A Severe Mercy

In his book, A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken vividly tells of the love he and his wife Davy shared—an intense and self-giving devo­tion.  They sought to share everything:  “If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it—and the other one must find it.”

Over time they realized, “The killer of love is creeping separateness… which was, in the last analysis, self.”  They fueled romance with self-altera­tion—no saying, “That’s just the way I am.”  Still, love between sinners get complicated:  “Should one of us change a pattern of behav­iour that bothered the other, or should the other learn to accept?”

As their love grew, they began to think about how death would one day separate them.  The solution, it seemed, was to die together—but “death is no respecter of love.”  They bought a sailboat and named it “Grey Goose” because, if the grey goose’s mate is killed, it flies on alone forever.  The prospect of death became a cloud over their joy.

A Severe Mercy also tells the tale of Sheldon and Davy’s search for God and their correspondence with an Oxford friend, C. S. Lewis.  For Davy, faith in Jesus flowed readily; her heart was ready for the gospel.  But Sheldon anguished—he wanted to believe; atheism had no appeal.  But he couldn’t just take that step of faith.  In one letter responding to Sheldon’s struggles, Lewis ends with this:  “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!”  Indeed, Vanauken was (in the end, quite gladly) caught by the saving love of Christ.

The story unfolds, and Davy is stricken with illness.  As her life ebbs away, she and Sheldon realize the “shining barrier” of their strong love was being breached.  Neither Lewis nor Vanauken implies that Davy’s death is “good” in any simple way.  But they do recognize how God accomplishes deep spiritual work within his frail, beloved people right there in the midst of harrowing loss.  Indeed, in the end Vanauken was able to say, “If my reasoning—my judgment—is correct, then her death in the dearness of our love had these results:  It brought me as nothing else could do to know and end my jealousy of God…  It took her death, ironical as it must seem, to make me content in her turning her gaze from me to the eternal Fountain” (p. 218).