A Severe Mercy

by Sheldon Vanauken

  But now it was the last day in Oxford, a sunny winter day. In the afternoon we should say goodbye to friends and in the night wander about Oxford. This morning we walked by way of New College and Queen’s Lane to Magdalen Bridge where we turned round to walk up the High Street. The High, gently curving, ancient colleges on either side, may well be the most beautiful street in the world, not least because of the soaring beauty of St. Mary’s spire. Just as we came up to it, the bell-ringers within, as if they had seen us coming, pulled their ropes, and the bells rang out. We stood there a few minutes submerged in the cheerful clamour of the change-ringing bells.

  On that last day I met C. S. Lewis at the Eastgate for lunch. We talked, I recall, about death or, rather, awakening after death. Whatever it would be like, we thought, our response to it would be ‘Why, of course! Of course it’s like this. How else could it have possibly been.’ We both chuckled at that. I said it would be a sort of coming home, and he agreed. Lewis said that he hoped Davy and I would be coming back to England soon, for we mustn’t get out of touch. ‘At all events,’ he said with a cheerful grin, ‘we’ll certainly meet again, here—or there.’ Then it was time to go, and we drained our mugs. When we emerged on to the busy High with the traffic streaming past, we shook hands, and he said: ‘I shan’t say goodbye. We’ll meet again.’ Then he plunged into the traffic. I stood there watching him. When he reached the pavement on the other side, he turned round as though he knew somehow that I would still be standing there in front of the Eastgate. Then he raised his voice in a great roar that easily overcame the noise of the cars and buses. Heads turned and at least one car swerved. ‘Besides,’ he bellowed with a great grin, ‘Christians NEVER say goodbye!’

  CHAPTER VI

  The Barrier Breached

  IN THE DEAD OF winter we came to Lynchburg in Virginia. As the new year began we were established, along with our blithe collie bitch, Flurry, in a drab bungalow, which after one look we named Li’l Dreary, on a street of drab houses. We had no car, but it was only half-a-mile to walk to Lynchburg College where I taught, and less than that to shops and to our parish church. We had come home. Or was it the other way round? Was it, indeed, that we had left home, England and Oxford, the city of our souls, for foreign parts? It felt more like that.

  We were, in fact, suffering from what was to be called ‘culture-shock’, the more devastating for being unexpected. There had been no corresponding shock in going to England. We had then been prepared for cultural differences, most of which we had taken to anyway. But now we were shocked and dismayed. The local newspaper after The Times was incredible. American lager beer was too cold and bubbly. Houses were too hot. The grass was not a proper green. The houses looked flimsy. The students at the college were not only not students but were semi-illiterate.

  Shortly after our return I spoke to the college women’s club, but all the polite welcoming smiles faded, except Davy’s which got broader, as I began to lash at American barbarisms: car horns blasting to summon friends, drinking attitudes as well as anti-drinking attitudes, and McCarthyism. I contrasted the anti-communist hysteria with an early experience in Oxford: walking along the Broad one night, we had come to a little knot of people listening, mostly with amusement, to a ‘Commie’ ranting on a soapbox, while a fascist-type heckled him, and a bobby stood watching. When it began to look as though the fascist was going to start a fight, the bobby shouldered his way through the crowd, a large hand descended on the angry fascist’s shoulder, and the bobby said soothingly: ‘Now, now, lad. Let ‘im ‘ave ‘is say.’

  We had sunk so deeply into England and the high civility of Oxford, unaware that we were doing so, that the cultural shock was quite genuine. And it was compounded by discomfort. Every interior was suffocatingly too hot—trains, buses, houses—too bloody hot! And our tweeds and flannels, all we had, were too heavy. I would fling the classroom window wide, and the students would shiver like leaves and complain. At home, at least, we pushed the thermostat back to the peg and kept a friendly coal fire on the hearth. We drank ‘proper tea’ morning, noon, and night and even, for awhile, tried to continue eating tea as a meal. We read Theodore Maynard’s poem ‘Exile’ with empathy and murmured with him: ‘And English air that was my breath/ Remained my mortal life till death . . .’ We wrote homesick letters to friends still in Oxford, and received homesick letters from friends who, like us, had gone down and weren’t happy about being in Kansas or Kenya Colony. Later, when summer came, we were startled by the creepers and lush undergrowth and frightful heat: Virginia, though we had never noticed it in past years, seemed tropical, even jungly. Davy and I were drawn closer in a back-to-back sort of way by our shared dislike, partly temporary, of so much around us and by our longing for England.

  Compounding the cultural shock was a religious one. At Oxford we had remembered Lynchburg as a city of churches, not such venerable and beautiful churches as the English ones perhaps but full, no doubt, of the Holy Spirit, full of constant lively searching into the meaning of the Christ-centred life. To be sure, we had not noticed this vivid Christian life, doubtless surging all about us—but, then, we had not been Christians. Now it appeared to us that there was very little interest in living a life centred in the Incarnate Lord. People went to church of course, but their conversation was about the convivial Couples Club or the radical racial ideas of the bishop. No doubt Christ was in the churches, somewhere, but He was not easy to find.

  Even more dismaying, in other circles, was the watering-down of the Faith to little more than a few of Christ’s moral precepts. ‘Yes,’ said these unbelievers who called themselves Christians, ‘yes, indeed, Jesus was the divine Son of God; so are we all, divine Sons of God. Of course there was an incarnation: each of us is the incarnation of God. If St. John suggests anything else, or St. Paul does, they are not to be depended on. Miracles—well, no, we happen to know God doesn’t work that way. No, of course our knowledge of how God works doesn’t come from the Bible, but we know all the same. There was no resurrection, except in some very, very spiritual sense, whatever those naive Apostles thought they saw. Of course we’re Christians—how could you doubt it?—though, naturally, Buddhism and Islam and all religions except the Catholic Church are equally Ways. Truth? What is truth? What has truth got to do with it?’

  All this, to us who had accepted the ancient Christian faith, was depressing. It was about as far from the strong red wine of the Faith as grape juice. The Faith was too strong: the wine must be turned to water in an anti-miracle. In other ages people who could not believe in Christianity (and, admittedly, it takes some believing) had called themselves Deists or Unitarians, but these people, for reasons we did not understand, were intent to shelter under the name of Christianity and at the same time to reduce the Faith to a hollow thing that required no believing beyond a mild theism.

  We resolved to stand firm for the Faith once-given, and we began to be glad for the unswerving faith of Rome. The place of last resort.

  Oxford had really represented to us two things so intertwined that we did not clearly distinguish them. One was the apostolic faith in its fullness, as represented by C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams. The other was high civilisation, sweet reason, and the life of the mind, which was no less represented by Lewis and Williams as well as many others. Religiously, we longed for the lively life in Christ, but we did not fully see that we were equally longing for the lively life of the mind—the delights of conversation at once serious and gay, which is, whatever its subject, Christ or poetry or history, the ultimately civilised thing. When we spoke of the lively life in Christ, we meant keenness, to be sure, but we also meant the subtle discourse on the meanings of Christ’s way that is, in fact, only possible among highly articulate and civilised Christians. There was perhaps more faith in the Virginian churches than we perceived, faith that was real but inarticulate and not thought about. But we, seeing what looked like apathy in one direction and, in the other direction, watered-down Christianity, began to wonder
whether in Protestantism the apostolic faith were not dying. We were comforted by thoughts of Julian, radiant with his deep faith, and other friends scattered about the world, holding the faith.

  We lived in the parish of Grace Church, a small and beautiful church built of a local green stone as soft in colour as Cotswold stone. Rector Jeffrey and his wife were English—Cornish, actually —which of course pleased us. And we soon came to know a neighbour, in the church, Miss Preston Ambler, who was not only a lady but a firm and articulate Christian. And another Anglican, Shirley Rosser, in physics at the college, was no less firm in the faith. The fact that he, like Peter and Lew at Oxford, was a physicist and a Christian led me to formulate a theory as to why so many physicists—I knew of still others—were committed Christians. The theory went like this: The non-scientists say, well, we don’t know the answers, but the scientists do; and the scientists who are not physicists say, well, we don’t know the answers either, but the physicists do; and the physicists know that they do not, in fact, have the ultimate answers and, accordingly, turn to Christ who does.

  We also became part of a rather more worldly group of friends in the college, who, if not ardently interested in Christianity, were lively and intelligent people, interested in books and the artistic life of the community. One of them in particular, Belle Hill, a woman who had lost her husband a year or two earlier and was now cheerfully and bravely making a new life in college teaching, became a close and trusted friend.

  Gradually we settled-in to the patterns of our new life, still not liking it much. I taught a fairly heavy schedule at the college, and Davy, in March, got a job in the book-keeping department of our bank. She also took on a high-school-level class on Sunday at Grace Church, working hard on her preparation for it. We faithfully went to church and sometimes went with the Rector to another church where he had Evensong. At home, morning and night, we had family prayers from the Prayerbook, the two of us kneeling at a wooden cross, reading and praying the well-loved prayers and holding hands.

  One day in early March in a class in world civilisations I pointed out that no textbook writer was ever purely objective and that his particular bias could often be discovered through his choice of adjectives. Among my examples was that of an ‘enlightened emperor’ of China who, doubting his own religion, invited missionaries of other religions into China to present their beliefs. The class was puzzled. The emperor, I said, might be called ‘open-minded’ but to call him ‘enlightened’—having the light of spiritual truth—when he did not, in fact, believe anything, must mean that the author, if not simply careless, must hold that to believe in nothing was to have the light of truth. This at once threw the class into furious argument for the rest of the hour. One girl, a very good student, continued to argue that he was, somehow, enlightened after class, and finally asked if she might come round to my house that night and talk further.

  She came and Davy and I discussed the thing with her. Inevitably we moved into talk of the sort of enlightenment—the ancient and apostolic Christian faith—that had fallen upon us at Oxford. The girl was a more-or-less nominal Christian of the ‘liberal’or watered-down variety; and she was fascinated by the suggestion of a Christianity that was at once civilised and magnificent and maybe—just maybe—supremely true. Could she come again, please? And bring a friend? Of course.

  Thus, completely unplanned, our Christian group was born. The girl and her friend became a dozen students. Week after week they came and were welcomed. Some dropped away and others took their places. We had not started it. It had just happened, and it went on of its own accord. We simply accepted, though, as I wrote in the Journal, we were ‘awed and joyful’—awed at the work of the Spirit, joyful that God was using us. It was all, in the C. S. Lewis words we loved, the Great Dance. Many of these students became real Christians, a great many indeed over the years. We read things from C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams and Dorothy Sayers. We discussed the Apostolic faith and answered the hundreds of questions. At the same time we scoffed at solemnity and the mushy sentimentality of some Protestant circles, as well as the incredible view that ‘alcohol’was sin. The Christianity we represented was sunny and joyous, with all the room in the world for humour and gaiety, and yet at the same time rigorous and glorious. So we laughed and joked and poured out the wine but challenged their minds and souls. And the students smiled and abandoned the solemn voices they had been taught to use in speaking about such things, gaily drinking the wine and discovering a Christ who was a blazing reality.

  Davy and I, with our closeness of understanding and love, made an almost perfect team. No doubt it was I who insisted upon the intellectual rigour 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. Both of us felt that this group in this moment of time was our vocation. When we and the students knelt at the end of an evening in silent prayer —the only spoken words being my ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost’ at the beginning and the whispered amens as each one finished his prayer—the room, lighted then only by the glowing fire, seemed charged with holiness.

  Even Flurry seemed to pray. She, too, daughter of Gypsy, and former seadog on Grey Goose, was a part of our team. She made the students laugh, and she amazed them with her obedience and intelligence. She even taught them something, for she refused to obey the command ‘Lay down!’—only ‘Lie!’

  One night, with Flurry lying in the centre of the room, I told the group a true story of Flurry and Gypsy to illuminate the difficult doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin, which next day I wrote down. As I told the tale, Flurry pricked up her ears at every mention of her name. Here is the story I told that night:

  THE FALL

  Gypsy, a furry, wheat-coloured collie, found herself in possession of several hundred acres of hills and woods, full of good things like rabbit trails and streams and intriguing burrows, and she delighted in it all. She was given a comfortable bed and good meals. Perhaps she rather took it all for granted. Of obligations there were few, and they not heavy. She was, to be sure, supposed to worship her Master and be right joyous to be with him. She knew she must not chase the chickens. While she must obey certain commands—to follow, to come, to lie down—there were no unreasonable ones, and no tricks. After all, to obey and to worship were natural to her dog nature.

  There came a day when, as Gypsy was prowling on the far hill past the springhouse and pasture, two things happened at once: the Master called her and a rabbit fled across the hill. Gypsy wheeled and raced towards the Master, as she had always done. Then she stopped. It entered her mind that she didn’t have to obey. Perhaps the Master didn’t understand about that rabbit. Anyhow, these were her hills. The rabbit was hers, too. Very likely it was all lies—that story of everything, including herself, belonging to the Master. How did she know that the food in her dish came from him?—Probably there was some natural explanation. She was a free dog and that was the end of it. These thoughts went through her mind swiftly while she stood irresolute. Again came the Master’s command; the rabbit crossed the hilltop. Gypsy whirled and raced after the rabbit. She had made a choice. She was free to choose.

  Hours later she came home. She saw the Master waiting for her, but she did not rush gladly to him, leaping and frisking, as she had always done. Something new came into her demeanour: guilt. She crept up to him like a snake on her belly. Undoubtedly she was penitent at the moment. But she had a new knowledge— the knowledge of the possibility of sin—and it was a thrill in her heart and a salt taste in her mouth. Nevertheless she was very obedient next day and the day after. Eventually, though, there was another rabbit—and she did not even hesitate. Soon it was the mere possibility of a rabbit. And then she dropped the rabbit thing altogether and went her way.

  The Master loved her still but trusted her no longer. In time she lived in a pen and went for walks with a rope round her neck. All her real freedom was gone. But the Master gave her
, from time to time, new chances to obey of her own free will. Had she chosen to obey she would once again have had perfect freedom to wander her hundreds of acres. But she did not return to the obedience. She always chose, if she were out of reach, to run away. The Master, knowing hunger would bring her back to her pen, let her run. He could have stopped her: the rifle that would have ended her rebellion with the crack of doom stood in the corner. But while she lived she might still return to the obedience, might still choose the obedience that was freedom.

  One day, during a journey by car, Gypsy and her good little daughter, Flurry, were taken into the edge of a wood. Always Gypsy had limited her disobedience to her own hills. But now, coming back to the car, she suddenly felt the old thrill. She turned and fled. The Master called with a note of sharp urgency. Flurry, with the courtesy that always ruled her, came at once. Gypsy, her ears dulled to the meanings of the Master, continued her rush into the dark forest. After hours of search and calling, the Master sadly abandoned the lost one and, with Flurry beside him, went home.

  There Flurry continued to live in freedom under the obedience. She was right joyous to be with the Master and gay when she did a thing that pleased him. She knew that in his service was perfect freedom. She obeyed gladly of her own free choice.

  But lost Gypsy, if she still lived, wandered the woods and roads an outcast. She became dirty and matted with burs. No doubt stones were thrown at her and she was often hungry, but she had lost the way home. If she had puppies, they, too, and their children had lost the way home, for Gypsy’s perilous and bent will to disobey must infect them; and the comforting hand of the Master would be unknown to them, except as a tale. This is the way Gypsy chose on the Day of the Rabbit and continued to choose until, suddenly, there was no more choosing.