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

Heaven itself, he thought, would be—must be—a coming home.

A severe mercy—the phrase haunted him: a mercy that was as severe as death, a death that was as merciful as love. For it had been death in love, not death of love. Love can die in many ways, most of them far more terrible than physical death; and if all natural love must die in one way or another, Davy’s death—he and she in love—was the death that hinted at springtime and rebirth.

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

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.

those who condemn what they do not understand are, surely, little men.

It is not possible to be ‘incidentally a Christian’. The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming firsts but many balances.

If I knew beyond hope or despair that Christianity were true, my fight for ever after would have to be against the pride of ‘the spine may break but it never bends’.

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.

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!

There will be a counter attack on you, you know, so don’t be too alarmed when it comes. The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you. Be busy learning to pray and (if you have made up yr. mind on the denominational question) get confirmed. Blessings on you and a hundred thousand welcomes. Make use of me in any way you please: and let us pray for each other always.

‘None are so unholy as those whose hands are cauterised with holy things’; sacred things may become profane by becoming matters of the job.

On the whole, I’ d advise you to get on with your tent-making. The performance of a duty will probably teach you quite as much about God as academic Theology wd. do.

I was worshipping beauty in the Christian God while Davy was worshipping God.

But I had begun to despair of having the old pagan joy with her, ever again. And Davy, meanwhile, was longing, a little pitifully, for me to find the joy she was finding in the Obedience: the joy that is perhaps the only perfect joy.

But she knew—knew there was something dark in my eyes. We could not hide from each other.

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.

If everything is lost, thanks be to God If I must see it go, watch it go, Watch it fade away, die Thanks be to God that He is all I have And if I have Him not, I have nothing at all Nothing at all, only a farewell to the wind Farewell to the grey sky Goodbye, God be with you evening October sky. If all is lost, thanks be to God, For He is He, and I, I am only I.

love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom.

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.

Be careful of your own bodily health. You must be, physically, v. tired, much more tired than you know. Above all, don’t yield to the feeling that such things ‘don’t matter now? You must remain, as she wishes, a good instrument for all heavenly impulses to work on, and the body is part of the instrument.

All this, which seemed to me a major insight into the nature of bereavement, I put to Lewis, along with some ironic comments on the change in my once-famous ‘luck’. Long before, friends had thought me lucky: my First Honours in college (because I had been lucky enough to get the right questions), my happy marriage (because I had been lucky enough to find the right girl). But, since Christianity, several things had not been so fortunate, culminating in Davy’s death. I sent him a photograph of Davy, perhaps in hospital; and asked him about Cambridge.

Some people run away from grief, go on world cruises or move to another town. But they do not escape, I think. The memories, unbidden, spring into their minds, scattered perhaps over the years. There is, maybe, something to be said for facing them all deliberately and straightaway. At all events, it is what I did in the Illumination of the Past.

If, indeed, we all have a kind of appetite for eternity, we have allowed ourselves to be caught up in a society that frustrates our longing at every turn. Half our inventions are advertised to save time—the washing machine, the fast car, the jet flight—but for what? Never were people more harried by time: by watches, by buzzers, by time clocks, by precise schedules, by the beginning of the programme. There is, in fact, some truth in ‘the good old days’: no other civilisation of the past was ever so harried by time.

C. S. Lewis, in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not 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?’ Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it—how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren’t adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.

The ticking has stopped. It is eternity.

whatever the object of our quest, we learn when we find it that it does not ever contain the joy that broke our heart with longing.

Thus, Lewis says, ‘if a man diligently followed this desire [for joy], pursuing the false objects until their falsity appeared and then resolutely abandoning them, he must come out at last into the clear knowledge that the human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given—nay, cannot even be imagined as given—in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience.’ This, I think, is what C. S. Lewis’s life and writings are about; and mine, too. Davy and I, having each other, longed for unpressured time— time-free existence—for thus we should find joy. We dimly glimpsed eternity, but what we, like Lewis, longed for was joy. But, though we never quite forgot the timelessness that was originally the end to which the boat was to be the means, we sometimes in those early years saw the schooner-to-be as an end in itself, an object containing the joy.

A year before her death, Davy offered-up her life for me, for the fulfilment of my soul. If I could cease to be jealous of God only through her death, if the love we both loved could only be saved through her death, if I would turn my eyes towards the eternal Fountain only through her death, is it unlikely that her offering-up was accepted?

The disappearance of the grief is not followed by happiness. It is followed by emptiness.