The grey goose is a perfect emblem of both a free, wild spirit and a lifelong love. It mates for life and, if its mate is killed, it flies on alone.
For this reason, Sheldon and Jean “Davy” Vanauken took the grey goose as a symbol of their relationship. Through wartime, travels overseas, and numerous adventures, they remained steadfast in their love and vowed to never love another. As Sheldon Vanauken wrote in “A Severe Mercy” (1977), the two met in the 1930s at a department store where Davy worked hand-tinting photographs. Vanauken was a junior at Wabash College, and Davy was a freshman at Butler University. They married after 10 months.
Vanauken’s book, which chronicles their life together, is a reflection on the grief Vanauken experienced after Davy’s death in 1955 from an undiagnosable illness. Like the grey goose, Vanauken never remarried, and he chose to use the years following Davy’s death to come to know her better through deepening his spiritual life.
The book focuses both on their relationship and on their conversion to Christianity, which was influenced by their friendship and correspondence with renowned author C.S. Lewis.
Vanauken describes his book not as a love story or a conversion story, but as “the spiritual autobiography of a love rather than of the lovers.” The distinction points to a unique aspect of his relationship with his wife Davy: They weren’t only in love with each other, but in love with “inloveness.” They understood love to be a conscious choice, and prized it over any other earthly joy. Thus, whenever the feeling of love was in danger of fading, or when they felt more distant from each other, they were driven to recapture that union with the other from a love of love itself.
In the early years of their marriage, Vanauken and Davy were self-described pagans on a quest for beauty and love. It was during their time at Oxford that they decided to take a closer look at the religions they had formerly scorned. There, they found a circle of friends of all religious persuasions. In an honest pursuit of the truth, the Catholics, evangelicals, and atheists Vanauken described all spoke on equal terms in an exchange of ideas.
In this intellectual atmosphere, Sheldon and Davy were inspired to look closer into Christianity. Vanauken wrote to C.S. Lewis for advice. He didn’t expect that this letter would become the start of a deep and abiding friendship that would later help him through his grief.
Love Through Life and Loss
Sheldon and Davy’s love seemed remarkable to those around them. One aspect that set it apart is the amount of silent communication between them. They resolved to know the other as fully as possible and to put their united good above personal will. This intimate knowledge of each other enabled them to anticipate each other’s needs wordlessly, to communicate with a look or subtle gesture or imbue a song or verse with years of accrued meaning.This knowing of the other person continued even after Davy’s death as Vanauken resolved not to avoid grief or let his suffering go to waste. Rather, he chose to use it to understand why Davy had lived and died, and to use his sorrow to propel him into a quest for understanding. To this end, he embarked on what he called the “Illumination of the Past,” a study of their years together, and of the meaning of their life in relation to God.
During this process, Vanauken delved into memory’s halls to encounter all the Davys he had known—Davy at each point in her life. Only at the end of her temporal life could each of these selves—from every moment of her life—be present to him all at once. Vanauken wrote that this complete vision of a person is possible only after death, and he was now able to see “the wholeness of Davy.”
‘A Mind Awake’
As time goes on, the world’s need for this book increases. It provides us with a beautiful example of what man looks like when he is fully alive and awake to the world. Vanauken shows this in his and Davy’s receptivity to their surroundings. When we’re fully awake, we allow beauty to inspire us and move us to new perceptions and ways of loving.In our age, however, man’s ability to see is in decline, largely because there is too much that demands to be seen. The barrage on our senses by the entertainment industry, social media, and the internet has dulled our senses and prevented us from giving patient and profound attention to any one thing. We must learn to see again, not only through abstinence from this visual noise, but also by means of a more effective remedy: artistic creation.
In their quest for beauty, the Vanaukens continually demonstrated this remedy in poetry, painting, and music, and through their eager observation of the people and places around them. Davy’s last words to her husband may well serve as a parting word of counsel to each of us: “Oh dearling, look.”
For Vanauken and Davy, in being fully awake to the world, every example of beauty, human interaction, and emotion is charged with meaning and importance, and is worthy of keen attention. Just as C.S. Lewis has been described as “a mind awake,” Vanauken and Davy merit such a description as well.
‘Principle of Courtesy’
Vanauken wrote that in the early days of his relationship with Davy, they saw the world as a place where love didn’t endure, and the standards of decency and courtesy were cast aside. The greatest threat to love, Vanauken observed, is a “creeping separateness” brought on by the intrusion of the self: “‘We turning into ‘I.’” As a remedy to selfishness and self-regard, Davy and Vanauken resolved to share as many experiences as possible and to share what they loved. What one of them loved would be dear to the other as well, and they were guided by the “principle of courtesy”: what one of them asked, the other would do.
As Davy made further progress in her spiritual journey, Vanauken was in danger of becoming jealous of God. The timing of her death, the subordination of Vanauken’s will to God’s will, and the closeness that came in Davy’s last days, preserved Vanauken from a separateness that may have come later in life due to this jealousy. Instead, Vanauken came to realize the truth in what Lewis wrote: In the timing and circumstances of Davy’s death, he had been treated with “a severe mercy.”
Vanauken notes that the idea of Davy’s death being a severe mercy will likely be distasteful to a society in which romantic and sexual love are celebrated as the highest goods while death is considered the greatest evil. Yet, it was Davy’s death that not only kept Vanauken close to God, but drew him closer to him than ever before, such that neither God nor his beloved was ever distanced.
