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

The author distinguishes between the “pagan” love the couple share before their conversion and the Christian love they share after the fact. The distinction is one in which Christian love is defined primarily by love for God, subordinating all other loves to their rightful place beneath that love, while “pagan” love is concerned purely with the other without any reference to a transcendent good beyond and above the beloved. Their “pagan” love is not construed as anything wicked, however, for it was their “pagan” love that drew them to each other and allowed them to revel in the enjoyment of anything good or beautiful.

The Grey Goose is the name Van and Davy give to the boat of their dreams, the boat they hoped to one day build and sail that would allow them to forego the trappings of personal possessions and fixed places. They chose the name Grey Goose as an homage to the bird species, which only takes a single mate as long as it lives, refusing another even if they are separated or one of them dies. Thus, the Grey Goose becomes another symbol and embodiment of their love (even if they never build the boat they imagined, abandoning the dream due to their shifting priorities and, eventually, Davy’s illness).

The word literally means “to cling inwardly together with,” and the author uses it to describe the radical intimacy with which he and his wife love one another. To speak of their co-inherence is to speak of their intimate union—not just a physical union but also an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual union. After their conversion to Christianity, the author writes of their co-inherence with one another and, additionally, their co-inherence together in the presence and person of Jesus Christ. In this way, the Shining Barrier protects co-inherence, either of the couple alone or of the couple in their mutual love with and for God.

The Island in the West only makes two or three appearances. The phrase literally refers to a place in Lewis’s allegorical novel Pilgrim’s Regress that is a place of desire and ultimate destiny for the main character in that story. The author uses it to speak about the human desire for God that is sometimes disguised or mistaken for another good and wholesome desire. In certain parts of the narrative, it is used as a shorthand phrase to describe one’s general longing for something they can’t quite put their finger on but that they know they yearn for nevertheless.

Oxford refers to the University of Oxford and the city of Oxford, where the University is situated. It can also, at times, be used to refer to the county of Oxfordshire, which is made up of dozens of small towns and villages that surround the city center and University. Formed in the year 1096, it is the oldest university system in the Western world and one of the oldest universities in the world. Oxford University is made up of 39 separate colleges and private halls that together form the university system (the word “university” coming from the same Latin root as the English word “universal,” referring to “the whole”).