Maggie Curry, a worker at English L’Abri, writes the following. She grew up as child at the Manor. After a number of years in Nepal she returned with her family to be a worker. What you will read her is a narrative drawn from interviews with former students.
We stood at the front door of solid oak. It looked to my eight year old eyes like a church door weighted with all kinds of mystery. This was to be our new home. This towering English Manor House with its dark, echoing rooms and empty stairs. We felt small and inadequate, huddled there on a cold January afternoon; a mum, a dad and three children, waiting for our future to start. It would be a future that would bring warmth and welcome to hundreds, who like us, turned the heavy handle and went in. Thirty-four years later, Sarah would be one to turn that heavy handle. She had arrived at L’Abri carrying that same little bag she had toted around France for the last few months. The same bag she had packed to leave home right after her eighteenth birthday. “France was everything I thought I wanted” Sarah told me, “beautiful, no responsibilities. I could do whatever I wanted.” However, Sarah’s sister who had always maintained a strong faith and was concerned for her wandering sibling, mentioned L’Abri as a place she could go. “I was always jealous of my sister”, Sarah says, “I always thought I was not the kind of person who could ever have her kind of faith. When I showed up in France, I didn’t know whether I was a Christian or not, but I had sort of given up trying to practice my faith.”
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“I’m not sure what I thought I’d accomplish at L’Abri,” Sarah explained, only that I needed to talk to people about God. I think I wanted to have penetrating conversation without revealing anything of myself.” Hearing voices drifting through the Manor door, Sarah swung her bag onto her shoulder, gave the door a push, and went in. Sarah remembers the first time she came to the converted Stables (which was the home I then shared with my husband and four children). Jennifer, another student, was stirring an outsize pot of spaghetti bolognaise on a very small stove, music was playing, people were laughing and Catherine (our youngest) was bouncing around the room. “I had no idea about anything (at L’Abri),’ Sarah remembers. “What on earth had I come to? Who were all these people?” Whatever she had come to, one thing was obvious; she was in the midst of someone’s home. “L’Abri,” says Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, “is not a job, or a school where we have lessons to teach; it is a life we share together and are totally committed to it.” Our ordinary family homes become the context for this shared life, and doing our mundane duties faithfully, becomes the seedbed for God’s glory.
We should be living witnesses to the fact that Christianity is not esoteric but ordinary,” writes the Anglican M M Claire. “The world should see the extra-ordinariness of Christianity in family love, the sacrifice, the obedience made incarnate in the Christian community.”
Many have come over the years. Some have come only for a short stay and some have stayed a lifetime. For each of us, however, it has been a chance for God to do extraordinary things in the midst of the ordinary. We have participated in a very simple daily routine of practical work, combined with study. For Amy, a young teacher of emotionally disturbed teenagers, the rhythm of daily work at L’Abri was of great importance right from the very beginning. It became more than the essential ‘guarantee of normality’, it became the catalyst for Amy to hear God and for His silence to be broken. Coming to L’Abri would be a last ditch attempt for Amy to salvage a fragmented faith in God. She was desperate to allow God to do something; to speak, to show himself, anything but the silence she had endured for so long. In secular academic circles Amy had always been valued for her quick intelligence and diligent study. She was a good student. In Christian circles, however, Amy hadn’t felt appreciated. She just couldn’t make the spiritual mark. She didn’t lead Bible studies, she never evangelized, and she didn’t pray at meetings and was plagued by doubt. Yet here at L’Abri, doing small daily tasks to the best of her ability, like cleaning a kitchen or looking after the children, was seen to be just as spiritual an offering as leading worship or preaching. “It wasn’t like this work wasn’t spiritual enough. What I could contribute was valued. I myself was valued within a Christian context because what I was bringing to the community was an expression of who I really was.”
“I felt I could be very open about my own position and my own view of Christianity,” Angus, an IT professional told me, as he described his time at L’Abri. “The fact that my thoughts were just accepted for what they were and also understood made a huge impression. In a sense I was being met where I was rather than pushed to conform to the norms that you’d find in church. I could be quite vocal in my criticism of Christianity without anyone taking it personally.
Angus came to L’Abri on the recommendation of a friend. “I remember my first lunch. It was in Jock and Alison’s home. “ He reminisces, “The conversation was all about the loss of community. I thought ‘Wow, these people really have their finger on the pulse of society.” I was both emotionally and intellectually stimulated.” A few years before, as a teenager, Angus had become a Christian at school along with a bunch of friends. This faith, however, was very much compartmentalized. “It was more about living a moral life than knowing God,” he says. “I was the one person with my Christian friends and another person with others. The impossibility of living a moral life consistently became increasingly difficult to sustain.” Angus felt trapped in a religion he could neither live out morally nor defend intellectually.
Unable to explain his faith to his cynical, anti-religious parents, Angus’s frustration and hurt came to a head during a humiliating episode when a friend “pretty much wiped the floor with me intellectually.” Angus then decided he’d had enough. “I said to God, ‘Now its really up to you to find me. I’ve had enough of trying to find you and trying to get things straight in my mind.’ From that time on I didn’t consider myself to be a Christian any more.”
Sarah, Amy and Angus. Three very different people yet each with a complicated mix of personal problems and difficult questions that needed to be untangled and thought through carefully.
People come to L’Abri for all sorts of different reasons and by many different routes. A few come with a definite purpose and a long list of questions in hand. Much more often these days they are like Sarah and sort of drift in and are held for a while, like a leaf in an eddy of a fast flowing stream. In that first experience of stillness their questions rise to the surface.
Sarah thought everything was going really well that first month at L’Abri. “I was having a great time,” she says. Sarah’s ‘great time’ however, quickly turned into a bit of a nightmare. Her sleep became more and more disturbed and in the end she stopped sleeping altogether. “The first weeks” she tells us “I could maintain a pretense, but living with people, you can’t maintain false ideas about yourself for long, not even in your own head. I started having myself revealed to myself.” Sarah began to feel and think about things in a new way. “I didn’t care (about others) so much and I’d find myself getting angry when I realized I was longing to care. Not so much to receive love but to give and make a difference. But I realized I couldn’t even have a real conversation with anybody. How could I get to the point of being able to trust and love anybody, let alone God?” Sarah was now living like a creature peeled of its skin, in unbearable pain. “It was terrible, really terrible.: she says.
John (a worker in training) was the person whose humble offering of ‘horizontal’ love for her was made powerfully effective through his ‘vertical’ love to God. Sarah was assigned to work alongside him in the garden every afternoon. “I was so mean to him. I would make him cry.” However, “he just loved me back.” Here was a man unafraid to be himself before her and willing to cry. He did not try to preach but instead transparently lived out his utter dependence on God. In the garden amongst the moist soil and drifting rain she listened to John talk and had to respect his deep sincerity. This man actually believed that what he was saying was true. True not just for him but for everyone.
“Sometimes he used the most clichéd, sappy language but would mean it, and mean it for me.” Sarah laughs. “He was the first person I wanted to be able to care for.” She started to live as every human being is made it live – in relationship; first with John, then later with God. “I learned that, despite myself, you could come to depend on people and love them.” Sarah concludes, “this helped me understand the reality of my need: how much I need people and how much I need God.” Sarah’s transformation from angry independence to dependence on God was without a doubt the work of God. His supernatural power made visible.
Andrew Fellows was the one to listen to Amy as she sat in the leather armchair in his study. Rain streaked the windows outside as tears streaked the face of this fragile looking girl before him. What were the hidden questions in her heart and how should he answer?
For Amy, God was silent. She decided to “live as though God was not there.” Living as if God was not there, however, was too confusing.
As difficult as it was, she knew within weeks of coming to L’Abri that she wanted to stay a long time. Tramping the woods and country lanes every day, taking delight in making the house beautiful, looking after the kids, her short stay quickly turned into months. Amy gradually began to turn towards God. A God who would accept her, as she was, creative, hard working and passionate. To be spiritual for Him meant nothing more than to be fully herself before him. What was important was not what she could do but what God could do in her. However, seeing God more clearly, not as a taskmaster with impossible requirements but as a tender lover, made Amy see herself more clearly for the first time and it was not a pretty sight. Her hidden underbelly was exposed. She was forced to look into the ‘basement of her soul’ that had wrapped itself up in layers of deception. Now this self began to die and it felt pretty bad. “Confession hurts” writes Bonhoffer, “it cuts a man down, it is a dreadful blow to the pride. We cannot find the cross of Jesus if we shrink from going to the place where it is to be found – the public death of a sinner.”
“I had to repent of how I had acted out on other people because of how I had been wounded. Because I had been so fragile before, I’d never seen that. Looking at my own sin was really a shock and very hard to do. But I did. And I did weep over my sin.” Amy confesses.
All these years Amy had felt that there was something hidden from her heart that meant she couldn’t feel, see or hear God. Maybe God was, at heart, uninterested and unloving. Now she understood. She had ‘put herself, rather than God at the center of the universe,” and “then was constantly turning inward (to self) instead of outward (to God). This was the essence of her rebellion against God. The reason why God seemed silent was because “when she turned inward, there was no one to communicate with except herself. “It is not because there is no one to speak with that men are lonely but because they are cut off from the one who can fulfill their loneliness.’ says Francis Schaeffer.
“Before, I couldn’t quite see what ‘sins’ were but neither could I see the love of God. God seemed to love everyone else but me. My repentance unleashed a deep understanding of God’s love for me.” Amy says. The silent God was now speaking because Amy had chosen repentant obedience. She was experiencing resurrection.
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