S5E48 – Severe Mercy Month (Part I): “Pagan Love”

While David is taking the month off to write his book about “The Four Loves”, Andrew and Matt discuss “A Severe Mercy” by Sheldon Vanauken. In this episode, they focus on the earlier part of the story and the “Pagan love” between Sheldon and his wife, Davy.

S5E48: “A Severe Mercy Month (Part I): Pagan Love” (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

“The Shining Barrier – the shield of our love. A walled garden. A fence around a young tree to keep the deer from nibbling it. A fortified place with the walls and watchtowers gleaming white like the cliffs of England. The Shining Barrier – we called it so from the first – protecting the green tree of our love. And yet in another sense it was our love itself, made strong within, that was the Shining Barrier.”

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

Chit-Chat

• What was your first experience with ASM? Very binary – people love or hate it.

Beverage and Toast

• Andrew was drinking some San Antonio Blend Texas coffee.
• Matt was drinking Spindrift.
  • David, who is writing these notes, would like to point out that the English are NOT secretly enamoured of the French…

Discussion

1. “Book Overview”

Andrew and Matt outline the story

• Pagan Love – lasts about 10 years
  • The Shining Barrier – Protecting inloveness / from separation
  • The Appeal to Love – Everything for the sake of the Love (not individual)
  • The Grey Goose – if a mate is killed, flies on alone and never takes another
• Shadow of a Tree
  • The Hound of Heaven – Jesus starts circling (Cross of masts for Van and Conviction of Sin for Davy)
• Encounter with Light (Falling in Love with Divine Love) – Really takes hold at Oxford (2 year period)
  • Christian Friends
  • C.S. Lewis
  • Davy’s Conversion
  • Van’s Conversion – couple months later
  • The Studio – Intellectual conversation / incredible friendships / taking in 
• Lil Dreary / The Barrier Breached – Post Oxford Struggle (1 year)
  • Davy all-in / Van partial in: Jealousy toward God
  • Appeal to Love Broken
  • Shining Barrier penetrated (wasn’t just them)
  • Davy offers up her life
• Deathly Snows
  • Davy = True Saiddnt
• Way of Grief / Lessons / A Severe Mercy
• Key Themes – Similar to Lewis
  • Beauty – Poetry / Nature
  • Longing – The Grey Goose
  • Timelessness – The Grey Goose
  • Falling in love with Divine Love

2. “Shining Barrier”

“The Shining Barrier – the shield of our love. A walled garden. A fence around a young tree to keep the deer from nibbling it. A fortified place with the walls and watchtowers gleaming white like the cliffs of England. The Shining Barrier – we called it so from the first – protecting the green tree of our love. And yet in another sense it was our love itself, made strong within, that was the Shining Barrier.” 

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

“The killer of love is creeping separateness. Inloveness is a gift of the gods but then it is up to the lovers to cherish or to ruin. Taking love for granted, especially after marriage. Ceasing to do things together. Finding separate interests. ‘We’ turning into ‘I’. Self. Self-regard: what I want to do. Actual selfishness only a hop away. This was the way of creeping separateness. And in the modern world, especially in the cities, everything favored it. The man going off to his office; the woman staying home with the children – her children – or perhaps having a different job. The failure of love might seem to be caused by hate or boredom or unfaithfulness with a lover; but those were results. First came the creeping separateness: the failure behind the failure”

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

“What will be best for OUR love?”

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

The Grey Goose was the name of the boat which they built.

3. “The Grey Goose”

Timeless Moment of Infinite Duration – they would experience these moments and wanted to protect them at all cost

“If it’s mate is killed, flies on alone and never takes another.”

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

“The grey goose was initially only a means to an end: the good life. The timeful life. But our imaginations were more and more caught up in the grace and beauty of the ships and the sea. We would sail the seas in storm and sunshine to far islands, carrying with us our beloved books and our few possessions and we would be free, free to be, free from schedules.”

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

Travel / Oxford / Career Success / Marriage

Four options from prayer:

1. The worthiness of the petitioner made it bad for him to have his prayers granted; might lead him to think there was an element of bargain to it
2. The unworthiness made it bad; might lead him to think that God did not demand righteousness
3. The worthiness made it good; might free him from scruples, show him that his conduct had been right after all
4. The unworthiness made it good; produced humbled compunction

I’ve never had such small audiences before. Must be frightfully good for me.

Letter from C.S. Lewis to John Lawlor (4th October 1956)

Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book II, Chapter 5)

4. “The Mid-mourning”

“There was to be much of the seas, both ships and yachts. In these colourful and adventurous years, years that were to include, besides the fancy and the yachts, a great university, Yale, and a Virginian farmhouse”

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (Chapter III)

• Two incidents:
  • Van – Destroyer Masts – not sure as much about his other than it planted a seed.
  • Davy – Conviction of Sin & Pain

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 11)

“What is important is that the moment was a culmination of all we had ever dreamt: not just grey goose, not just the good life – the timeful life without the pressure of time – but also the green tree of the pagan love flourishing within the Shining Barrier. Still in love, still outward bound, We were leaving this grey goose way for a little while, but only for awhile.”

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

Wrap-Up

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