Disciplined Disciple Ep. 1: A Severe Mercy With R. A. Moore
Welcome to Disciplined Disciple, the first podcast Petra Publications has released. I've been working on it for months. It's an interview series with Reformed Christians who have devoted their lives to discipline, seeking sanctification and to be conformed to the image of Christ. Some guests you may know, and I'm keeping a few of them secret for now!
To ease into interviews, this first episode is a conversation about a book. I sat down with R. A. Young, who writes papers for our website, to discuss A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy, and Triumph by Sheldon Vanauken. As the Washington Post said, no brief review can do justice to the human depth of this book, so we aren't trying to explain all of it, just to bring awareness to it.
The book
R. A. Young first encountered A Severe Mercy years ago, fell in love with it, and has recommended it to nearly everyone since, including me (she gave it to me for Christmas). I wish I had read it sooner. It's truly a life-changing read.
Sheldon Vanauken was born on August 4, 1914, and died on October 18, 1996. The big thing to know before you pick it up is that he was friends with C. S. Lewis, and much of the book centers on that friendship.
Whenever she recommends it, she feels oddly obliged to warn people, "It's a strange book," which isn't fair, because it's her favorite! The first chapter, about 23 pages, is a little confusing, almost like a movie script describing a scene. But once you get past it, everything makes sense.
Beauty and longing
It's a book that made me long for more and appreciate life. It displays the beauty of creation and of the English language, and you're on the edge of your seat for every sentence. It makes you want to go out and explore the world. One scene she loves: after months practically living in the library at Yale, he remembers that there are stars and leafless trees outside, and they go out to reclaim what's beyond their own minds.
It's also the kind of book you hate to finish. About a third of the way through you think, "If I finish this, I can never read it for the first time again." Usually I'm ready to get to the end of a book so I can start the next one. This one I wanted to read for the rest of my life. (She read it three times in one semester.) I found myself laughing, crying, even yelling at the book, as if that would change anything. As Vanauken asks, what is beauty but something responded to with emotion?
Hospitality and conversion
What R. A. loved most was their way of life. A little rhyme on their mantelpiece sums it up: friends, fire and books, wisdom, strength and courtesy. At Oxford their flat was always open, with people in and out at all hours, deep discussions of philosophy and theology. And it was those friendships, especially with Lewis, that led to their conversion.
At first they were "pagans," worshiping a high ideal of beauty. At Petra Publications we strive for beauty too, but beauty can't be the god you worship. Their path went from worshiping beauty, to attending Anglican services for the beauty of the liturgy (praying from the prayer book and taking communion before they were even Christians), to realizing, "Wait a minute, this is true."
His poem "The Gap" (p. 100) captures that moment. He describes conversion as a leap of faith in either direction: to believe that Christ is Lord, or to go back to paganism, disregarding what they now knew to be true. Standing still was impossible, because the ground behind them was crumbling.
Grief
Spoiler warning. His wife, Davy, dies, and Vanauken walks you through his grief. There's time between learning she's dying and her death, yet it feels so quick: one moment she's fine, and the next she's gone, which shows how it felt to him. Interestingly, he writes beautiful poems after her death, but none while she's dying.
Lewis's letters
The book includes eighteen letters from C. S. Lewis, with material you won't find in his books, including a letter on homosexuality (p. 147), where Lewis takes it as certain that acting on homosexual desire is sin. The book also captures so much of the history and culture of the time in a small space. And it's full of Vanauken's poems, two of which he sent to Lewis, who liked them.
A few things we marked
- On love (p. 29): someone who's never been in love might mistake infatuation for it, but when the real thing comes, there's no doubt, like a man in the jungle who might mistake a hyena's growl for a lion's until he hears a lion.
- Those who see love as only, or mainly, sex simply don't know what love is (p. 43). And "love must grow or die."
- On time: R. A.'s favorite. He and Davy longed for "timeless moments," moments without the pressure of time. It's endings that make time painful, which is especially poignant in a book whose whole story leads toward an ending.
- Still a pagan, he wrote that it isn't possible to be incidentally Christian. Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing (pp. 86–87). And: the best argument for Christianity is Christians, their joy and certainty; the strongest argument against it is also Christians, when they're somber, joyless, self-righteous and smug. It's amazing how much he understood about Christian living from the outside, and it's a reminder that our lives affect the unbelievers around us.
- A funny one about their hospitality (p. 120): the one morning they didn't answer a knock, with the fuses blown, the room full of smoke and coffee cups everywhere, he concludes, "probably it was Jesus."
- At home, morning and night, they had family prayers from the prayer book, kneeling together at a wooden cross (p. 130). They even kept a shared journal and worked through arguments in it.
- "There may be danger in the love of beauty" (p. 141). It can be a snare. We've felt that too: idolizing beauty over truth. One of the first things that drew him to Davy was that she knew that "beauty hurts."
- And of course Grey Goose, the boat they searched for years to find and lived on for about a year, supporting themselves by writing for boating magazines. It was a season of real growth, and I think it even prepared Davy for death.
The book is small, but it's so dense. We hope this inspires you to pick up a copy and feel the pain and beauty in it for yourself.
Soli Deo Gloria!
