A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy and Triumph

The Idealization of Glenmerle, the author’s childhood home, will play an important role in the narrative from beginning to end and works nicely as a springboard to set the mood of this particularly intimate memoir. Starting with the trip to Glenmerle does two things in particular. First, by allowing the reader to accompany him to his childhood home, the author invites the reader into his most intimate memories, setting the mood for a story that will pore over the whole of his life by relating the stories and events that most poignantly shaped him and pushed him to the point in life where he finds himself at the moment. Second, starting at the end of the story gives the reader a clear sense of direction, creating an experience where the question in the reader’s mind shifts from “how will this story end” to “what will happen along the way.” Giving away the ending emphasizes that the outcome is slightly less important than the events along the way. The journey—both the literal and the spiritual—is of great importance, and begins at Glenmerle.

The memories of this late-night rendezvous with his childhood home also serve as signposts for important events. He speaks about the lasting impression of the literature and poetry that he came to love as a child, the effect of experiencing the beauty that washed over him in marveling at the stars, and the decision to choose the heights and valleys of the human experience to get the most out of life. All these things would be perfectly matched by Davy, the woman he came to Glenmerle to mourn and the woman he had fallen in love with when he could still call Glenmerle home.

The two most significant insights the author relates in the prologue—being awestruck by beauty and vowing to get the most out of life’s joys—are both concerned with approaching life with a certain sympathy and openness. It is remarkable, then, that he should meet the one woman who could match him in these ideals and desires—especially The Dedication to (and Search for) Beauty—in his hometown at his college. The girl’s name was Jean Davis, he relates at the head of the second chapter, but she was called Davy for short. The author relates how their love flared up almost immediately and that this was actually a cause for concern for a short while. He relates how there was such an intensity that it was reasonable to question the validity and genuineness of something that initially seemed too good to be true.

In this moment, the author introduces poetry and literary citation for the first time, citing a piece about the nature of love and desire by an unknown author that had struck him at the time. What is significant about this is that it sets the beginning of a pattern in which poetry, songs, letters, and other quotations from literary works will be used to ground the narrative perspective in more objective ways rather than relying purely on the emotional gravity and interior dialogue of the author that could be construed as entirely subjective, and therefore unreliable. Citing the works of other authors when speaking about emotions gives them a universality they otherwise might not project. In the second chapter, the author also gives names to some of the most important truths of his life with Davy in the first half of their life before their conversion to Christianity.

The first of these is the declaration of their love to be a form of high “paganism,” dedicated to the beauty of the world, the love of nature and the outdoors, and sharing all things in common. This shared love of the world—and resolution to share everything in life that could be shared—resulted in the creation of what they came to call the Shining Barrier. The Shining Barrier was a metaphor to describe their intense reality and conviction never to let anything, or anyone, get in the way of their intentional unity. They had decided to enter into their relationship and love sharing everything because they had seen too many instances of men and women who had let their love die by a slow separation of ideals and division of interests. To combat this, they developed and agreed on a radical commitment to sharing, around which they set up the Shining Barrier to protect their love and their union from any outside influence that could break or mar their bond.

All the other idiosyncratic decisions to share as much as possible and affirm the other in their interests and desires were made to strengthen the Shining Barrier. There was the Navigator’s Council—a formal time for assessing the health and state of their relationship. There was also what they called the Appeal to Love, wherein they would make decisions purely based on what was best for their love, and this would prevent any selfishness from putting the individual above the other, keeping their perspective on the good of the other, rather than on the good of one’s self. In later years, these self-made institutions and ideals would be challenged and purified by their conversion to Christianity, but they formed the foundation of their love and life from the very beginning.