Davy Vanauken - journey to faith

Introduction

This is an account of how Jean (Davy) Vanauken became a Christian. It does not involve any great moment of revelation but was a process unfolding over a few years. To understand her journey we need to understand a much-ridiculed word. Sin.

Suppose you were invited to a reception in which you are to be introduced to the King. You are dressed to perfection but before you enter the building you park the car, trip and fall into a muddy pool of water. You are a mess but there’s no time to go home and change. Fortunately, in the car you have a long overcoat, so you put it on and hope to get away with it. But when you enter the reception you have to remove the coat and at that moment the King walks by and sees you.

This illustrates what “sin” means. If all our imperfections, failures in compassion, wrongdoings, harsh words and unkind deeds were no longer hidden but exposed to the light then we would all look very grubby indeed. We bathe and shower to keep our bodies clean but how do we clean our souls? For most of us this is not a problem, we tolerate our imperfection. After all, no one is perfect. We reckon ourselves to be as good as most people and a lot better than some. But, in the words uaed in Handel's Messiah:

“Who can abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth?”

In the presence of holiness our unholy self has no place to hide. This is the point Davy Vanauken came to.

A Severe Mercy

Her story is told in A Severe Mercy (1977) by her husband Sheldon Vanauken. Extracts below in italics are from the book.

When Davy and Sheldon began their relationship that in time led to their marriage, they erected what they called “The Shining Barrier” within which they would share everything and at the same time keep the rest of the world at bay.

Sheldon Vanuken does not include in the book a very important part of Davy’s youth. Her father was Methodist minister and two years after his death, when she was 14, she gave birth to a daughter who she named Marion. The baby was given up for adoption, but Davy never forgot her. It is very likely that this experience played a part in the journey to faith she was to take.

All The World Fell Away

A Severe Mercy recounts an incident in a park where Davy was reading a book and a man exposed himself to her. She outran him and was not molested but of course was deeply upset. Sheldon writes:

I came home to find her face streaked with tears and she clung to me desperately and wept. It was some time before she could try to tell me what had happened. The two lines she wrote next day of a poem that was never completed are the beginning point:

All the world fell away last night
Leaving you, only you and fright.

Her sins, she said, had come out and paraded before her, ghastly in appearance and mocking in demeanour. What sins? What sins could this eager, loving creature have committed? Not sins as the world counts sins. No one person had she murdered. Not one gold ingot stolen. No unfaithfulness, no secret drinking, no dishonesty, no sloth, no kicking dogs. But sometimes she'd been grouchy or snappish. She had said cruel things to people. …... Now her words haunted her. Sin. She knew there was such a thing as plain sin. Not something any psychiatrist could absolve or explain away. Even worse, the sins of omission. She quoted some poet whose name she did not know. “O, unattempted loveliness. O costly valour never won”.

She was shaken to the depths. Shaken as I had never known her to be. I knew it had been a huge and dreadful experience. But how could I understand? I who had never known the like. …... …I know now, of course. That she had experienced the classical conviction of sin. Christianity knows all about it. But I didn't know all about Christianity.

The Sin Picture

Davy enjoyed drawing and painting. She painted a tree in a meadow near their house.

Then she did another of the tree recognisably the same tree, black and bare of leaves. But the meadow had given way to a dream landscape of rocks and earthen cliffs. In the cliffs were caves out of which grotesque and even fiendish faces leered. In the foreground was the tree and near it a wraithlike female figure -the soul beyond doubt - groped as though unable to see clearly towards the tree: the tree whose massive branch cast on the bare earth the shadow of the crucified Messiah. The Shadow of a Tree. The picture grew, of course, out of that experience of all the world falling away. And we called it lightly, her sin picture.

Oxford – Christians - CS Lewis

Not long after the end of WWII they moved from the USA to Oxford so Sheldon could study for a BLitt degree. They were still atheists but in Oxford came across many Christians who became friends. Gradually as they met and talked with them, they were impressed not just by their explanations of their faith but by the lives they lived. Davy and Sheldon began to take the possibility of faith more seriously. They were also strongly influenced by the writings of CS Lewis who was an Oxford Don. Sheldon started a correspondence with Lewis. They realised they were coming closer and closer to the point where a decision would have to be made.

Decision

But Davy’s emotional position was not the same. There was need. What we talked about mostly were the intellectual things that can be put into words so much more easily than feelings, especially feelings that are not perhaps altogether known to oneself. But there were for Davy needs growing out of sin and pain. She had not forgotten, of course, that night when all the world fell away. The experience she painted in her sin picture with this prophetic shadow of the crucified Lord. Even then, intuitively she had known what it all pointed to. That experience and the very different one of the evil man in the park. The frightful evil of the monstrous ego had, I think, undermined her confidence in herself and even perhaps undermined her confidence in the beautiful us-sufficiency of our love. But she didn't know it, nor did I. But the Shining Barrier was not quite invulnerable.

Christianity was offering consolation and assurance and even absolution. It fell into her soul as the water of life. One evening, after a lively discussion of the faith. I asked Davy if she felt she was near to believing that Christ was God. She said. “Well, I think he might be”. 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 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 fear, hate, love, hope and well. DID it. I committed my ways to God in Christ.

A few weeks later Sheldon took his own leap of faith.

Afterward

They returned to the USA but a few years later, on January 17, 1955 Davy died of a viral infection . She was 40 years old, and they had been married for seventeen years.

Sheldon Vanauken died of lung cancer on October 28, 1996. Wikipedia entry here

Sheldon Vanauken – another link

A Severe Mercy comments etc here