A Severe Mercy

by Sheldon Vanauken

  Pondering Lewis’s words about joy and my own thinking upon time and eternity, recalling the tendency of Davy and me to sub-stitute the means for the end, not only the yacht for the time-free existence it was to make possible but also other glimpses of heavenly joy—joy through love and beauty—that we were allowed and what we made of them, especially the Shining Barrier, 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. One man’s intimation of joy through beauty and his longing to be, somehow, one with that beauty may lead him to painting and thence, the beauty half-forgotten, to advocacy of nothing more than an artistic fashion; or that same desire to be one with beauty may lead another man to cut-throat art-collecting or to flamboyant, Wildean excesses in his personal life. Someone else may link the joy with a glimpse of heavenly justice and then be led into law or perhaps communism, justice in the end forgotten. A boy growing up in a crowded, squalid flat may associate the joy with clean spaciousness which then becomes affluence, the desire for which causes him to become a crook, believing vaguely that the world owes him his heart’s desire. An inkling of joy through human love might lead to lust and orgiastic cruelty. The priest’s vocation may spring from his glimpse of God as joy, but that vocation may become episcopal politics, God mouthed and forgotten. Even a Hitler may begin with a longing for joy through peace and order. Davy and I had our glimpse of joy, joy eternal not limited by time, and sought Grey Goose as a way to it. If we sometimes made the schooner an end in itself, still it did, in truth, give us much of unpressured time in which, to use Lewis’s brilliant analogy, we did sometimes escape from the endless line of minutes on to the plane, supremely so on the night of the cold sea-fire when all our inklings of eternity and love and beauty became one.

  I said earlier that there were two intertwined strands in my Maytime thinking, the earlier one, beginning with the Illumination of the Past, having to do with time and eternity, and the later one, begun by Lewis’s early May letter, having to do with the death of love and with mercy.

  I had written to Lewis in April, a long letter, telling him the story of the Shining Barrier quite completely, including the completion of the Barrier by the last long dive. I told him its purpose —to keep inloveness. I told him why we had not had children— lest they should come between us by lessening our sharing.

  Lewis’s reply led perhaps to this book and gave it its title:

  Your letter is a wonderfully clear and beautiful expression of an experience often desired but not often achieved to the degree you and Jean achieved it. My reason for sending it back is my belief that if you re-read it often, till you can look at it as if it were someone else’s story, you will in the end think as I do (but of course far more deeply & fruitfully than I can, because it will cost you so much more) about a life so wholly (at first) devoted to US. Not only as I do, but as the whole ‘sense’ of the human family wd. on their various levels. Begin at the bottom. What wd. the grosser Pagans think? They’d say there was excess in it, that it wd. provoke the Nemesis of the gods; they wd. ‘see the red light.’ Go up one: the finer Pagans wd. blame each withdrawal from the claims of common humanity as unmanly, uncitizenly, uxorious. If Stoics they wd. say that to try to wrest part of the Whole (US) into a self-sufficing Whole on its own was ‘contrary to nature’. Then come to Christians. They wd. of course agree that man & wife are ‘one flesh’; they wd. perhaps admit that this was most admirably realised by Jean and you. But surely they wd. 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 its neighbours—first and foremost among them the children it ought to have produced. (The idea behind your voluntary sterility, that an experience, e.g. maternity, wh. cannot be shared shd. on that account be avoided, is surely v. unsound. For a. (forgive me) the conjugal act itself depends on opposite, reciprocal and therefore unshareable experiences. Did you want her to feel she had a woman in bed with her? b. The experience of a woman denied maternity is one you did not & could not share with her. To be denied paternity is different, trivial in comparison.)

  One way or another the thing had to die. Perpetual spring-time is not allowed. You were not cutting the wood of life according to the grain. There are various possible ways in wh. it cd. have died tho’ both the parties went on living. You have been treated with a severe mercy. You have been brought to see (how true & how v. 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 than 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 believing that death by that route wd. 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 dare write so plainly. And that, if you can believe me, is the strongest proof of my belief in you and love for you. To fools and weaklings one writes soft things. You spared her (v. 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 shd. be patiently suffered & joyfully delivered?

  God bless you. Pray for me.

  After this severe and splendid letter I loved Lewis like a brother. A brother and father combined.

  If I had been at all tempted to break my promise to Davy about following her by my own act, the temptation vanished after one horrified look at Lewis’s ‘eternally unbridgeable chasm.’ In the margin by it there’s a small ‘Ugh!!’ in my hand.

  In my reply I told Lewis of these reactions and thanked him for his clarity and honesty and trust. I said that Davy and I, in fact, had kept springtime—Oxford had been June perhaps—and then it was all over. I said that perhaps she and I had shared the experience of a woman denied maternity through our closeness and empathy. And I promised to think deeply about all he had said. His subsequent letter on eternity has been given.

  My thinking on time and eternity had prepared me—by showing me that God was what we had always longed for, longed for as ‘timelessness’—for the more rigorous thinking that must follow this ‘severe mercy’ letter. If God is to be, in truth, sought first, He must be seen as heart’s desire.

  The central thrust of the Severe Mercy Letter came in the next-to-last paragraph, beginning: ‘One way or another the thing had to die.’ Had to die. But it might have died in a different way. Lewis had said something like this before, in his first letter after Davy’s death. There he had said: ‘I feel .. . v. strongly what you say about the “curious consolation ”that “nothing now can mar ” your joint lives. I sometimes wonder whether bereavement is not, at bottom, the easiest and least perilous of the ways in wh. men lose the happiness of youthful love. For I believe it must always be lost in some way: every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have come through a difficult death and re-birth. But far more have missed the re-birth. Your MS, as you well say, has now gone safe to the Printer.’ Again the same note: our love had to die, but there are many ways of dying.

  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.

  This is not a concept that will have an immediate appeal to everyone, not in a society that celebrates both romantic and sexual love as the great goods and hates death as the great evil. And, indeed, apart from death as a release from frightful pain
for those already doomed, how can death be called a mercy? Here were two young people in their thirties who loved each other and longed for her to live: how can her death be seen as a mercy?

  If, indeed, we had broken the Law—by attempting perpetual springtime, by being ‘us-sufficient’, by rejecting the children we might have had—then, no doubt, her death might be seen by some of the grimmer sort of religious folk as a richly deserved divine punishment. But had we not become Christians? Might we not through that faith have achieved the ‘difficult death and re-birth’in life and in the end become one of the ‘happy old couples’? Why did she, so humble and so holy, have to die? Was not her death, if decreed by God, severity without mercy?

  It is with the Law I must begin. The Law of God. But not, though, all the Law that we may have violated. If somebody expects a mea culpa for our rejection of children, she will not get it. I do not know whether it is licit to refuse children; it is for the theologians to decide, whether anyone listens or not. The question became irrelevant for us when Davy went in hospital.*

  Equally I cannot speak with any theological assurance upon Lewis’s dictum that ‘Perpetual springtime is not allowed’. The question was resolved by her death. What we had was perhaps merely a prolonged ‘northern’ springtime of inloveness. In terms of the seasonal analogy, there are many variations: lush girls becoming mothers—summer and fruiting—in their teens, virtually missing springtime altogether; worldly-wise, burnt-out youths leaping straight into autumn or winter. We, in attempting to keep the April inloveness, were perhaps blindly seeking eternity. And it was so gay and lovely that I cannot, being uncertain of the Law, feel very penitent.

  And yet I can say this about the Law: we as creatures—we as created by God—existed for Him. Not for ourselves. That, at least, is certain.

  Davy and I, in Lewis’s words, ‘admirably realised’ 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, in a word, 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 in violation of the Law; for what was best for our love might not be in accordance with our love and duty to our neighbour. And the Shining Barrier contained an ultimate defiance of God in our resolute intention to die together in the last long dive.

  But the Shining Barrier had been breached by God’s assault troops, including C. S. Lewis in the van; and we had bent the knee. The Appeal had been broken, to my dismay; and the last long dive had been forbidden, to our haunting sorrow in hospital. We had thought our love invulnerable; and so perhaps it was to the world, as long as the Barrier stood. But God had breached it, after which our love was vulnerable to any menace.

  In the Severe Mercy Letter, Lewis said: ‘You have been brought to see . . . that you were jealous of God.’ So I had said to him: it had been one of the sharp and shattering insights of my agonised grief. Jealous of my God! Or jealous of my lover’s Divine Lover. This was precisely what it had been when I moped about Li’l Dreary and wouldn’t read my Bible and played with Jane. Mea culpa in truth. Of course I hadn’t known I was jealous of God. It was an almost unthinkable thought, and it remained unthought— and even more unthinkable—while I was pleading for Davy’s life in the hospital months and pouring my strength into my total commitment to her. But the jealousy was there. And God knew.

  Neither the fact that our love had become vulnerable through the breach in the Shining Barrier nor the fact that I was, almost latently, jealous of God affected us in those last months in hospital when I was living for her and she was dying for God.

  Still, the Barrier was breached and the jealousy was there. What would have resulted from them if she had recovered? That is the question I must ask. How if at the last minute—after, perhaps, the gay young love of her coming out of the coma and our happy and hopeful Christmas with the ‘Song of the Two Lovers’—she had begun to mend? How if she had gone on mending until she was quite well? The doctors would have been astonished; they would have said, ‘Almost a miracle.’ We, being so hopeful, might have been less astonished. But very grateful to Christ the Healer.

  And we would have been joyful. I should have loved her the more dearly, because I had feared to lose her and because, like Persephone, she had come back from the gates of death. And she would have loved me the more dearly, because I had not failed her ever in those terrible months.

  But the immediate joy and gratitude could not have gone on for ever. She, after her naked knowing of God, would have been even more overwhelmed by His glory and even more surrendered to His will. She might, indeed, have believed herself returned to life for a holy purpose. And I would still be jealous of God and would again remember that the Appeal to Love could not be used.

  Or would my jealousy have been overcome, once and for all, by the miracle of her healing? But it wouldn’t have been the miracle. It would have been ‘almost a miracle’. It would have been, as perhaps any miracle must be, subject to other explanations—her will to live, the doctors’ skill. Perhaps the prognosis had been wrong to begin with. If my jealousy, unknown and unsuspected, had endured in the terrible crisis of her dying and her holy and beautiful submission to the will of God, it would not have disappeared because of something ‘almost miraculous’. It would, for a long time, have been dormant, with even less chance of being detected; but it would have been there still.

  The question, therefore, remains: what would have happened, not immediately but in the long run, if she had got well? How would it have been with us in three years? Ten? How remote the crisis and recovery would seem ten years later!

  If my judgment of myself—that the jealousy would survive— is correct, there are, I think, three possibilities to be examined:

  (I) I should, somehow, have become as wholly committed — mind and heart—as she. It had not happened while she was in hospital. My moment of selfless offering-up had been for her best good, which may come to the same thing as the Kingdom’s good, but is not the same in intention. My commitment was to her. If, unimaginably, my duty to God had seemed to require my leaving her there in hospital to cope alone, I would not have done it. Never. As Lewis rightly saw, I had moved from ‘us’to ‘us-and-God’ but was still light-years from ‘God-and-us’ in my pagan heart. I, therefore, conclude that—unless God had compelled me by grace—I should not have become as wholly committed as she.

  (2) I should have attempted, with some success, to damage or lessen her commitment to God, not admitting of course, even to myself, that I was doing it. She would have been full of love and gratitude to me. I should have spoken of balances, a balance between love for each other and love for God. Was there not excess in her service to God if our love was hurt thereby? I might, in fact, have succeeded in reducing her devotion to a ‘comfortable’ level. By thus arguing, I should really have been re-introducing the old Appeal in a slightly changed form. Davy was human—intensely human—and she loved me. It may be that the closeness at Mole End, beginning with that New Year’s breakfast, was a very human and slight weakening of her allegiance to God owing to a sort of mute appeal from me. I might have weakened her faith. Or driven it underground to burst forth later. But I think I should have failed. She was too far gone in God’s service, especially in her naked surrender to the Majesty there in hospital. It cannot be supposed that God would have looked kindly upon my effort or refrained from supporting her.

  (3) I should have come to hate God —or Davy. If I have not become as committed as she and cannot weaken her faith, what remains? My jealousy of God remains: it will revive. The Appeal is still broken. It would begin by my drifting away from God, only a little at first. But it is not how far; it is which direction. Away or towards. And in three years? Or ten? Time enough. And in the end, I should have co
me to hatred of God who had stolen my love though she still lived. The hatred of course would have been concealed as ceasing to believe. Nobody admits to hating God. But, then, with Davy quite lost to me—would I not come to hate her, too? Her holiness would, more and more, appear to me as hypocrisy. Or fanaticism. We have so many useful words. And, above all, she would be a traitor to our love. Then, soon or late, a new Jane, without the innocency. And all the Shining Barrier would be down.

  These possibilities—the last two—are almost too frightful to contemplate. But if I am to be honest, I must face them. If (I) doesn’t happen, if I attempt (2) and fail, then (3). I come to hate God. Or Davy. Or, most likely, both. In this terrible judgment, I take into account what I know of myself. I am not one to plod along day by day or quietly to accept contracted horizons. And, necessarily, I should have had to move towards God or away. If seeing Davy’s most lovely love of her Incarnate Lord in hospital had not brought me to seek Him first, would anything else have done it—except her death? Contemplating these dreadful possibilities—coming to hate my God! coming to hate my dear love! — I cry, even as I write: ‘No, no! My God! It could not have happened! Never!’ But the I that cries out is the man who knew her death in that winter dawn and all that followed.