The Mercy of Eternity

I am a big fan of rereading, and that's one of the reasons why it takes me a long time to get to books people recommend to me. They always go on the list, but the list is quite extensive, and every time I like a book and want to read it again, it goes back on the list. So I will get to the books everyone keeps telling me to read ... when I get to them. And in the meantime, I am rereading as often as I'm reading for the first time. I've read my favorite novel, Winter's Tale, four times, and I intend to read it once a year for the foreseeable future.

I say all this because I just reread Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy. I first read this book about two years ago, after owning it for quite a bit longer and occasionally paging through it to read some of the passages others had highlighted for me. This time around, I discovered this little gem which I wouldn't have noticed before: "Rereading books, we [Vanauken and C.S. Lewis] said with immense agreement, was the mark of the real lover of books." If two writers as talented as they set that as the criterion, then I believe they're right, and I'm thrilled that by their standard I am a real lover of books!

Mercy is a beautiful book, exquisitely moving and heartbreaking. It is a memoir of Vanauken's relationship with his wife, their conversion to Christianity at Oxford (in which Lewis played a great part), and her subsequent death. The love between the two of them is so perfect as to be almost unbelievable, and I'm not quite sure what Vanauken does to keep the reader believing it - because I do. All the way till the end. They are so devoted to one another, and while still "pagans" they set up what they call the "Shining Barrier," which is meant to protect their love from anything that might threaten it. They are great believers in beauty, and they travel all over in pursuit of "moments made eternal." They truly seem to find these moments on many occasions, and their life together is enviable.

This makes it all the more surprising when they eventually do become Christians. It's rare to find someone so committed both to transcendency and intellectual honesty as Vanauken and his wife, Davy, were. Typically people tend to cling to one at the expense of the other, but these two wholeheartedly embraced both. Through conversations with their friends at Oxford, and their own study of Scripture, they came to believe that Christianity was true. Davy accepted Christ first, and her husband dragged his feet a little bit. (One of the book's most charming features, in fact, is Vanauken's honesty about his own faults. He is very matter of fact about his reasons for putting off conversion, not the least of which is that he is jealous of God for suddenly having more of Davy's affection than Vanauken himself does.) Eventually they both accepted, and none too soon, for Davy was then diagnosed with a disease that is never named in the book, but which seems to have been liver failure.

The rest of the book chronicles the days leading up to Davy's death and Vanauken's struggle to cope after the fact. This is where the book is most compelling, because he is so real in his grief and yet manages to come up with stunning insights about eternity and the death of love. I think he wrote the book some twenty years after Davy's death, so that likely has something to do with his ability to draw conclusions from it, but he also prints letters between himself and Lewis during the time immediately following, and the depth and clarity of his thoughts in these letters is striking.

One of the things Vanauken realizes is that, despite the beauty and transcendency of the moments he and Davy experienced on earth, they were always seeking to live outside the pressures of time, and never managed to achieve that. He is able to acknowledge that, wonderful as their love was, it wasn't all that they dreamed it would be. He writes a beautiful passage describing what he thinks heaven will be like, time-free, and italicized all the words that refer to time just to show how impossible it is for us to imagine a life without it:

"It is a heavenly afternoon. Davy and I have just had a timeless luncheon (I am assuming that God will not waste so joyous an invention as taste). I then say to her that I shall wander down to sit beneath the beech treee and contemplate the valley for awhile, but I shall be back soon. I do so. I contemlate the valley for some hours or some years - the words are meaningless here where foreverness is in the air. At all events, I contemplate it just as long as I feel like doing. Then I get up and start back, but I meet someone, C.S. Lewis perhaps, and we sit on a bench and maybe have a pint of bitter and talk for an hour or several hours - until we have said all we have to say for now. And then I go gladly back to Davy. She, meanwhile, has played the celestial organ, an organ on which perhaps every note of a song can be heard at the same time; that is, the song not played in time with half of it gone and half yet to be heard. She has played the organ for a few minutes and is just turnning to greet me when I come in. Whether I was away for an hour or a hundred years, whether she has played for ten minutes or thirty, neither of us has waited or could wait for the other. For there simply is no time, no hours, no minutes, no sense of time passing. The ticking has stopped. It is eternity."

A place like this is beyond imagination. And yet - it is too good not to be true.

Davy's last words before her death are, "Oh, dearling, look." Stories like that cause me to believe that, at the last breath, believers are somehow suspended between this world and the next, that they can see what's ahead even as they are still confined to their earthly bodies for a moment or two more. It's thrilling to think that an experience that should cause a great deal of fear - from a biological standpoint, our bodies are meant to fight death with every last bit of energy - could actually be an incredibly peaceful and joyous time instead. Of course, it's impossible to know for sure, but this book makes me feel as though even my own death or that of someone very close to me could bring with it an outpouring of mercy. Somehow, God knows exactly what He is doing, and it seems as though He never gives up on redeeming our hurt here on earth. Then, He welcomes us home, where time is lost, and with it all the anxieties it brings us in this life.