It seemed to work for my mom. She was there for quite a time but her delusions did pass and before long she returned to her painting. It remained unclear when my mother would be released but in those days, before all the medicines, a diagnosis of schizophrenia usually meant long-term hospitalization and even lifelong institutionalization. Eventually, one of the nurses noticed her artwork, the healing it had brought, and she began advocating for her release. My mother’s college roommate, Margaret, enlisted help from her church camp and Peniel brought in its big guns. Miss Beers was the central leader and spiritual guide of the camp. She was formidable, a veteran of the prewar mission fields of Japan. Grover Wilcox was a fundamentalist preacher from Newark, a firebrand who turned his house into a church and combed the ghetto streets for souls to save. His sense of righteousness made him fearless and he hit like a freight train. Beers and Wilcox descended on the hospital like twin holy terrors and demanded my mother’s release.
Wilcox brought my mother home to his house church, where his family gave her a room and a place at their table. My mother stayed afraid but Wilcox had built a mighty fortress and he kept her safe for a time. He kept my mother from slipping out of the world, even as he renounced it. He didn’t approve of art, but he helped my mother graduate, finally, from Pratt. She took a job teaching art in Newark’s elementary schools. Every morning my mother stood in front of kids from the projects, handed out scissors and glue, and tried to organize art. Art teachers are just a step removed from supply teachers. Their motives are pure and their discipline vague. They make excellent time-honoured targets and provide ammunition in the form of art supplies. And my mother, she was a hopeless disciplinarian. She raised me. Mom says teaching art in the Newark state schools was the most terrifying experience of her life. The next summer, when the pastor offered her a lift to Peniel she jumped at it. He packed up his family, thirty-odd church kids, a few lost souls and my mother and headed upstate.
As for my father, he soon outgrew science fiction, pistols and groundhogs. He majored in philosophy and music composition. He studied existentialism seriously enough to be terrified and found Schoenberg’s twelve-tone scale appalling. He packed up his life and moved everything into his head. He often closed his eyes in concentration, as if hearing some silent, slow music. This slow music made driving dangerous and dating awkward; by his final year my father had dug himself into a social and ideological hole. It wasn’t long before an odd student named John Guray stepped into it.
Guray was prematurely bald, walked with a limp and a cane, and wrote light verse. He wore berets and had discovered psychoanalysis. Guray was made for psychoanalysis and began practising his art on my father incessantly. He kept notes and made charts. He pondered my father’s dreams. It was Guray who convinced my dad to travel west and find his father. In fact Guray went along for the ride, guiding my father and his subconscious across the country.
My dad had not seen or heard from his father until the day he and Guray tracked him down. They found him in Hollywood, working on a studio lot. ‘He was nice enough. Somewhat reserved,’ my father said to me recently. ‘He introduced us to some blonde starlet. I think he wanted to make sure we weren’t gay, that we showed some interest.’
His father then introduced them to Cecil B. DeMille, and when my father asked, ‘How did you part the Red Sea, Mr DeMille?’ DeMille replied, ‘I didn’t, son. God did.’ And that was it. That’s all my father told me. That’s all he knew of his father. A blonde bombshell and Cecil B. DeMille stole the show.
Upon their return to New Haven, a crestfallen John Guray claimed the analysis and their relationship could go no further, that my father had experienced a great breakthrough. He then produced a bill for four thousand dollars. All my father got from plumbing his subconscious was a road trip and a ridiculous invoice. My father felt he really owed Guray – that’s how lost he was. He looked for guidance in his books and found it in Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton’s story brought him to God. Yale’s so-called New Critics, Cleanth Brooks among them, had given my father a well-lit, archetypically ordered universe, and now Merton’s God would give it meaning. My father even considered monastic life in Merton’s order.
About this time John Guray began sending my father handwritten bills that he marked ‘Overdue’. My father avoided him and began attending church. Guray began attending church and suggested my father meet a minister acquaintance, Don Mostrom. Before long my father was attending a weekly Bible study run by Mostrom and some other theologically astute, serious men. A number of them spoke highly of the Peniel Bible Conference; a few were in leadership roles as members of Peniel’s Prayer Council. They tore up John Guray’s bills and began mentoring my father.
My dad had recently been fired from Berman Salvage & Scrap, where he had earned his way by scraping gold tracings from discarded spark plugs. He had few prospects. But he had a Yale philosophy degree, so he found a job teaching seventh graders at the Riverdale Country School. Like my mother, he found the experience unrewarding. He’s referred to his pupils as ‘snarling, derisive children of affluence’. He fled in a hail of spitwads and headed straight for Peniel – again, just like my mother. His career had stalled, perhaps, but he was now clear about what he wanted to do. He wanted to help build the Kingdom of God – that ‘shining city upon a hill’ proclaimed by the Puritan leader John Winthrop. He went to Peniel because it was a big job and he was unsure where to begin. That was 1954, the summer he met my mother.
It’s a wonder Peniel Bible Conference ever brought my parents together, a tribute to the biological imperative. Love is a great mystery, and nowhere more mysterious than at Bible camp. In my experience the place routinely smothered romance with spiritual angst and Bible study. We were taught that no matter how attractive we found fellow campers, we were all clothed in the Old Man or the Flesh, camp-speak for our corrupt, fallen natures. My father, of course, has a different view. I know my father believes they were set up. Why else, he argues, would they have made him assist in my mother’s arts and crafts class? But in the end, it wasn’t church history or Peniel’s machinations that drew them together, it was my mother when she’s well – her empathy, her ease and laughter with friends, and what my father calls her ‘cheery, elfin smile’.
They were married in 1958, just after my father graduated from Westminster Seminary. My parents honeymooned in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Dad commenced Mom’s education at the Tanglewood Music Festival. When they returned from Lenox, Grover Wilcox ordained my father as his assistant pastor. He moved in, and so my parents began their life together on the top floor of a house church in Newark, New Jersey. Wilcox was known for his legalism, a worldview held by the hardest of the hard core, the separatists of fundamentalism. Wilcox labelled anything secular – art, sports, politics right or left, beer – ‘of the World’, a distraction from God. He disapproved of my father reading the New York Times. He threw out the arts section. His church piano was for hymns only – certain ones – and my father remembers playing a Beethoven sonata when Wilcox barged in. ‘What is that, Richard?’ he yelled. ‘Scales?’ Wilcox and other Peniel leaders took pride in their cultural isolation, in the blessed assurance of songs known by heart. My father was suspect; he worked on a whole different scale.
But the following summer Dad connected with Julian Alexander, a like-minded minister from Scotch Plains, New Jersey. They were washing dishes together in the camp kitchen when my father began complaining about Wilcox and legalism. ‘The elders at Mostrom’s church drink beer all the time. And John Murray, at Westminster, the theologian, he drinks sherry.’ He threw a pot down in the sink. ‘Did you know, Julian, that Calvin’s salary included forty gallons of wine annually? Or that Luther recommended drinking a beer before confronting the Devil?’
Alexander was himself an intellectual and allergic to legalism. He enjoyed my dad’s mind and loved his idiosyncrasies. I believe he hired my father as youth pastor just so he had someone with whom to discuss Luther,