A pagan love turned Christward.

Sheldon Vanauken has written what some people might call an old-fashioned, and somewhat improbable, love story; improbable because it occurs in this century. But this is a true story, the story of life with his wife Davy, which ended in her early death from an obscure liver disease. “A Severe Mercy” is also the tale of two pagans turned Christian and the part that C.S. Lewis, another pagan turned Christian, played in their conversion.

That evening began my friendship with Lewis. It was a very deep friendship on my part: no man ever did so much to shape my mind, quite aside from Christianity, which of course shaped my wholes life. I have never loved a man more.

The story moves from Vanauken’s home, Glenmerle, to Hawaii during World War II, to the Florida Keys (where he and his wife lived and sailed in a small sloop), to Yale, to Virginia, and then to Oxford. There the pagan life ended and the Shining Barrier that he and Davy had put around their love at the outset of their lives together was finally threatened-not by another man or woman, not by “creeping separateness,” or money, or any of the numerous small problems that break marriages today, but by God. Davy became a Christian first, but Vanauken, confused and uncertain, hung back for a few more months. During that time he wrote to Lewis, asking his advice. Lewis replied promptly.

The contradiction ‘we must have faith to believe and must believe to have faith’ belongs to the same class as those by which the Eleatic philosophers proved that all motion was impossible. And there are many others. You can’t swim unless you can support yourself in water & you can’t support yourself in water unless you can swim. Or again, in an act of volition (e.g. getting up in the morning) is the very beginning of the act itself voluntary or involuntary? If voluntary then you must have willed it, … you were willing already, … it was not really the beginning. If involuntary, then the continuation of the act (being determined by the first moment) is involuntary too. But in spite of this we do swim, & we do get out of bed.

I do not think there is a demonstrative proof (like Euclid) of Christianity, nor of the existence of matter, nor of the good will & honesty of my best & oldest friends. I think all three are (except perhaps the second) far more probable than the alternatives. The case for Xtianity in general is well given by Chesterton; and I tried to do something in my Broadcast Talks. As to why God doesn’t make it demonstratively clear: are we sure that He is even interested in the kind of Theism which wd. be a compelled logical assent to a conclusive argument? Are we interested in it in personal matters? I demand from my friend a trust in my good faith which is certain without demonstrative proof. It wouldn’t be confidence at all if he waited for rigourous proof. Hang it all, the very fairy-tales embody the truth. Othello believed in Desdemona’s innocence when it was proved: but that was too late. Lear believed in Cordelia’s love when it was proved: but that was too late. ‘His praise is lost who stays till all commend.’ The magnanimity, the generosity wh. will trust on a reasonable probability, is required of us. But supposing one believed and was wrong after all? Why, then you wd. have paid the universe a compliment it doesn’t deserve. Your error wd. even so be more interesting & important than the reality. And yet how cd. that be? How cd. an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

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Note that life after death, which still seems to you the essential thing, was itself a late revelation. God trained the Hebrews for centuries to believe in Him without promising them an after-life, and, blessings on Him, he trained me in the same way for about a year. It is like the disguised prince in the fairy tale who wins the heroine’s love before she knows he is anything more than a woodcutter. What wd. be a bribe if it came first had better come last.

It is quite clear from what you say that you have conscious wishes on both sides. And now, another point about wishes. A wish may lead to false beliefs, granted. But what does the existence of the wish suggest? At one time I was much impressed by Arnold’s line ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.’ But surely, tho’ it doesn’t prove that one particular man will get food, it does prove that there is such a thing as food! i.e. if we were a species that didn’t normally eat, weren’t designed to eat, wd. we feel hungry? You say the materialist universe is ‘ugly’. I wonder how you discovered that! If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. (‘How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up & married! I can hardly believe it!’) In heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.…

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But I think you are already in the meshes of the net! The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away!

That letter frightened Vanauken. But he soon realized that he could not turn back.

In my old easy-going theism. I had regarded Christianity as a sort of fairy tale; and I had neither accepted nor rejected Jesus, since I had never, in fact, encountered him. Now I had. The position was not, as I had been comfortably thinking all these months, merely a question of whether I was to accept the Messiah or not. It was a question of whether I was to accept Him—or reject. My God! There was a gap behind me, too. Perhaps the leap to acceptance was a horrifying gamble—but what of the leap to rejection? There might be no certainty that Christ was God,—but, by God, there was no certainty that He was not.… This was not to be borne. I could not reject Jesus. There was only one thing to do, once I had seen the gap behind me. I turned away from it and flung myself over the gap towards Jesus.…

We were now Christians. Davy perhaps had got used to it. But I—I a Christian! I, who had been wont to regard Christians with pitying dislike, must now confess myself to be one. I did so, with shrinking and pride. Indeed, I felt a curious mixture of emotions: a sort of embarrassment among my more worldly and presumably non-Christian friends, some of whom would have accepted my becoming a Buddhist or an atheist with less amazement, and a sort of pride as though I had done something laudable—or done God a favour. I was half inclined to conceal my faith, and yet it seemed to me that If I were to take a stand for Christ, my lord, I must wear his colours.

There was perhaps a want of humility. Even my saying at the moment of conversion ‘I choose to believe’ instead of ‘I believe’, although they may come to the same thing in the end, had something about it of the last-ditch stand. The banner of my independence dipped, lying in the dust and myself kneeling, but somehow proudly still. I did homage to Christ as one pledges his sword and his fealty to a king. In reality, I suspect, it was not like that at all: I did not choose; I was chosen. The loving prayers of Davy and the rest—the prayers of C.S. Lewis, not just his books and letters—these did the work of the King. And yet there is this to be said for the pledged sword, even though it be so only in one’s own mind: if in some future year faith should weaken, one cannot in honour forswear the fealty tendered in ‘I choose to believe.’

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The Oxford days soon ended and Davy and Vanauken returned to the States, to Lynchburg, Virginia, where Vanauken had a teaching position. They had said to themselves that they were coming home. Instead, they found themselves suffering from a kind of reverse culture shock. American life displeased them. They had planned for a home that they tentatively named “Ladywood,” but what they had was a drab bungalow they called “Li’l Dreary.” Despite the problems, they slowly adjusted to life at Lynchburg College and to their additional surprise found themselves the center of a Christian discussion group.

Thus, completely unplanned, our Christian group was born. The girl and her friend became a dozen students. Week after week they came and were welcomed. Some dropped away and others took their places. We had not started it. It had just happened, and it went on of its own accord. We simply accepted, though, as I wrote in the Journal we were ‘awed and joyful’—awed at the work of the Spirit, joyful that God was using us. It was all, in the Charles Williams words we loved, the Great Dance. Many of these students became real Christians, a great many indeed over the years. We read things from C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers. We discussed the Apostolic faith and answered the hundreds of questions. At the same time we scoffed at solemnity and the mushy sentimentality of some Protestant circles, as well as the incredible view that ‘alcohol’ was sin. The Christianity we represented was sunny and joyous, with all the room in the world for humour and gaiety, and yet at the same time rigorous and glorious. So we laughed and joked and poured out the wine but challenged their minds and souls. And the students smiled and abandoned the solemn voices they had been taught to use in speaking about such things, gaily drinking the wine and discovering a Christ who was a blazing reality.

Davy and I, with our closeness of understanding and love, made an almost perfect team. No doubt it was I who insisted upon the intellectual rigour and logic that C.S. Lewis had taught me. And Davy, ‘so eager and loving’ as I wrote then, was the one who made the love of God a flame in the room. Both of us felt that this group in this moment of time was our vocation. When we and the students knelt at the end of an evening in silent prayer—the only spoken words being my ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost’ at the beginning and the whispered amens as each one finished his prayer—the room, lighted then only by the glowing fire, seemed charged with holiness.

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Vanauken’s “pagan impulses” did not leave him satisfied with his new life with Davy. He longed for the old days when he and Davy were isolated from the rest of the world.

I became more troubled as the year moved on, which, in turn, troubled Davy. While still in Oxford, we had talked … of the need to be alone, with leisure, in order to reconcile and bring into harmony our pagan dream of love and beauty and this overwhelming Christianity.… How did the Shining Barrier stand under the Light? But Li’l Dreary was not Ladywood. There was little of leisure or being alone together. And I was remembering—being stabbed by remembrance—the images from the old pagan days: the gay companionship, the love of life and beauty, the dedication to our love, schooner outward bound to far islands.

But we were Christians now. Davy, with the eagerness that was part of her very being, was flinging herself into the service of the Incarnate God. I, too, was serving Him: the morning and evening prayers with Davy, the church, the student group, the challenges that I tried to make implicit in my teaching. Indeed, it was I who at Oxford had seen and written in our Journal: ‘It is not possible to be “incidently a Christian”. The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing.’ And I would no doubt have affirmed that statement still, with my mind. Davy was affirming it with her whole being. And Christianity was first in my concerns. Intellectually I was wholly committed to its truth. And yet I was holding something back. But for Davy it really was ‘overwhelmingly first’—nothing held back. She was literally pouring out her life in Christ’s service.…

The heat that summer was frightful. The heat and the jungle. And we were used to England. No air-conditioning. We should hardly have had the energy to talk if we had had time. In July I became worried about Davy’s tiredness—tiredness coupled with a slight swelling of her ankles—and insisted that she see our doctor. He said she was overdoing and must work part-time only. So now I did issue a command: she must stop working altogether. Accordingly, she gave in her notice.

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Davy did not say so then, but she secretly thought—perhaps only briefly—that she was going to die. She prayed that she be allowed to live one more year for the sake of the Christian group. But I did not know.…

Davy one night, having contemplated Holiness, said she was restless and would sleep in the guestroom. But she did not sleep: she prayed. All night, like the saints, she wrestled in prayer. Some say that prayer, even prayer for what God desires, releases power by the operation of a deep spiritual law; and to offer up what one loves may release still more. However that may be, Davy that night offered up her life. For me—that my soul might be fulfilled.… Now, as I fixed my eyes on the Island in the West and looked not Eastward, she humbly proposed holy exchange. It was between her and the Incarnate One. I was not to know then.

A few months after that Davy came down with a virus that left her drained of energy; the doctor insisted that she enter a hospital for some extensive tests. The results showed that Davy would die, probably within six months. Vanauken had to tell her.

As I drove in the morning sunshine to Charlottesville, I thought of her offering-up her life for me in the previous autumn. Was this the result? Then I thought with a kind of awe of her belief in July a year ago that she might be going to die, and her asking God then for ‘one more year’ for the sake of the student group; now it was another July—one more year, indeed—and I was on my way to tell her of her death. Any recovery is but a stay of the death that is our common doom: she had had what she asked for. One more year. Was it right for me to ask for more? Was it right for me to ask when she had offered-up her life? How should I approach God? What should I say to the Incarnate God who made the world and suffered it to crucify Him? I thought of Grey Goose, never again to sail the waters of this world; I thought of poetry, including my own, and of all dear things; I thought of Islands in the West. Then I rolled it all together into a ball. If she died, I might—since, under God, I must not act to follow her—I might live for years. Those years and all of beauty they might contain I put into the ball. And then I offered-up all of it to the King: take all I have ever dreamed, all I may ever long for including the death I shall certainly long for: I offer it up, oh Christ, for her, for her best good, death or life. This was my offering-up. I asked God to take all, all that was or would ever be, in holy exchange, not for her spared life which would be my good but not perhaps hers, but for her good, whatever it might be. Later I would pray that she might recover but only if it were for her good. That offering-up was perhaps the most purely holy and purely loving act of my life.

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By now it was December. The doctor had said that Davy would die either in a coma or bleeding internally or through the eyeballs. They had both prayed that if she must die she would die conscious of what was happening. But that month it looked as though their prayer had been denied. Davy went into a coma.

The following day when I came and whistled the recognition signal under her window, there was no reply. Of course she might be talking to the doctor. But when I entered the room, I saw that they had put bed-railings up to keep her from falling out. The nurse told me that she was going into coma. The nurse spoke to her, but there was no reply. I spoke to her and said I had come. She smiled angelically, but did not open her eyes. I said, ‘Open your eyes, dearling.’ She smiled again, but that was all. I said, ‘Your eyes are still shut. I can’t see you if your eyes are shut, can I?’ She gave a faint giggle, but nothing more. I sat there beside her for an hour or two, holding her hand; and then I had to leave.

That night when I returned she had sunk deeper into the coma. The doctor came and spoke to her, but there was no response. He thought that she would never come out of it.… The next day they began intra-venous feeding. She was totally unresponsive to doctors or nurses. Then I found that I could reach her. If I spoke of Laddie or Glenmerle, she would murmur. I told her about Laddie having hold of the pig’s tail, and she gave a delighted giggle—to the amazement of a nurse who came in just then. I asked the nurse to bring me something for her to eat. The nurse said it wouldn’t work but brought it. I told Davy to open her mouth, and she did, and I put the spoon in it, telling her to swallow, and she did that. I fed her the whole dishful, as though she were a baby. The nurse tried it, but Davy could not hear any voice but mine. After that the hospital forgot visiting hours and 1 forgot classes: I fed her all her meals.

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The Shepherds’ Reformation

The new apostates’ breath

Shrivels divinity up.

Unproved assumptions gauge

Their scholarship: their lord’s

The Spirit of the Age.

They stab with secular swords

The wounded side

Of the Crucified,

And holding the holy cup

They urge the ultimate death.

As suavely they speak the Creed,

With every word forsworn,

From His Father’s side

And His fainting Bride

The Son of God is torn.

The flung stone shatters

The blue stained glass:

The Light of Heaven scatters

Upon the pitying grass.

—But what if He’s risen indeed?

SHELDON VANAUKEN

And i talked her out of that coma.

A month later, Vanauken had a call at three A.M. Davy was dying. She had no pain and she was completely rational. Her life was slowing to a stop. They prayed together and reminded each other of the great love they bore for the other. She knew that she was dying.

Her fingers moved to each corner of my mouth, as we had always done. And I gave her fingers little corner-of-the-mouth kisses, as we had always done. Then her arm fell slowly back. Past seeing and past speaking, with the last of her failing strength, she had said goodbye.…

One of the letters I wrote the day after her death was to C.S. Lewis. I told him how she died and how I meant to scatter her ashes at St. Stephen’s, as she and I had planned. But we had also thought it might be fitting for a handful of those ashes to be scattered at little Binsey church near Oxford. Would he—Lewis—do it? There was no reply to my letter, and I decided he must be away from Oxford.

I, therefore, entrusted the tiny packet to my friend Edmund Dews, who, indeed, had first taken us to Binsey-by-the-well.…

But Lewis was not away: he was waiting for the ashes. His letter had been lost in the post. Now he heard from Edmund.…

I heard from your friend about 2 days ago, and today I have got your letter of Feb. 5. I am most distressed to find that my answer to your previous letter has never reached you; particularly since its miscarriage has left you in doubt whether I wd. have accepted the v. sacred office of scattering the ashes. I wd. have liked to do (if you can understand) for the v. reason that I wd. not have liked doing it, since a deep spiritual gaucheie makes (me) uneasy in any ceremonial act; and I wd. have wished in that way to be honoured with a share, however tiny, in this Cross.… And how you re-assure me when, to describe your own state, you use the simple, obvious, yet now so rare, word sad. Neither more nor less nor other than sad. It suggests a clean wound—much here for tears, but ‘nothing but good and fair’. And I am sure it is never sadness—a proper, straight natural response to loss—that does people harm, but all the other things, all the resentment, dismay, doubt and self-pity with wh. it is usually complicated.… I sometimes wonder whether bereavement is not, at bottom, the easiest and least perilous of the ways in wh. men lose the happiness of youthful love. For I believe it must always be lost in some way: every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have come through a difficult death and re-birth. But far more have missed the re-birth. Your MS, as you well say, has now gone safe to the Printer.…

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C.S. Lewis was to be the friend in my loss and grief, the one hand in mine as I walked through a dark and desolate night. Other friends gave me love, and it was a fire to warm me. But Lewis was the friend I needed, the friend who would go with me down to the bedrock of meaning. I told him the insights that came to me through my grief observed—the title of the book he would write on his own future bereavement—and he gave me not only love but wisdom and understanding and, when necessary, severity.…

Your letter is a wonderfully clear and beautiful expression of an experience often desired but not often achieved to the degree you and Jean [Davy] achieved it. My reason for sending it back is my belief that if you re-read it often, till you can look at it as if it were someone else’s story, you will in the end think as I do (but of course far more deeply & fruitfully than I can, because it will cost you so much more) about a life so wholly (at first) devoted to US. Not only as I do, but as the whole ‘sense’ of the human family wd. on their various levels. Begin at the bottom. What wd. the grosser Pagans think? They’d say there was excess in it, that it wd. provoke the Nemesis of the gods; they wd. ‘see the red light.’ Go up one: the finer Pagans wd. blame each withdrawal from the claims of common humanity as unmanly, uncitizenly, uxorious. If Stoics they wd. say that to try to wrest part of the whole (US) into a self-sufficing Whole on its own was ‘contrary to nature’. Then come to Christians. They wd. of course agree that man & wife are ‘one flesh’; they wd. perhaps admit that this was most admirably realised by Jean and you. But surely they wd. add that this One Flesh must not (and in the long run cannot) ‘live to itself’ any more than the single individual. It was not made, any more than he, to be its Own End. It was made for God and (in Him) for its neighbours—first and foremost among them the children it ought to have produced. (The idea behind your voluntary sterility, that an experience, e.g. maternity, wh. cannot be shared shd. on that account be avoided, is surely v. unsound. For a. (forgive me) the conjugal act itself depends on opposite, reciprocal and therefore unsharable experiences. Did you want her to feel she had a woman in bed with her? b. The experience of a woman denied maternity is one you did not & could not share with her. To be denied paternity is different, trivial in comparison.)

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One way or another the thing had to die. Perpetual springtime is not allowed. You were not cutting the wood of life according to the grain. There are various possible ways in wh. it cd. have died tho’ both the parties went on living. You have been treated with a severe mercy. You have been brought to see (how true & how v. frequent this is!) that you were jealous of God. So from US you have been led back to US AND GOD; it remains to go on to GOD AND US. She was further on than you, and she can help you more where she now is than she could have done on earth. You must go on. That is one of the many reasons why suicide is out of the question. (Another is the absence of any ground for believing that death by that route wd. reunite you with her. Why should it? You might be digging an eternally unbridgeable chasm. Disobedience is not the way to get nearer to the obedient.)

There’s no other man, in such affliction as yours, to whom I’d dare write so plainly. And that, if you can believe me, is the strongest proof of my belief in you and love for you. To fools and weaklings one writes soft things. You spared her (v. wrongly) the pains of childbirth: do not evade your own, the travail you must undergo while Christ is being born in you. Do you imagine she herself can now have any greater care about you than that this spiritual maternity of yours shd. be patiently suffered & joyfully delivered?…

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The central thrust of the Severe Mercy letter came in the next-to-the-last paragraph.… It was death—Davy’s death—that was the severe mercy. There is no doubt at all that Lewis is saying precisely that. That death, so full of suffering for us both, suffering that still overwhelmed my life, was yet a severe mercy. A mercy as severe as death, a severity as merciful as love.…

Davy and I, in Lewis’s words, ‘admirably realised’ the Christian ideal of man and wife as One Flesh. That was the Shining Barrier: and in so far as the Shining Barrier meant closeness, dearness, sharing, and, in a word, love, it must surely, have been sanctified by God. To avoid creeping separateness in the name of love was simply being true to the sacrament of marriage.

But the Shining Barrier was more than that. In its Appeal to Love—what is best for our love—as the sole criterion of all decisions, it was in violation of the Law; for what was best for our love might not be in accordance with our love and duty to our neighbour. And the Shining Barrier contained an ultimate defiance of God in our resolute intention to die together in the last long dive.

But the Shining Barrier had been breached by God’s assault troops, including C.S. Lewis in the van; and we had bent the knee. The Appeal had been broken, to my dismay; and the last long dive had been forbidden, to our haunting sorrow in hospital. We had thought our love invulnerable; and so perhaps it was to the world, as long as the Barrier stood. But God had breached it, after which our love was vulnerable to any menace.

In the Severe Mercy Letter, Lewis said: “You have been brought to see … that you were jealous of God.” So I had said to him: it had been one of the sharp and shattering insights of my agonised grief. Jealous of my God! Or jealous of my lover’s Divine Lover. This was precisely what it had been when I moped about Li’l Dreary.… Mea culpa in truth. Of course I hadn’t known I was jealous of God. It was an almost unthinkable thought, and it remained unthought—and even more unthinkable—while I was pleading for Davy’s life in the hospital months and pouring my strength into my total commitment to her. But the jealousy was there. And God knew.

Neither the fact that our love had become vulnerable through the breach in the Shining Barrier nor the fact that I was, almost latently, jealous of God affected us in those last months in hospital when I was living for her and she was dying for God. Still, the Barrier was breached and the jealousy was there.… My moment of selfless offering-up had been for her best good, which may come to the same thing as the Kingdom’s good, but is not the same in intention. My commitment was to her. If, unimaginably, my duty to God had seemed to require my leaving her there in hospital to cope alone, I would not have done it. Never. As Lewis rightly saw, I had moved from ‘us’ to ‘us-and-God’ but was still light-years from ‘God-and-us’ in my pagan heart. I, therefore, conclude that—unless God had compelled me by Grace—I should not have become as wholly committed as she.

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More than two years later the second death occurred when the sense of the presence of Davy disappeared for him. And in the emptiness that it left he longed again for the grief that would bring Davy’s presence back to him. But in what was the final death of Davy something C.S. Lewis had said to him the first time he left Oxford remained with him.

‘At all events,’ he said with a cheerful grin, ‘we’ll certainly meet again, here—or there.’ … ‘I shan’t say goodbye.…’ Then he plunged into the traffic. I stood there watching him. When he reached the pavement on the other side, he turned around as though he knew somehow that I would still be standing there in front of the Eastgate. Then he raised his voice in a great roar that easily overcame the noise of the cars and buses. Heads turned and at least one car swerved. ‘Besides,’ he bellowed with a great grin, ‘Christians NEVER say goodbye!’.…

When I myself come to cross that boundary that she has crossed, I think I shall find her hand and hear her voice first of all.

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