9. A Love Strong Enough to Hurt
9
A Love Strong Enough to Hurt
The loss of someone we love, whether by death or otherwise, brings us to the brink of the abyss of mystery. If we wrestle, as most of us are forced to do, with the question of God in the matter, we are bound to ask why He found it necessary to withdraw such a good gift. We will not get the whole answer, but certainly one answer is the necessity of being reminded that wherever our treasure is there will our hearts be also. If we have put all our eggs in the basket of earthly life and earthly affections, we haven’t much left when the basket falls. Christians, being citizens of Another Country, subject of a Heavenly King, are supposed to set their affections there rather than here—a lesson few learn without mortal anguish.
Sheldon Vanauken’s love for his wife, Davy, as he writes in A Severe Mercy, was an all-consuming love—passionate, romantic, and, as his friend C. S. Lewis pointed out to him, selfish. In their pre-Christian days a shortsighted view of happiness led them to exclude all others, to the point of Vanauken’s refusal even to allow children to “mar” what he and Davy had. When they became Christians he began to feel that she was “holier than necessary,” and to see God as his rival. One night Davy offered up her life for her husband, that his soul might be fulfilled.
Had they not had all anyone could ask for fulfillment? Davy knew they had not. She had found hers in Christ, and longed that her husband too should find his there. It was a drastic prayer she prayed, one that she knew would cost her something. It did. God accepted her surrender, and a year later she died.
A strange answer, some would say. The end of a “perfect” marriage. Stripped at last of the object of a passion that had shut out all else, Vanauken did, through much anguish, find the fulfillment for which Davy had prayed. Her death was what his friend Lewis called a severe mercy.
Might God sometimes take from us our love because we love too much? I don’t think so. Surely it is impossible to love “too much,” for love is from God, who is Love. Usually we love too little and too sentimentally. Our love, God-given though it be, is usually mixed up with possessiveness and selfishness. It needs strengthening and purifying. Human love is often inordinate, which means disorderly, unregulated, unrestrained, not limited to the usual bounds. If we love someone more than we love God, it is worse than inordinate—it is idolatry. When God is first in our hearts, all other loves are in order and find their rightful place. If God is not first, other loves, even those which are in no sense sexual, easily turn into self-gratification and therefore destroy both the love and the beloved.
Vanauken had constructed a world for himself and the woman he loved, and thrown up around it what they called The Shining Barrier. Shutting out all else, they determined to make things work their way. It was a rigid structure, perilously maintained, and when Christ came into their lives it cracked. “Any man who falls on that stone will be dashed to pieces; and if it falls on a man he will be crushed by it” (Luke 20:10 NEB).
Lewis helped Vanauken to see that his very agony was the mercy of God.
In His mercy God stands silently by and permits us to agonize. We simply cannot turn to Him until we have nowhere else to turn. Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven” describes a lonely man’s attempt to flee Him and find solace elsewhere.
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from him . . .
He tried romantic love, he tried the love of children, he tried Nature, while
Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet. . . .
At last the Hound chases him to earth. He hears a Voice around, “like a bursting sea,” which says:
“All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms, but just that thou shouldst
seek it in My arms,
All which thy child’s mistake fancies as lost,
I have stored for thee at home;
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!”
“Not for thy harms.” Like a skilled surgeon, God may have to hurt us, but He will never harm us. His object is wholeness.
“Stored for us at home.” Everything we have lost? Did we only fancy it as lost? How can this be?
We may not ask too many questions about the hows of God’s secret work. Consider this list of questions:
Can God spread a table in the wilderness?
Has your God been able to save you from the lions?
Can these bones live again?
How is the Lord to save Jerusalem?
Is this your care for the widow?
Which way are we to turn?
Why wait any longer for him to help us?
Where can we buy bread?
How can a man be born when he is old?
How can you give me living water?
How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
How is it that this untrained man can teach?
What is the good of that for such a crowd?
Who will roll away the stone?1
We may add our own burning question about how God stores things for us at home. If a child has died, the answer may not seem too difficult—the child is in heaven. But other losses?
The Bible is a book about the mysterious ways of God with individual men. It shows us on every page that there is a Controller. We have a tendency to dismiss the possibility of mystery in our own lives, even when we are faithful readers and professed believers of the Bible, with remarks like, “Oh, but that was back then.” Jesus Christ is the same. Yesterday. Today. Forever. We have innumerable promises that the Seen is not the whole story. The Unseen is where it is to be finally unfurled.
“Our troubles are slight and short-lived; and their outcome an eternal glory which outweighs them far. Meanwhile our eyes are fixed, not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are unseen: for what is seen passes away; what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor. 4:17–18 NEB).
How shall we be sure that the word “not for thy harms” is true? How shall we fix our eyes on things unseen? There is no answer but faith, faith in the character of God Himself. That and no other is the anchor for our souls.