A Severe Mercy

by Sheldon Vanauken

  Naturally I told Davy about the silent night—what there was to tell. About holding hands and about wishing Jane were my sister. I had told her all along what Jane and I had said and done. Davy and I always told each other things.

  But what was there to tell? Something had happened, but what was it? Was I in love with Jane? The thought had never crossed my mind. It didn’t cross it now. No, but was I? Was Jane in love with me? I hadn’t thought of that either; but now Davy and I thought that perhaps she was. I was not pleased at the thought. I was enamoured with Jane as sister, a sister in England. One may have a strong bond with a sister. But enamoured by it I was. I was caught up in it and remained so for weeks, exchanging many letters with Jane, all of which Davy saw of course and we talked over. Nothing hidden.

  In an earlier chapter, writing about the Shining Barrier, I said that with the closeness we were bringing into being it would be unthinkable for either of us ever to love another. Unthinkable. Literally unthinkable. And I literally had not thought of being in love with Jane, nor did I think of it in the next weeks. The Shining Barrier, even breached by Christ, was still immensely strong. And, indeed, whatever might be the truth of my feelings for Jane, Davy was my life. Davy was the air I breathed. I knew that steadily.

  But I was in love with Jane. And she with me. I do not doubt it now. We never so much as kissed each other, but that’s what it was. She did not know it for what it was then either. She and I were caught up in a dream of beauty. Poetry was at the heart of it. There were elements of high-church mystery and elements that were virtually pagan, like the Yorkshire moors and the wild powerful love of Heathcliffe and Cathy, a love of the spirit that was almost sexless. Often when people are falling in love, physical desire is in abeyance: had it not been so with Jane and me, alarums would have rung. But it was a thing of the spirit, its true nature precisely unthinkable by me—or, in a different way, by her. And I said to myself, as I wrote letters to Jane or walked in the night, that my dream of Jane as sister was made up of elements—poetry and pagan beauty—that Davy, in her deep Christian commitment, didn’t have time for any more. A strange and subtle betrayal, almost innocent. But not quite: corruption is never compulsory.

  The most important thing about what happened with Jane is that it was a consequence. It was the consequence of God’s breaching the Shining Barrier, of the failure of the Appeal. This I believe to be certainly true. It could not have happened, even in that nearly innocent form, in the years when the Shining Barrier was intact. Of course, if I had been as wholly committed to Christ as Davy was, it wouldn’t have happened either. It happened because in my heart I wasn’t that committed and because I wanted the old pagan joy—and couldn’t appeal to Davy on the grounds of our love. It was the ‘old Davy’ I had been wanting, and a schooner under the wind. If Davy—Davy my comrade and my love—had wanted what I wanted, the Shining Barrier would have stood. 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.

  The hot weather broke that year in early September; and Davy, through rest and coolness, began to feel good again. The autumn term would be beginning soon. In the meantime we drove out morning, noon, and night in the MG, very frisky and Oxonian, with Flurry riding gaily in Flurry’s ‘Ole behind the seat. Once, when Flurry was attractively in heat, we were pursued by a wolf pack of half a dozen of her more spirited suitors, the neighbours looking on in astonishment and we laughing until we had tears in our eyes. In the MG, named now the Trout, we explored all the country round including the Blue Mountains. We often stopped at night at St. Stephen’s and prayed together, kneeling by an old stone cross in the graveyard. This led us to come, sometimes, to church there. We could not desert Grace Church because of our love for the Rector and Preston Ambler, but we found the little country church, very old for this part of Virginia and set amongst great oaks, so appealing that we declared we were ‘half members’. Not far from St. Stephen’s, out there in Bedford County, we found an old and deserted house, rather small but with great dignity and with fine trees all about. We decided that it would be a perfect ‘Ladywood’—the house we had planned to find, back in the Lamb and Flag, where we could be alone together and talk. Next year, we said, we might be able to buy it.

  But even as we were renewing our comradeship through that blessed little MG, I was writing to Jane and still caught up in that particular web of beauty, still with the restless longing of the heart for some ‘island in the west’. Davy was sympathetic and loving when I talked about Jane; and when I wrote a couple of poems to ‘my sister’, I think Davy loved them more, albeit some-what wistfully, than the sister did.

  Then Davy, who did not write poems, wrote one about Dom Julian, far away in his monastery. We exchanged letters with him and loved him always, reading often his splendid Christian poems. This is Davy’s poem to Julian:

  Dear dying Julian

  Gracious and just

  Dying to self

  And hid deep in Christ

  Still thou dost live

  In pain and thirst

  And bit by bit

  Consume to dust

  Thy soul’s dark night

  Works life in us

  To our dim vision

  There shines forth Christ

  Ah! but how fair

  Thy bare faith is

  Refuge for us

  Who still do not trust

  Davy, whom I saw as far ahead of me on the Way as she saw Julian to be ahead of her, fell far short, in her own eyes, of the glory of God, as of course Julian, in his own eyes, fell short. To me, both were holy. The distance is infinity, and position is relative. Even I perhaps may have seemed holy to somebody. Some penitent villain.

  And Davy one night, having contemplated holiness, said she was restless and would sleep in the guestroom. But she did not sleep: she prayed. All night, like the saints, she wrestled in prayer. Some say that prayer, even prayer for what God desires, releases power by the operation of a deep spiritual law; and to offer up what one loves may release still more. However that may be, Davy that night offered up her life. For me—that my soul might be fulfilled, almost the prayer of that Oxford Advent. Now, as I fixed my eyes on the Island in the West and looked not Eastward, , she humbly proposed holy exchange. It was between her and the Incarnate One. I was not to know then.

  The college term began, and the Christian group at once revived with even more interest and enthusiasm than before. We talked of Christ, and we read Julian’s unpublished poems again and again because the students asked for them. The fire glowed on the hearth, and the Lord Messiah, in whose Name we gathered, was in the room.

  Many of the students came to talk to us about their problems, and we tried, Davy especially, to be always available. Before the term was a month old we were confronted with a major problem: homosexuality. A girl came to talk to Davy alone; a boy to talk to us both. They came because we were Christians. Our preChristian view of homosexuality had been tolerant: if that was what people wanted, why not? And one of our dear friends was a pleasant lesbian lady. But now as Christians what did we think? We didn’t know. We knew St. Paul was rather stern about it; but maybe he meant just sex, homosex, without love. Sex that came before God. Might there be, perhaps, a Christian love, marriage even, between men or between women that included homosex but was not dominated by it? We did not know. Our Rector thought not. Eventually I wrote to C. S. Lewis about that matter as well as about prayer—whether holy prayers, like those of Julian and Davy, would be more efficacious because of their merit. Lewis’s reference to my spine has to do with my slipping a disc climbing Snowdon in Wales, an injury which still bothered me. His letter:

  I have seen less than you but more than I wanted of this terrible problem. I will discuss your letter with those whom I think wise in Christ. This is only an interim report. First, to map out the boundaries within w
hich all discussion must go on, I take it for certain that the physical satisfaction of homo-sexual desires is sin. This leaves the homo, no worse off than any normal person who is, for whatever reason, prevented from marrying. Second, our speculations on the cause of the abnormality are not what matters and we must be content with ignorance. The disciples were not told why (in terms of efficient cause) the man was born blind (Jn. IX 1-3): only the final cause, that the works of God shd. be made manifest in him. This suggests that in homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, those works can be made manifest: i.e. that every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, wh. will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.’ Of course, the first step must be to accept any privations wh., if so disabled, we can’t lawfully get. The homo, has to accept sexual abstinence just as the poor man has to forego otherwise lawful pleasures because he wd. be unjust to his wife and children if he took them. That is merely a negative condition. What shd. the positive life of the homo, be? I wish I had a letter wh. a pious male homo., now dead, once wrote to me—but of course it was the sort of letter one takes care to destroy. He believed that his necessity could be turned to spiritual gain: that there were certain kinds of sympathy and understanding, a certain social role which mere men and mere women cd. not give. But it is all horribly vague— too long ago. Perhaps any homo, who humbly accepts his cross and puts himself under Divine guidance will, however, be shown the way. I am sure that any attempt to evade it (e.g. by mock-or quasi-marriage with a member of one’s own sex even if this does not lead to any carnal act) is the wrong way. Jealousy (this another homo, admitted to me) is far more rampant and deadly among them than among us. And I don’t think little concessions like wearing the clothes of the other sex in private is the right line either. It is the duties, the burdens, the characteristic virtues of the other sex, I expect, which the patient must try to cultivate. I have mentioned humility because male homos. (I don’t know about women) are rather apt, the moment they find you don’t treat them with horror and contempt, to rush to the opposite pole and start implying that they are somehow superior to the normal type. I wish I could be more definite. All I have really said is that, like all other tribulations, it must be offered to God and His guidance how to use it must be sought.

  I heard you had been troubled with the old spine again. I hope the silence on this topic in your letter does not merely result from selflessness but means that you are now well. Remember me to your very nice wife. You both keep your place in my daily prayers. It is a sweet duty, praying for our friends. I always feel as if I had had a brief meeting with you when I do so: perhaps it is a meeting, and the best kind. Pray for me to be made more charitable: we’re in the middle of a Faculty crisis wh. tempts me to hatred many times a day.

  P.S. I’ d nearly forgotten your other point. I presume God grants prayers when granting wd. be good for the petitioner & others and denies them when it wd. not. Might there be cases where

  a. The worthiness of the petitioner made it bad for him to have his prayers granted: i.e. might lead him to think there was an element of bargain about it.

  b. The unworthiness made it bad: i.e. might lead him to think that God did not demand righteousness.

  c. The worthiness made it good: i.e. might free him from scruples, show him that his conduct had been right after all.

  d. The unworthiness made it good: i.e. produced humbled compunction -unde hoc mihi?

  All v. crude. The point is that worthiness might easily be taken into account tho’ not in the way of direct earning and reward.

  On Christmas Eve, when Davy was out of the room, I brought forth an immense photograph of the piers and vaulting of Bourges Cathedral that she had never seen, propping it up at eye level with a single lamp upon it and the others out. Looking at it, one was almost there, gazing up at all that soaring splendour. Then I put the Sanctus from the Mozart ‘Requiem Mass’ on the record player, ready to go at full volume. Fetching Davy in with her eyes obediently shut, I stood her in front of the picture and touched the switch. As the music swept into the room with grandeur, I put my arms around her from behind and whispered, ‘Open your eyes, dearling.’ It was a moment of astonishing glory, even to me who had staged it; and Davy had tears in her eyes. Glory and love. I knew I loved Davy more than all the world besides. And she knew it, too.

  That moment marked the end of a variously troubled year: The year of well-named Li’l 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.

  Mole End was the name, from The Wind in the Willows of course, that we gave to the basement flat that we moved into in the dead of winter. It was in a huge and handsome ante-bellum mansion set among great oaks in spacious grounds. The flat itself had spacious rooms, and it seemed about a mile from the back room to the front. It had a little forecourt, like Mole’s Mole End, under the mansion’s front steps. The move was complicated by other people’s moving; so that, on the last night of the year, we were not in Mole End though our furniture was, but were rather perched in an upperstorey flat in the same mansion. There we went wearily to earth, my back about done in by lifting boxes of books.

  I went to bed on a sort of many-windowed sun porch that night, while Davy played gleefully with the wheeled tea trolley—some-thing she had always wanted—that we were to inherit.

  On New Year’s morning I awoke to bright sunshine pouring in the many windows, and out of them I could see only a fantastic maze of oak branches, along which half a dozen squirrels merrily chased each other. It felt like country, and I was transported back to Glenmerle. Then, hearing a clink, I looked round, and in came Davy wheeling the already beloved tea trolley with an eager, shy delight. And on it—most splendid of meals—a glorious breakfast: eggs and bacon and sausage and country ham—all—and English muffins, hot, and toast, cold, and Oxford vintage marmalade. And of course the teapot under its cosy. We kissed each other and murmured a prayer and ate the lot, laughing now and then at the squirrels and feeding titbits to Flurry. I told her of my being carried back to Glenmerle, and then we remembered that other New Year’s Day, shortly after we met, when I brought her first to Glenmerle. We laughed, recalling the old tale of Don and his wreck, and we smiled when we spoke of how young we were then. For a moment we were silent, remembering. I said, ‘Davy?’ She looked at me with bright, remembering eyes—her long lovely eyes—and I said, ‘I love you.’ ‘I know,’ she said. ‘And I love you.’ We looked at each other with that look of perfect under-standing that, more than any other single thing, was the essence of our love. I raised my teacup and said, ‘If it’s half as good as the half we’ve known . . .’ and she, lifting hers, said, ‘Here’s Hail! to the rest of the road.’ We drank to that in Darjeeling.

  She knew without my saying that I was hers, that I was full of happiness that we were deeply together again, wherever the road led. And I knew without her saying that she had, somehow, come to a new understanding that God in His ample love embraced our love with, it may be, a sort of tenderness, and we must tread the Way to Him hand in hand. We understood without words that we must hold the co-inherence of lovers and be Companions of the Co-inherence of the Incarnate Lord: she in me and I in her; Christ in us and we in Him. ‘Everyone who loves is the child of God,’ says John (I John IV 7). Perhaps that morning she came back for me and then perhaps, astonishingly, found herself further along the Way. At all events, joy flowered between us, the joy that I had thought to be pagan joy. After all, for Christian and unbeliever, there is but one spring of joy.

  Certainly, as we moved into the new year, we held the reality of each other and were lovers and comrades again, as we had
been at Oxford and Glenmerle and aboard Grey Goose. Mole End, therefore, with its spray of English heather on the wall of the big living-room, was a happy place. We were happy, and for Davy it was in several ways a very fulfilling time. The Christian group, coming every week, sitting on the floor in front of the fire, flourished; and Davy very blithely made all sorts of goodies to put on her dear tea trolley and wheel in to make the meetings gayer. At other times during the week the students of the group and others, as well as faculty friends, dropped in for tea and talk. Many of the students—Bill, Joan, Sandra, Rosie, Anne—became friends. Others told us their deepest problems, coming particularly to Davy because of her warmth of kindness. Belle Hill came by often, brisk and cheerful. We had long Christian conversations with physicist Shirley Rosser, Shirley with his warm grin and prematurely snowy hair. In fact, Mole End, though far less cramped, took on something of the quality of the Studio, with the odd littls forecourt in place of the cobbled lane. There was a large opaque glass-brick window, where our wooden cross stood, and it was our ‘skylight’. And of course the coalfireon the hearth and hundreds of books. Now, though, some fine furniture and oriental rugs, Glenmerle things.

  At night Davy and I would often go up to Grace Church, to which we had a key. We would pray there at the white altar that had the words ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ engraved on it—sometimes I would speak the words aloud because of the coming together of purity of vowel sounds and purity of meaning. Then Davy would play for me on the organ, and the little church would be filled with the thunder of the Toccata-and-Fugue or the Little G Minor or ‘Thou Art the King of Glory’. These evenings in the church, dark but for the sanctuary lights and the organ console, swept with the mighty music, were very dear to me and a joyous fulfilment for Davy. Sometimes we would go from the splendours of the music to Mole End and the splendours of poetry. I was writing poetry, too; and she eagerly entered into the process as always, so that the poems were truly ours.