Matt and Andrew wrap up their discussion of “A Severe Mercy”.
S5E50: “A Severe Mercy Month” (Part III) (Download)
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Show Notes
Introduction
Quote-of-the-week
“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”
Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy
Chit-Chat
- Matt has finished a big project.
- Andrew is starting a new job!
Beverage and Toast
- Matt was drinking Churchill War Rooms Whisky
- Andrew was drinking Polar Seltzer Black Cherry seltzer water. Andrew shared the fun fact that, according to Walter Hooper, Lewis would put four teaspoons of sugar in his tea.
- They toasted all the listeners!
Discussion
1. “Recap”
Matt recapped the story so far: conversions, the role of longing and St. Udio’s.
…this is a time of taking in – taking in friendships, conversation, gaiety, wisdom, knowledge, beauty, holiness, and later, well, there’ll be a time of giving out.
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
2. “Lil Dreary and Barrier Breached”
The first year after Oxford was difficult and he called it Lil Dreary; they both struggled with watered down Christianity without their intellectual and deeply committed Christian friend group; further, they struggled with the divide Christianity caused between each other. The Appeal to Love was at risk as it put The Shining Barrier at risk.
Eventually they were able to create a Christian group, mainly of younger students longing for the intellectual beauty of Christianity.
“No doubt it was I who insisted upon the intellectual rigor 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.”
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
For Davy, Christianity was everything and her priority. For Van, it was important, but he was holding something back. He was all-in intellectually but still desired the old Grey Goose. He could sense the “Appeal to Love” was no more. For Davy, it was an Appeal to God.
“I wanted the fine keen bow of a schooner cutting the waves with Davy and me – just Davy and me and Flurry – happy and loving and comradely on her decks. Well, there was nothing unChristian about that, as long as God was there, too, and as long as we were neglecting no service of love. But, though I wouldn’t have admitted it, even to myself, I didn’t want God aboard. He was too heavy. I wanted Him approving from a considerable distance. I didn’t want to be thinking of Him. I wanted to be free – like Gypsy. I wanted life itself, the colour and fire and loveliness of life. And Christ now and then, like a love poem I could read when I wanted to. I didn’t want us to be swallowed up in God. But for Davy, to live was Christ. She didn’t want to be a saint, either; she was too humble even to think of such a thing. She simply wanted God – almost totally. His service was her freedom, her joy. She loved me, she loved our sharing; but, ultimately, all there was to share was Christ and His service.”
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
3. “Nightly intercession”
The above breached the Barrier and broke the appeal. It was no longer to love but to God and Van was struggling with that and Davy sensed it but they didn’t speak about it. Davy could sense that Van was struggling with their new life, therefore, one night, she went to the guestroom and prayed like the saints all night. She offered her life to the Lord that Van’s soul might be fulfilled.
Beautiful moment with music (Requiem Mass) and the photo of the Bourges Cathedral –
That moment market the end of the variously troubled year: the year of well named Lil Dreary, which we were now to abandon without regrets. The year of shock and adjustment after Oxford. The year when the Appeal was seen to be impossible to use and the Shining Barrier breached. And the year, consequently when I responded to Jane’s pure and innocent love. It was also the year when Davy, a month or so before its end, offered up her life in holy exchange and utter love for me. Tonight, after Bourges and the ‘Requiem Mass’, she told me, to my horror and dread.
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
4. “The Deathly Snows”
Van finds out Davy is terminally ill and has a year to live
“Dearling, this illness is maybe going to mean our parting” …She too smiled through tears, and said in a husky voice: “Let it all be according to His perfect will.”
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
When friends came with love to cheer her up and they went away cheered and strengthened. Her love and strength flowed out to them. One of the students, later, did a painting of Davy, smiling in the light, leading a darkly silhouetted student towards a tree – The tree.
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
“She obediently did everything the doctors and the nurses told her to do: everything except stay in bed when someone else was in need. Over and over again she was discovered out of bed in the night, sitting beside some other patient who was suffering, soothing her, holding her hand, praying for her… Later I was to get dozens of letters, some almost illiterate, from people who had been in the hospital with her, saying that she had helped and sustained them. One said she was like an Angel of God.”
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
He later found out that the hospital and doctors wouldn’t charge them a dime for the time in the hospital because Davy did more for them through her joy, compassion, and kindness than they did for her.
5. “The Way of Grief”
Davy dies and Van grieves. Then begins the “Illumination of the Past” – a complete study of their time together; he reached out to friends who had letters from her, read journals, re-read books…etc
“I had assembled, and put into chronological order, hundreds of letters Davy had written over the years. I had the diaries and journals we had kept. I had her paintings done in their various periods and our photograph album. But I had gone further than these helps; I had searched out and bought recordings of music we had liked and merely chanced to listen to a good deal in some period, including especially English lavender. I had all our favorite poems of the years. I had already been reading meaningful books from our past, but I had saved some of the dearest ones until now.”
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
As he did this, he could see Christ in her before she / he saw Christ in herself. Heaven/Hell is retroactive.
6. “Time & Eternity”
Four months after Davy’s death and he’s had two strong thoughts, the first of which is “Time & Eternity”.
Unpressured time – time to sit on stone walls, time to see beauty, time to star as long as sheep and cows
Timeless moments made eternity; awareness of duration, of terminus, spoils the Now
“God created time. If, indeed, that is so, if God is eternity and time is a created thing, then Davy must now be divorced from time and in eternity;
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
“I saw with immense clarity that we had always been harried by time. All our dreams back there in Glenmerle had come true: the schooner Grey Goose under the wind, the far islands of Hawaii in the dark-blue rolling Pacific, the spires of Oxford. But all the fulfillments were somehow, it seemed to me, incomplete, temporary, hurried. We wished to know, to savour, to sink in – into the heart of the experience – to possess it wholly. But there was never enough time; something still eluded us”
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
The timelessness that seems to reside in the future or the past is an illusion. We dreamt of Grey Goose by the pool at Glenmerle, dreaming of the schooner sailing into the quiet lagoon of some far out time, or time-free. In reality, the log to write, the meal to get, the topsail to be mended. The holiday trip to England is full of timeless images – the moments in Wells or Coventry Cathedral, the long talks with Peter or Jane, the hours in the peaceful countryside. In reality, even without the fearfully time-pressured guided tour, there are trains to catch, shirts to wash, sleep to get, rooms to book before it’s too late. The future dream charms us because of its timelessness; and I think most of the charm we see in the good old days is no less an illusion of timelessness
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
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 it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren’t adapted to it, not at home in it. If this is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
“So it appeared to me. It appeared to me that Davy and I had longed for timelessness – eternity – all our days; and the longing coupled with my post-mortem vision of the total Davy whetted my appetite for heaven. Golden streets and compulsory harp lessons may lack appeal – but timelessness? And total persons? Heaven is indeed home”
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
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.”
Letter from C.S. Lewis to Sheldon Vanauken
“I came to wonder whether all objects that men and women set their hearts upon, even the darkest and most obsessive desires, do not begin as intimations of joy from the sole spring of joy, God?”
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
7. “God’s Eternal Mercy”
The second of Van’s thoughts related to “God’s Eternal Mercy”. This thought was spurred from a letter he sent to Lewis and his response after hearing the entire Grey Goose / Shining Barrier Story.
“What would the grosser Pagans think? They’d say there was excess in it, that it would provoke the Nemesis of the gods; they would ‘see the red light.’ Go up one: the finer pagans would blame each withdrawal from the claims of common humanity as unmanly, uncitizenly, uxorious. If stoics, they would say that to try to wrest part of the Whole (US) into a self-sufficing Whole on it’s own was ‘contrary to nature.’ Then come to Christians. They would of course agree that man and wife are ‘one flesh” they would perhaps admit that this was most admirably realized by Jean and you. But surely they would 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 it’s neighbors – first and foremost among them the children it ought to have produced. The idea behind your involuntary sterility that an experience which cannot be shared should on that account be avoided, is surely very unsound…
…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 which it could have died though both the parties went on living. You have been treated with a severe mercy. You have been brought to see (how true and how very 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 then 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 believe that death by that route would 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 write so plainly. And that, if you can believe me, is the strongest proof of my belief in you and love from you. To fools and weaklings one writes soft things. You spared her (very 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 should be patiently suffered and joyfully delivered?
Letter from C.S. Lewis to Sheldon Vanauken
One way or another, the thing had to die… You have been treated with a severe mercy.
Letter from C.S. Lewis to Sheldon Vanauken
Davy and I admirably realized 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 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 a violation of the Law; for what was best for our love might not be in accordance with our love and duty to our neighbor. And the shining barrier contained an ultimate defiance of God in our resolute intention to die together in the last long dive.
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
So her death “brought me as nothing else could do to know and end my jealousy of God. It saved her faith from assault. It brought me, if Lewis is right, her far greater help from eternity. And it saved our love from perishing in one of the other ways that love could perish”
A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken
8. “Concluding Thoughts”
Openness to Truth & Critique. While there was a privilege and naïveté in the beginning, I have to give him props for his openness to correction all along the way; when evidence presented Christianity they changed. When Lewis at the end flat out called out his nonsense, he received it. Really powerful last chapter: timelessness and God’s severe mercy were powerful concepts (and piercing to my soul). Davy’s Beauty – I really do wish I could love people like that but I dislike vulnerability and am self-centered.
All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love—a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek—
But self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
As the Ruin Falls, C. S. Lewis
You give me are more precious than all other gains.
