A Severe Mercy: A Heartrending Memoir of Love, Faith, Grief, and the Healing Power of God, Featuring Unseen Letters from C. S. Lewis

by Sheldon Vanauken

To believe with certainty, somebody said, one has to begin by doubting.

Only someone who has faced the question—is Christianity false?—can help someone else resolve the counter-question—is it true?

The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest

argument against Christianity is also Christians—when they are sombre and joy-less, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Chris-tianity dies a thousand deaths. But, though it is just to condemn some Christians for these things, perhaps, after all, it is not just, though very easy, to condemn Christianity itself for them. Indeed, there are impressive indications that the positive quality of joy is in Christianity—and possibly nowhere else. If that were certain, it would be proof of a very high order.

I don’t agree with your picture of the history of religion— Christ, Buddha, Mohammed and others elaborating an original simplicity. I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xtianity.

I didn’t want us to be swallowed up in God. I wanted holidays from the school of Christ.

Death—corruption—resurrection is the true rhythm: not the pathetic, horrible practice of mummification.

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.

If God saved our love—and, indeed, trans-formed it into its real and eternal self—in the only way possible, her death, it was for me, despite grief and aloneness, worth it.

‘Christians NEVER say goodbye!’

It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we do not know at all that it is the same with others.