Divine Offering It All

If she died, I might – since, under God, I must not act to follow her – I might live for years. Those years and all of beauty they might contain I put into the ball. And then I offered-up all of it to the King: take all I have ever dreamed, all I may ever long for including the death I shall certainly long for: I offer it up, oh Christ, for her for her best good death or life. This was my offering-up. I asked God to take all…That offering-up was perhaps the most purely holy and purely loving act of my life. –Sheldon Vanauken (A Severe Mercy)

This passage is just immense. I tried to condense it as much as I could, but I couldn’t. The passion, feeling and pure Love behind all of these words is enough to bring me to tears. Vanauken is able to write and so sharply produce his thoughts and emotions so intelligibly.

Despite the overwhelming compassion and beauty of Vanauken’s words we can see the pain amid these words as well. I may be spoiling the book for those of you, but I haven’t hid the ending of the story, where Vanauken’s wife despite all they have gone through contracts a mysterious sickness and dies. This in the end shatters him and forces him to cling all the tighter to the Cross.

Yet, here Vanauken sounds like a saint offering up the rest of his years for Davy, his wife. He has no idea what will happen to her, but instinctually he knows she will die. Amid the drowning despair that has clutched his heart, he wants to make sure she will be ok in the end. As he says at the end of the passage I quoted, “was perhaps the most purely holy and purely loving act of my life.” And I have to agree; because that is in essence the best we can do for one another.

God Bless the Vanaukens for the insights they have given me and the motions of my heart they have opened me up to.