Jack:
I have read your conversion essay, “Longest Way Round.” I am quite in awe at your ability to explain what is almost impossible to articulate—the power of conversion and the realization that atheism was too simple. It is flaming writing. Not much in our world is as simple as it appears, and if you want to dig deeper, as you do, Joy, you must be prepared for the difficulty in that journey. Most are not. And I am honored that you mentioned my work in your essay. Thank you.
Joy:
In that essay I state that ever since that half minute, I’d been slowly changing into a new person. And for the first time in a long while, I can feel that change again—the transformation toward a new life with my true self.
Yes, of course I mentioned your work. Both The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce stirred the dormant parts of my spiritual life. It took a little while, but the stories moved inside me until I was ready. Isn’t that the way with all good stories? But it was you, Jack, who taught me where I had gone wrong in my intellectual analysis. Your words were not the last step in my conversion, but the first.
Chad lifted a bottle of Chianti, poured some into a glass, and handed it to me.
Eva glanced at Bill in the lake and then lowered her voice as if we shared a secret. “I want to know how it all started,” she said, returning to the subject of Jack. “What do you two write about?”
“Everything. Books. Theory. We have a running argument about birth control. Love. Mythology. Our dreams. Our work.” I laughed. “There’s no subject off limits.”
Eva smiled. “There are learned men everywhere who would love to have Lewis write to them about philosophy and dreams.”
“Eva, it’s as if all the reading and all the writing I’ve done in my life have led me to this friendship.”
“I don’t feel that way about anything.” Eva smiled at me. “Except my girls.”
“And me, my love?” Chad asked and pulled her close.
“And you.”
I glanced toward Bill at the lake’s edge, throwing Davy from the far edge of the dock.
I wrote about the Ten Commandments, yet wrestled with their meaning in my own life. Yes, I was committed to staying married. I wanted to make it work with Bill, and yet my mind was consumed with what to say or write to another man and what he might say to me in return. This wasn’t infidelity, but what was it?
Jack:
You asked about mythology. It was Tolkien (have you yet read his work?) who convinced me of the one true myth—Jesus Christ. It wasn’t an easy conversion for me, but one of an all-night conversation at the river’s edge.
Joy:
Of course I have read The Hobbit (and read it to my sons). It is extraordinary. As far as myth, I was once ashamed of my taste for mythology and fantasy, but it helped me make some sense of a world that made no sense. And I’m grateful for it now, as it brought me to your work, and to my beliefs. I found MacDonald’s Phantastes at twelve, bored in the school library. Once I only believed in a three-dimensional world, but it was a fourth-dimensional world I wanted, and those stories gave it to me. It all seems one master plan in hindsight—each story a stepping-stone to where I am now.
Jack:
My! What a joyful coincidence—it was Phantastes that baptized my own imagination, and to wonder that it brought you to my work. What joy to have a pen-friend whom I admire and look forward to hearing from. I expect your next letter with great anticipation.
Chad rose to join Bill and the children in the lake. I took a long sip of the Chianti and let the warm haze settle over me. Far off, thunder clapped.
Eva groaned. “Not again with the rain.” She rolled over to study me. “What has helped you get through this year?” she asked. “If there are so many ills?”
I folded my legs beneath me and set the empty glass sideways on the grass. “My sons. Writing. Drawing close to God, or what I know of him, as best I can. I still don’t quite have Christianity all figured out as you seem to.”
“I surely don’t have it figured out.” She propped her face in her palm. “None of us does.”
“Do we ever? You’ve believed much longer than I have.”
“I don’t think so, Joy. It’s an unfolding. A constant unfolding to new life—or at its best that’s what it is.”
“New life.” I said the words as if I wanted to taste them.
CHAPTER 5
Love will go crazy if the moon is bright
“SONNET III,” JOY DAVIDMAN
From a hazy woodland sleep, Davy and Douglas’s laughter along with that of the Walsh girls flooded through the open window. They’d woken me from a dream—what had it been?
Morning fell soft as cashmere through the open window, and I rolled over to glance at the other twin bed in the room—Bill had woken and gone. I snuggled back into the pillow as the familiar thunderheads drummed from far off.
The children’s laughter turned to raucous roaring. In their sibling bantering I remembered my half-forgotten dream—it was of Howie and our midnight trips to the zoo. I missed our childhood closeness; I missed him with an ache below my heart. I closed my eyes, wanting for just a moment to remember when he loved me, that particular feeling elusive now.
I opened my eyes to the morning sun, to the children’s voices and the new day. I wanted to be a different kind of parent for my boys than my parents were for me. Was I?
With these long, slow days of summer, I’d decided, with great fortitude, that my top priority was to look after my sons, my husband, my garden, and my house—all gifts given to me. I wanted to heal my marriage, ease into the early happiness of those first days together. I wanted to rest in the gentleness we found with each other in small moments—writing together, playing with our sons, making love. It would take radical forgiveness and grace, but these were my goals, and maybe joy and peace would show up with their accomplishments. Here’s for hoping, I thought.
My cotton nightgown tangled in the sheets as I rose, and I laughed, slipping the gown over my head to change into shorts and a worn red T-shirt left over from Bill’s college days. I pulled aside the red-checked curtain and called out the window, “Good morning, all you lovies out there.”
“Mommy!” Douglas waved from the rope swing that hung from the lowest gnarled branch of an old oak. “Mrs. Walsh is making pancakes for breakfast. Hurry!”
Jack:
But what has arrived at our home, the Kilns? You sent Warnie and me a ham! Thank you very much. You can’t imagine what this means during the days of food rationing. We are not short of food, but we are quite tired of the repetitive choices.
Joy:
You are more than welcome. I could barely tolerate knowing you were eating the same foods day after day. Here my summer garden is abundant! I’ve made jams and canned the beans; I’ve baked pies with the apples and pears from my orchard.
There in Vermont, the children ran through the forest as wild as the flowers themselves. I took all six children on long walks through the woods, stalking mushrooms, teaching them the names and tastes of all things wild. The boys teased the girls for being too frightened to eat what I picked from the soft earth. I knew they thought me eccentric, and I didn’t mind.