant to me. I thanked her for being one of the people who shaped my life and made it so much richer than it would have been. Jane wrote me a lovely letter back, and she enclosed a fistful of yellowing clippings. They were of articles I’d written over the years and reviews of my novels. Jane had been watching over me even though we hadn’t been in touch for more than twenty-five years. She said she was proud of me. It meant a lot.

9
    C halet Les Mélèzes—big as chalets go—was originally built to comfortably house a family of eight, maybe with a spinster aunt or two thrown in, or a maid and cook tucked away in one of the smaller back rooms. It was not like the older small squat peasants’ chalets clustered in our village.
    Our chalet had been built by some upper-class Swiss in the 1920s, probably as a big summer home. Chalet Les Mélèzes sat about a quarter mile from the village center, out in steep open fields with just a couple of other houses nearby. It had a “Venus II” woodstove on every floor, as well as a big old coal furnace that almost warmed our ineffectual radiators. Sweeping balconies wrapped around each floor, and every room facing the mountains had large multipaned windows and/or a glass door that opened onto the balconies. And every window and door had thick wooden shutters that we closed at night during the winter, to provide a little insulation from the cold.
    When the shutters were closed, my room was completely dark except for one small shaft of light that, once the sun was up, would pour through the tulip-shaped cutout that decorated the shutters. Everything was beautifully made and fit snugly, with all the doors and windows exquisitely crafted. The tulip
pattern was repeated on the pine boards that provided a solid railing for the balconies.
    When I opened my curtains, if the sun was shining at a certain angle, a brilliant beam of light shot through the cutout tulip and across my bedroom, picking out glittering dust particles. If I smacked my pillow a couple of times, I stirred up a dazzling explosion of dust and it seemed as if a whole universe had suddenly sprung to life, complete with galaxies, suns, and worlds swirling and twinkling in the light that cut through the thick dark.
    I’d wedge myself between my bed and the wood-paneled wall—my bedroom was very small, only about five feet by ten—on the narrow patch of faded blue linoleum. I stared up at the mote-filled light. Maybe, I thought, our Planet Earth is nothing more than a dust mote floating in some huge bedroom.
    What if on one of my dust planets there was a boy lying on his back watching dust glitter in his sunbeam? What if his mother was downstairs preparing to lead the Monday Morning Bible Study and telling her young people—assuming other universes had lost people, too—that God was watching over them and had a wonderful plan for their lives?
    By the time I was seven or eight, on any given weekend there were about fifteen guests packed into our house. By the time I was eleven or twelve, L’Abri had “grown so wonderfully” that there