Sheldon Vanauken Quotes

It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words, and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we don't know at all that it is the same with others.

If it's half as good as the half we've known, here's Hail! to the rest of the road.

A man in the jungle at night, as someone said, may suppose a hyena's growl to be a lion's; but when he hears the lion's growl, he knows damn well it's a lion.

That death, so full of suffering for us both, suffering that still overwhelmed my life, was yet a severe mercy. A mercy as severe as death, a severity as merciful as love.

To believe with certainty, somebody said, one has to begin by doubting.

It is not possible to be 'incidentally a Christian.' The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non-Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming first but many balances.

Goodness & love are as real as their terrible opposites, and, in truth, far more real, though I say this mindful of the enormous evils... But love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed of wisdom.

Between the probable and proved there yawns A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd, Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse, Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns Our only hope: to leap into the Word That opens up the shuttered universe.

When we first fell in love in the dead of winter, we said, "If we aren't more in love in lilactime, we shall be finished." But we were more in love: for love must grow or die.

Both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, all of one's life will eventually be known to have been one or the other.

Signs must be read with caution. The history of Christendom is replete with instances of people who misread the signs.

…though I wouldn’t have admitted it, even to myself, I didn’t want God aboard. He was too heavy. I wanted Him approving from a considerable distance. I didn’t want to be thinking of Him. I wanted to be free—like Gypsy. I wanted life itself, the color and fire and loveliness of life. And Christ now and then, like a loved poem I could read when I wanted to. I didn’t want us to be swallowed up in God. I wanted holidays from the school of Christ.

The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians--when they are sombre and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths. But, though it is just to condemn some Christians for these things, perhaps, after all, it is not just, though very easy, to condemn Christianity itself for them. Indeed, there are impressive indications that the positive quality of joy is in Christianity--and possibly nowhere else. If that were certain, it would be proof of a very high order

It is not possible to be ‘incidentally a Christian’. The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming firsts but many balances.

Whatever one of us asked the other to do - it was assumed the asker would weigh all the consequences - the other would do. Thus one might wake the other in the night and ask for a cup of water; and the other would peacefully (and sleepily) fetch it. We, in fact, defined courtesy as 'a cup of water in the night'. And we considered it a very great courtesy to ask for the cup as well as to fetch it.

I had always served beauty. Davy and I together had loved beauty. Now, maybe, I was worshipping beauty in the Christian God while Davy was worshipping God. There may be danger in the love of beauty, though it seems treason to say it. Perhaps it can be a snare.

There was something tender and gentle about our love, something a little shy, that was like early spring.

we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we do not know at all that it is the same with others.

The personality of Jesus emerged from the Gospels with astonishing consistency. Whenever they were written, they were written in the shadow of a personality so tremendous that Christians who may never have seen him knew him utterly: that strange mixture of unbearable sternness and heartbreaking tenderness.

How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours?

those who condemn what they do not understand are, surely, little men.

What we did see was that jealousy is fear: it can corrode even if quite baseless.

But in the books again, great joy through love seemed always to go hand in hand with frightful pain. Still, he thought, looking out across the meadow, still, the joy would be worth the pain—if, indeed, they went together. If

The adult must seem to mislead the child, and the Master the dog. They misread the signs. Their ignorance and their wishes twist everything. You are so sure you know what the promise promised! And the danger is that when what He means by ‘wind’ appears you will ignore it because it is not what you thought it would be—as He Himself was rejected because He was not like the Messiah the Jews had in mind.

If there were a choice—and he suspected there was—a choice between, on the one hand, the heights and the depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths.

But I think you are already in the meshes of the net! The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt if you’ll get away!

C.S. Lewis in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. 'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed by it--how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.

He had been wont to despise emotions: girls were weak, emotions–tears– were weakness. But this morning he was thinking that being a great brain in a tower, nothing but brain, wouldn’t be much fun. No excitement, no dog to love, no joy in the blue sky– no feelings at all. But feelings– feelings are emotions! He was suddenly overwhelmed by the revelation that what makes life worth living is, precisely, the emotions. But then– this was awful!– maybe girls with their tears and laughter were getting more out of life. Shattering! He checked himself, showing one’s emotions was not the thing: having them was. Still, he was dizzy with the revelation. What is beauty but something is responded to with emotion? Courage, at least, is partly emotional. All the splendour of life. But if the best of life is, in fact, emotional, then one wanted the highest, the purest emotions: and that meant joy. Joy was the highest. How did one find joy? In books it was found in love– a great love… So if he wanted the heights of joy, he must have it, if he could find it, in great love. But in the books again, great joy through love always seemed go hand in hand with frightful pain. Still, he thought, looking out across the meadow, still, the joy would be worth the pain– if indeed, they went together. If there were a choice– and he suspected there was– a choice between, on the one hand, the hights and the depths and, on the other hand, some sort of safe, cautious middle way, he, for one, here and now chose the heights and the depths. Since then the years have gone by and he– had he not had what he chose that day in the meadow? He had had the love. And the joy– what joy it had been! And the sorrow. He had had– was having– all the sorrow there was. And yet, the joy was worth the pain. Even now he re-affirmed that long-past choice.

You have been treated with a severe mercy. You have been brought to see (how true & how v. frequent this is!) that you were jealous of God. So from US you have been led back to US AND GOD; it remains to go on to GOD AND US.

Note that life after death, which still seems to you the essential thing, was itself a late revelation. God trained the Hebrews for centuries to believe in Him without promising them an after-life, and blessings on Him, he trained me in the same way for about a year. It is like the disguised prince in the fairy tale who wins the heroine's love before she knows he is anything more than a woodcutter. What would be a bribe if it came first had better come last.

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 civilized thing.

Thus we were perfectly aware that the central claim of Christianity was and always had been that the same God who made the world had lived in the world and been killed by the world; and that the (claimed) proof of this was His Resurrection from the dead.

Corruption is never compulsory.

Heaven itself [...] would be— must be— a coming home.

If I must bear it, though, I would bear it— find the whole meaning of it, taste the whole of it.

It’s hard, since Noah, not to see a rainbow as a sign of hope.

The moment was utterly timeless: we didn’t know that time existed; and it contained, therefore, some foretaste, it may be, of eternity.

In my old easy-going theism, I had regarded Christianity as a sort of fairy tale; and I had neither accepted nor rejected Jesus, since I had never, in fact, encountered him. Now I had. The position was not, as I had been comfortably thinking all these months, merely a question of whether I was to accept the Messiah or not. It was a question of whether I was to accept Him--or reject>. My God! There was a gap behind me too. Perhaps the leap to acceptance was a horrifying gamble-but what of the leap to rejection? There might be no certainty that Christ was God-but, by God, there was no certainty that He was not.

My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?

The "Appeal to Love" was an essential part of the very structure of the Shining Barrier. What it meant was simply this question: what will be best for our love? Should one of us change a pattern of behavior that bothered the other, or should the other learn to accept? Well, which would be better for our love? Which way would be better, in any choice or decision, in the light of our single goal: to be in love as long as life might last?

At my father's club, sitting before the fire, we had spoken of 'moments made eternity', meaning what are called timeless moments, moments precisely without the pressure of time--moments that might be called, indeed, timeful moments. And we had clearly understood that the pressure of time was our nearly inescapable awareness of an approaching terminus-the bell about to ring, the holiday about to end, the going down from Oxford foreseen...Life itself is pressured by death, the final terminus. Socrates refused to delay his own death for a few more hours: perhaps he knew that those few hours under the pressure of time would be worth little....Awareness of duration, of terminus, spoils Now.

Death is no respecter of love.

Those sharings just happened to be; but what we must do now is share everything. Everything! If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it—and the other one must find it.

And I am sure it is never sadness—a proper, straight natural response to loss—that does people harm, but all the other things, all the resentment, dismay, doubt and self-pity with wh. it is usually complicated. I feel (indeed I tried to say something about it in that lost letter) v. strongly what you say about the ‘curious consolation’ that ‘nothing now can mar’ your joint lives. I sometimes wonder whether bereavement is not, at bottom, the easiest and least perilous of the ways in wh. men lose the happiness of youthful love. For I believe it must always be lost in some way: every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have come through a difficult death and re-birth. But far more have missed the re-birth. Your MS, as you well say, has now gone safe to the Printer.

One of my favorite Christian authors, Sheldon Vanauken, a friend of C. S. Lewis, said years ago that when you get a new car you should also get a hammer. Take that hammer and go out and put the first dent in the brand new car yourself. Then you’re not afraid to use it anymore. That way you don’t have to park at the end of the parking lot to protect from door dings, because you’ve already put the first dent in it yourself. Vanauken’s point was this: things are not to be loved, they’re to be used. The corollary to that is this: people are not to be used, they’re to be loved.

The wholeness of Davy. That wholeness can only be gained by death, I believe. In writing to Lewis of my understanding of this astonishing phenomenon, I used the analogy of reading a novel like David Copperfield that covers many years. In that book one follows the boy David running away to his Aunt Betsey Trotwood, the youth David loving Dora, the mature David with Agnes. While one reads, chapter by chapter, even as one lives one’s own life week by week, David is what he is at that particular point in the book’s time. But then, when one shuts the book at the end, all the Davids—small boy, youth, man—are equally close: and, indeed, are one. The whole David. One is then, with reference to the book’s created time, in an eternity, seeing it all in one’s own Now, even as God in His eternal Now sees the whole of history that was and is and will be.

First, to map out the boundaries within which all discussion must go on, I take it for certain that the physical satisfaction of homo-sexual desires is sin. This leaves the homo, no worse off than any normal person who is, for whatever reason, prevented from marrying. Second, our speculations on the cause of the abnormality are not what matters and we must be content with ignorance. The disciples were not told why (in terms of efficient cause) the man was born blind (Jn. IX 1-3): only the final cause, that the works of God shd. be made manifest in him. This suggests that in homosexuality, as in every other tribulation, those works can be made manifest: i.e. that every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, wh. will ‘turn the necessity to glorious gain.’ Of course, the first step must be to accept any privations wh., if so disabled, we can’t lawfully get. The homo, has to accept sexual abstinence just as the poor man has to forego otherwise lawful pleasures because he wd. be unjust to his wife and children if he took them. That is merely a negative condition. What shd. the positive life of the homo, be? I wish I had a letter wh. a pious male homo., now dead, once wrote to me—but of course it was the sort of letter one takes care to destroy. He believed that his necessity could be turned to spiritual gain: that there were certain kinds of sympathy and understanding, a certain social role which mere men and mere women could not give. But it is all horribly vague— too long ago. Perhaps any homo, who humbly accepts his cross and puts himself under Divine guidance will, however, be shown the way. I am sure that any attempt to evade it (e.g. by mock-or quasi-marriage with a member of one’s own sex even if this does not lead to any carnal act) is the wrong way. Jealousy (this another homo, admitted to me) is far more rampant and deadly among them than among us. And I don’t think little concessions like wearing the clothes of the other sex in private is the right line either. It is the duties, the burdens, the characteristic virtues of the other sex, I expect, which the patient must try to cultivate. I have mentioned humility because male homos. (I don’t know about women) are rather apt, the moment they find you don’t treat them with horror and contempt, to rush to the opposite pole and start implying that they are somehow superior to the normal type. I wish I could be more definite. All I have really said is that, like all other tribulations, it must be offered to God and His guidance how to use it must be sought.

Prayer, even prayer for what God desires, releases power by the operation of a deep spiritual law; and to offer up what one loves may release still more. —SHELDON VANAUKEN (1914–1996), American author and editor

Her death...brought me as nothing else could do to know and end my jealousy of God. It saved her faith from assault.

The Shining Barrier—the shield of our love. A walled garden. A fence around a young tree to keep the deer from nibbling it. A fortified place with the walls and watchtowers gleaming white like the cliffs of England. The Shining Barrier—we called it so from the first—protecting the green tree of our love. And yet in another sense it was our love itself, made strong within, that was the Shining Barrier.

But why does love need to be guarded? Against what enemies? We looked about us and saw the world as having become a hostile and threatening place where standards of decency and courtesy were perishing and war loomed gigantic. A world where love did not endure.

It must be that, whatever its promise, love does not by itself endure. But why? What was the failure behind the failure of love ?

The killer of love is creeping separateness. Inloveness is a gift of the gods, but then it is up to the lovers to cherish or to ruin. Taking love for granted, especially after marriage. Ceasing to do things together. Finding separate interests. ‘We’ turning into T . Self. Self-regard: what I want to do. Actual selfishness only a hop away. This was the way of creeping separateness.

The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you

It is a sweet duty, praying for our friends.

For I believe it must always be lost in some way: every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have come through a difficult death and re-birth. But far more have missed the re-birth.

There can be miraculous reprieve as well as miraculous pardon, and Lazarus was raised from the dead to die again.

One must have the capacity for happiness in order to be fully aware of its absence.

Love can die in many ways, most of them far more terrible than physical death.

One who has never been in love might mistake either infatuation or a mixture of affection and sexual attraction for being in love. But when the ‘real thing’ happens, there is no doubt.

Most of the people who reject Christianity know almost nothing of what they are rejecting: those who condemn what they do not understand are, surely, little men.

Honesty is better than any easy comfort.

A longing for eternity is built-in to us all

THE GAP Did Jesus live? And did he really say The burning words that banish mortal fear? And are they true? Just this is central, here The Church must stand or fall. It’s Christ we weigh. All else is off the point: the Flood, the Day Of Eden, or the Virgin Birth—Have done! The Question is, did God send us the Son Incarnate crying Love! Love is the Way! Between the probable and proved there yawns A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd, Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse, Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns Our only hope: to leap into the Word That opens up the shuttered universe.

The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians—when they are sombre and joy-less, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Chris-tianity dies a thousand deaths. But, though it is just to condemn some Christians for these things, perhaps, after all, it is not just, though very easy, to condemn Christianity itself for them. Indeed, there are impressive indications that the positive quality of joy is in Christianity—and possibly nowhere else. If that were certain, it would be proof of a very high order.

He was suddenly overwhelmed by the revelation that what makes life worth living is, precisely, the emotions. But, then -- this was awful! -- mabe girls with their tears and laughter were getting more out of life. Shattering!

Upstairs, waiting, would be his own room, just as he had left it. Heaven itself, he thought, would be -- must be-- a coming home.

One of the three points of my childhood code — which is something of a key to this book — was ‘Never betray a friend.’ That might imply that friendship was important to me: and so it was, to me and to Davy, too. We believed in deep and genuine friendship, and we held our friends and our families very dear and were intensely loyal to them.

What was so odd was that quite a lot of people, not just sheep but highly intelligent people, did apparently believe it. T. S. Eliot, for instance. Or Eddington—in fact, quite a few physicists, the very last people one would expect to be taken in by it. Philosophers, too. Was it possible—was there any chance—that there was more to it than I had thought? No, certainly not. Of course not! Still, it was odd. Damned odd.

The sheer quality of the Christians we met at Oxford shattered our stereotype, and thenceforward a reference in a book or conversation to someone’s being a Christian called up an entirely new image.

So it was agreed: we would while we were here seek the whole of the Oxford thing, together when we could, apart when we must. And I did, most faithfully, recount all to her, and in the end what was to prove the deepest part of our Oxford days we shared completely. One

The books of course had shaped his mind in a hundred ways, especially perhaps the poetry. He thought of the master at his school who had awakened him to the glory of Shakespeare, and his own discovery of Shelley. So many of the books, the best-loved ones, had been about England, and of course the poems were England itself. As a child England had seemed much nearer than New York or the cowboy west.

He remembered his own code that he had made up when he was about twelve, a code of three points only: ‘Never betray a friend. Never betray beauty. Never betray the sword.’ By that last he had meant being brave when he was afraid.

What is important, perhaps, is that the moment was a culmination of all we had ever dreamt: not just Grey Goose, not just the good life—the tuneful life without the pressure of time—but also the green tree of the pagan love flourishing within the Shining Barrier.

Sometimes the two of them had gone out in the night from his cabin to steal a watermelon or two from some farmer—stolen watermelons are sweeter—and brought them back where, on top of the haystack beside the cabin, they would eat the dripping hearts while bats flitted across the stars. His

Once, long before, we had had an argument over Browning’s poem, ‘The Last Ride Together’, and I had finally convinced her, over stubborn resistance, that a ‘ride’ meant horses, not a carriage. I smiled faintly, there in the MG, at the memory: she liked the carriage. But now we were having a sort of a last ride together, and it was a carriage, after all, or at least the MG. As we turned into the St. Stephen’s road, I said lightly: ‘You win, dearling.’ At St. Stephen’s I turned in, under the oaks. I could see only one or two dim stars through the bare twisting branches. I got out and picked up the box. There was something else, dimly, on the seat. It was the rose, so I took that, too, and walked into the graveyard. Still holding the box, I knelt a moment by the old stone cross and prayed. Something cold touched my neck: snowflakes were drifting down. I stood up. It was cold—the dead of winter. I opened the box and began to scatter the ashes, using a sower’s motion. When I had done, the flakes were coming down hard. I left the rose on the old cross. I said aloud: ‘Go under the Mercy.’ Then I went away, and her ashes were covered with the blanket of the snow. The deathly snows.

Then her breathing slowed. My face was close to hers. Then each of three breaths was lighter than the one before. There were no more. I knew on the instant of her dying that she was dead. A little dribble came out of her mouth. I wiped it away, and I shut her mouth and her eyes. She could not say it to me, so I said it, whispered it, to her: ‘All shall be most well, my dearling.’ Then I kissed her lightly and stood up. As I stood there in that suddenly empty room, I was suddenly swept with a tide of absolute knowing that Davy still was. I do not mean that I thought her body might still live; I knew it didn’t. But past faith and belief, I knew quite overwhelmingly that she herself—her soul—still was.

We had come up on deck some time in the night, wakened by the swing of the yacht at her anchor. A cool north breeze. A million brilliant stars above the dark slender masts. And every little wave crested with cold sea-fire. Without a word, Davy snuggled close and my arm about her, we had remained, the beauty pouring into us, remained for—what? An hour? Three hours? We never knew or cared. Finally, with wordless consent, we had gone below to sleep to the lift and stir of the yacht. A foretaste of eternity.

But I was in love with Jane. And she with me. I do not doubt it now. We never so much as kissed each other, but that’s what it was. She did not know it for what it was then either. She and I were caught up in a dream of beauty. Poetry was at the heart of it. There were elements of high-church mystery and elements that were virtually pagan, like the Yorkshire moors and the wild powerful love of Heathcliffe and Cathy, a love of the spirit that was almost sexless. Often when people are falling in love, physical desire is in abeyance: had it not been so with Jane and me, alarums would have rung. But it was a thing of the spirit, its true nature precisely unthinkable by me—or, in a different way, by her. And I said to myself, as I wrote letters to Jane or walked in the night, that my dream of Jane as sister was made up of elements—poetry and pagan beauty—that Davy, in her deep Christian commitment, didn’t have time for any more. A strange and subtle betrayal, almost innocent. But not quite: corruption is never compulsory.

So Davy went on reading the Bible, and I went on not reading it much. I read other things, novels and mysteries, which she didn’t have time to read. No longer in loyalty to our love were we reading the same books. How could I say: Stop reading Isaiah and read Margery Allingham? Besides, if she did, I’ d have to read Isaiah. And the old sharing was going in another way. She was becoming wifely. She was accepting St. Paul on women and wives. She seemed to want to be domestic and make things in the kitchen. I was afraid she might actually obey me if I issued a command. There was something very humble and good in her attitude towards me as well as towards Christ. A humble vocation. But it wasn’t like her. I almost wanted a fight.

Think of me as a fellow-patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier, could. give some advice.

Then Davy and I found ourselves alone in front of the fire. Her eyes, I had not failed to observe, were indeed beautiful: long eyes, grey eyes with a hint of sea-green in certain lights. A wide brow and a small determined chin—a heart-shaped face. Rather suddenly, without previous reflection on the matter, it began to appear to me that heart-shaped faces were perhaps the best kind. She was not very tall, and I was; but now I wondered whether, after all, small girls were not more—well, more adorable, sort of.

Lewis had been his mainstay in this half-year of sounding the depths of grief. He it was who had said that Davy’s death was a severe mercy. A severe mercy—the phrase haunted him: a mercy that was as severe as death, a death that was as merciful as love.

It may be that through the evocative power of music, I might have felt a stab of grief, but I had no wish to force it or prolong it beyond its natural term. This—the disappearance of the sense of the beloved’s presence and, therefore, the end of tears—this is the Second Death. I could not escape the impression that the Second Death was a withdrawal— that Davy had withdrawn herself from me. It seemed something more or other than merely a changing psychological state in me. It seemed to correspond to some actuality, some real spiritual event. If, indeed, grief is a response to the presence— seeming or real—of the dead, then the end of grief might correspond to some necessary turning away on their part. That walk up to the cathedral might have been, in truth, a farewell. The disappearance of the grief is not followed by happiness. It is followed by emptiness. C. S. Lewis in his letter on eternity quoted me as saying that my love for Davy must, in some sense, be killed—and ‘God must do it’. Now perhaps God was doing it.

one point Davy asked him about prayers to enlist the help of the Blessed Virgin. Lewis would never commit himself on anything having to do with differences between high church and low. He did say, though, that if one’s time for prayer was limited, the time one took for asking Mary’s help was time one might be using for going directly to the Most High.

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.