DAVY

If you have not yet read A Severe Mercy, I will take a moment to persuade you:

Read it. 

Or you are stupid.

It's a story of Van and Davy's love, their uncompromising, unquenchable love, divine and human; their lives of poetry, their valiant search for the heights, for radiance, for beauty, for God, and their unfailing hope that broke through tragedy. 

I recently re-read it (for the third time) and was struck by Davy, in the hospital, dying of cancer. Her husband writes:

"Davy, too, was saying farewell to the wind, farewell to the wind and sky, watching it all go, fade away, die--and thanking God. And yet she was human, heart-breakingly human, and she did not want to die.

She obediently did everything the doctors and nurses told her to do: everything except to stay in bed when someone else was in need. Over and over again she was discovered out of bed in the night, sitting beside some other patient who was suffering, soothing her, holding her hand, praying for her. The doctor told me to persuade her to stay in bed; and Davy would look guilty and grin and promise--and then she would hear a sob or a cry in the night. Later, I was to get dozens of letters, some almost illiterate, from people who had been in hospital with her, saying that she had helped and sustained them. One said she was like an angel of God. 

   The nurses loved her and hospital servants, too. She enlisted my help to make a grand medal 'for faithful service' for one of the black maids, who wore it proudly. Many of the nurses were praying for her. There was on nurse, especially, named Joan, whom we called St. Joan, who loved Davy and was loved. St. Joan was young and swift and valiant, and the name fitted her. Davy never lost her gaiety and sense of humour. People laughed to be around her. Someone gave her a floppy-eared creature which was always spoke of as 'St.-Paul-the-dog-or-rabbit'; and she used it to speak 'aside' to about how kind people were. It is simply true, without exaggeration, to say that she was a tower of strength to everyone--nurses, doctors, ministers no less than friends--all drew strength from her cheerful, brave, deeply loving spirit. Love shone forth from her; and love not only begets love, it transmits strength.                                                                          
It might be appropriate to say here, although I was not to know it until the end, that the hospital--the Virginia Baptist Hospital--would not take a penny for all their care of her over months, not even for the meals they occasionally brought me. They said that Davy had done more for them, for their nurses and other patients, then they had ever been able to do for her. And Dr. Craddock, in my opinion a deeply skilled doctor as well as a deeply Christian gentleman, who with his partner saw her daily during all those months, also refused all payment. I didn't ask either doctors or hospital for help and didn't expect it; I had made arrangements to borrow. Goodness and love are as real as their terrible opposites, and, in truth, far more real, though I say this mindful of the enormous evils like Nazi Germany. But love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom. 

Davy strove to do God's will. More important, she strove to make her own will conform to God's will: to will what He willed. Her prayer--and mine, too, often--was the prayer from one of Charles William's novels: 'Do--or do not.' She wanted, humanly, to live; and she, humanly, feared death: yet she was surrendered to God." 

{pg. 163-64}

I desire to be that surrendered to God... to know that severe mercy.