Last week I used a quote from a book I had not read in forty years.  I found the quote, but not in the place in the book where I was sure I would find it. My search reminded me of the story told and why I ought to read it again.  “A Severe Mercy” is, as my torn dust cover says, “a real-life story full of wonder and hope.” Sheldon Vanauken recounts the years in the mid-1950’s he and his wife Davy were graduate students in Oxford.  They meet new people, many of them, surprisingly, Christians, befriend C.S. Lewis, then teaching at Oxford, and in God’s time make their own commitments to Christ and the ways of the Kingdom.

The severe mercy of the book’s title is a phrase given by Lewis in a letter to Vanauken following their return to the U.S. and Davy’s untimely death from a rare infection.

I re-read “A Severe Mercy” this week and was taken by Sheldon Vanauken’s story of their conversion.  Well-read, intellectual, sophisticated, Sheldon and Davy had early on dismissed the possibility Christian faith playing a part in their lives. But new friends and Lewis’ care and wisdom began to challenge that early dismissal of Christ. Continue reading →