Van and Davy. The End. The Beginning

Van shows us a picture into the heart and mind of his wife, Davy.
This excerpt is also from his book, A Severe Mercy.

Davy's mother died during this time, after a long struggle with cancer. And along with this grief, she began to have a powerful sense of her own sin.

Thus, though her mind, too, asked the intellectual questions--questions to which answers were flooding in through our books--Christianity was offering consolation, assurance, and, even, absolution. It fell into her soul as the water of life.

One evening, after a lively discussion of the faith with Lew and Mary Ann, I asked Davy if she felt that she was near to believing that Christ was God. She said, "Well, I think he might be." And I said that "thinking he might be was not the same as believing."

She put this exchange in her Journal; and then she wrote, "Underneath I kept wanting to say, "I do, I do believe in Jesus--Jesus the Son of God and divine." She added, "I owe this to C. S. Lewis who has impressed me deeply with the necessity of Jesus to any thinking about God."

She was on the brink--indeed--and then she leaped. Only two days later she wrote:

Today, crossing from one side of the room to the other, I lumped together all I am, all I fear, hate, love, hope; and, well, DID it. I committed my ways to God in Christ.

She was alone when she took that walk across the room, and she told me when I came in an hour later. I was neither shocked nor astonished. It was as though I had known she would do it. I felt a sort of gladness for her, and told her. I also felt a bit forlorn.

A few nights later, after a rather gentle talk about Christianity, she went to bed, leaving me lying upon the sofa in front of the fire reading Lewis's Miracles.A half hour passed. I let the book fall and switched off the lamp. Gazing into the glowing coals, I wondered with a strange mixture of hope and fear whether Christ might be in very truth God. Suddenly I became aware that Davy was praying beside me--she had stolen into the room in her nightgown and knelt down by the sofa.

I looked at the quiet figure for a few moments. I had never seen her pray. Then she spoke, "When I was in bed," she said very softly, "it seemed to me that God was telling me to come to you. I have prayed to God to fulfill your soul."

She paused a moment and then she whispered: "Oh, my dearest--please believe!"

Moved almost to tears, I whispered back --"a broken whisper," she wrote in her Journal--I whispered, "Oh, I do believe." I was shaken by the affirmation that swept over me. She wrote, "We held one another tightly."

"Hold to this moment," she murmured. "Hold to it when doubts come. This is the true -- I know it is."

And so Van and Davy Vanuaken entered into the Light and ended their search for Truth. But they both realized immediately that their real journey had only just begun.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets

Read their whole story in A Severe Mercy, by Vanauken.