Zermatt

Not as many people know Frank Schaeffer as knew his father, Francis, the early Christian Right apologist, but he’s apparently well enough known in evangelical circles to get hate mail from them. I’ve been quite taken with two of his novels, Portofino, and Zermatt. They, along with Saving Grandma, are the ongoing saga of Calvin Becker, a young teen coming of age in a very strict fundamentalist/evangelical family. These books are humorous, and depending on your point of view, either hilarious or realistically painful — or more likely, both — especially to anyone raised in similar religious circumstances.

Calvin, his two sisters, and parents love each other, sometimes hate each other, and live on the edge of sanity. Although these characters may be exaggerated a bit, what they say and how they think ring true, but with a mother like his, I think I’d have learned to lie up a streak as well. We see the raw underbelly of an excessively religious family, and it is this that intrigues me the most and is why I mention it here. How does a family handle various grades of insanity, especially when it’s all painted in religious terms? When does faith become fantasy, or delusions or even schizophrenia? Or just outright sugar-coated meanness?

What is it that happens in family interractions behind closed doors? When family members are by themselves? How do the differences between the sexes express themselves when interracting with specific personality types? Just how do men and women negotiate what they want? Egalitarians rightly emphasize that all natural talents and spiritual gifts have been distributed between the sexes, but what’s the problem with admitting that they are not distributed equally? Even if that creates the problem that groups of people then tend to create required roles based on those unequally distributed talents and gifts, that’s still no excuse for not admitting the reality when it stares you in the face.

In Zermatt Calvin’s Dad tells him after his mother gets all hyper about his supposed episode of masturbation: “Boys don’t call their penis a ‘Little Thing.’ Boys don’t call their balls a ‘Precious Seed Sack.’ Women talk like that and they giggle when they have their period and call it ‘falling off the roof.’ It’s as if it’s all some cute secret…. Well, son, we men aren’t cute! Got it? Don’t be cute!” I have to say it was a great relief when Dad steps up to the plate to assert himself after pages of excessive and irrational religious talk by two of the three female characters, but I’m sure plenty of female readers would have the same reaction.

I think it’s wise to have a sense of forgiving humor about people’s weaknesses and a sense of humility about the certainty of our religious beliefs. We need the same senses concerning our views about gender. As Schaeffer says, believing in paradox and mystery is not a bad place to be.