Sheldon Vanauken Quotes & Sayings

Her death ... brought me as nothing else could do to know and end my jealousy of God. It saved her faith from assault. — Sheldon Vanauken

But in the books again, great joy through love seemed always to go hand in hand with frightful pain. Still, he thought, looking out across the meadow, still, the joy would be worth the pain - if, indeed, they went together. If — Sheldon Vanauken

Goodness & love are as real as their terrible opposites, and, in truth, far more real, though I say this mindful of the enormous evils ... But love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed of wisdom. — Sheldon Vanauken

At my father's club, sitting before the fire, we had spoken of 'moments made eternity', meaning what are called timeless moments, moments precisely without the pressure of time--moments that might be called, indeed, timeful moments. And we had clearly understood that the pressure of time was our nearly inescapable awareness of an approaching terminus-the bell about to ring, the holiday about to end, the going down from Oxford foreseen...Life itself is pressured by death, the final terminus. Socrates refused to delay his own death for a few more hours: perhaps he knew that those few hours under the pressure of time would be worth little....Awareness of duration, of terminus, spoils Now. — Sheldon Vanauken

Note that life after death, which still seems to you the essential thing, was itself a late revelation. God trained the Hebrews for centuries to believe in Him without promising them an after-life, and blessings on Him, he trained me in the same way for about a year. It is like the disguised prince in the fairy tale who wins the heroine's love before she knows he is anything more than a woodcutter. What would be a bribe if it came first had better come last. — Sheldon Vanauken

Art is first a seeing and then a revealing — Sheldon Vanauken

There was something tender and gentle about our love, something a little shy, that was like early spring. — Sheldon Vanauken

To believe with certainty, somebody said, one has to begin by doubting. — Sheldon Vanauken

Religiously, we longed for the lively life in Christ, but we did not fully see that we were equally longing for the lively life of the mind - the delights of conversation at once serious and gay, which is, whatever its subject, Christ or poetry or history, the ultimately civilized thing. — Sheldon Vanauken

If it's half as good as the half we've known, here's Hail! to the rest of the road. — Sheldon Vanauken

Corruption is never compulsory. — Sheldon Vanauken

A man in the jungle at night, as someone said, may suppose a hyena's growl to be a lion's; but when he hears the lion's growl, he knows damn well it's a lion. — Sheldon Vanauken

... though I wouldn't have admitted it, even to myself, I didn't want God aboard. He was too heavy. I wanted Him approving from a considerable distance. I didn't want to be thinking of Him. I wanted to be free - like Gypsy. I wanted life itself, the color and fire and loveliness of life. And Christ now and then, like a loved poem I could read when I wanted to. I didn't want us to be swallowed up in God. I wanted holidays from the school of Christ. — Sheldon Vanauken

Signs must be read with caution. The history of Christendom is replete with instances of people who misread the signs. — Sheldon Vanauken

That death, so full of suffering for us both, suffering that still overwhelmed my life, was yet a severe mercy. A mercy as severe as death, a severity as merciful as love. — Sheldon Vanauken

How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours? — Sheldon Vanauken

The "Appeal to Love" was an essential part of the very structure of the Shining Barrier. What it meant was simply this question: what will be best for our love? Should one of us change a pattern of behavior that bothered the other, or should the other learn to accept? Well, which would be better for our love? Which way would be better, in any choice or decision, in the light of our single goal: to be in love as long as life might last? — Sheldon Vanauken

The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians
when they are sombre and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths. But, though it is just to condemn some Christians for these things, perhaps, after all, it is not just, though very easy, to condemn Christianity itself for them. Indeed, there are impressive indications that the positive quality of joy is in Christianity
and possibly nowhere else. If that were certain, it would be proof of a very high order — Sheldon Vanauken

When we first fell in love in the dead of winter, we said, "If we aren't more in love in lilactime, we shall be finished." But we were more in love: for love must grow or die. — Sheldon Vanauken

Those sharings just happened to be; but what we must do now is share everything. Everything! If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it - and the other one must find it. — Sheldon Vanauken

My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table? — Sheldon Vanauken

God gives us many gifts, but never permanence; that we must seek in his arms. — Sheldon Vanauken

But I was not obeying the first and greatest commandment - to love God first - nor is it clear that I was obeying the second - to love my neighbour. Hating the oppressors of my neighbour isn't perhaps quite what Christ had in mind. — Sheldon Vanauken

I had always served beauty. Davy and I together had loved beauty. Now, maybe, I was worshipping beauty in the Christian God while Davy was worshipping God. There may be danger in the love of beauty, though it seems treason to say it. Perhaps it can be a snare. — Sheldon Vanauken

In my old easy-going theism, I had regarded Christianity as a sort of fairy tale; and I had neither accepted nor rejected Jesus, since I had never, in fact, encountered him. Now I had. The position was not, as I had been comfortably thinking all these months, merely a question of whether I was to accept the Messiah or not. It was a question of whether I was to accept Him
or reject>. My God! There was a gap behind me too. Perhaps the leap to acceptance was a horrifying gamble-but what of the leap to rejection? There might be no certainty that Christ was God-but, by God, there was no certainty that He was not. — Sheldon Vanauken

So it was agreed: we would while we were here seek the whole of the Oxford thing, together when we could, apart when we must. And I did, most faithfully, recount all to her, and in the end what was to prove the deepest part of our Oxford days we shared completely. One — Sheldon Vanauken

What we did see was that jealousy is fear: it can corrode even if quite baseless. — Sheldon Vanauken

So Englishmen saw it. Lincoln's insincerity was regarded as proven by two things: his earlier denial of any lawful right or wish to free the slaves; and, especially, his not freeing the slaves in 'loyal' Kentucky and other United States areas or even in Confederate areas occupied by United States troops, such as New Orleans. — Sheldon Vanauken

C.S. Lewis in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. 'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed by it
how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home. — Sheldon Vanauken

It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words, and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we don't know at all that it is the same with others. — Sheldon Vanauken

Both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, all of one's life will eventually be known to have been one or the other. — Sheldon Vanauken

The adult must seem to mislead the child, and the Master the dog. They misread the signs. Their ignorance and their wishes twist everything. You are so sure you know what the promise promised! And the danger is that when what He means by 'wind' appears you will ignore it because it is not what you thought it would be - as He Himself was rejected because He was not like the Messiah the Jews had in mind. — Sheldon Vanauken

Whatever one of us asked the other to do - it was assumed the asker would weigh all the consequences - the other would do. Thus one might wake the other in the night and ask for a cup of water; and the other would peacefully (and sleepily) fetch it. We, in fact, defined courtesy as 'a cup of water in the night'. And we considered it a very great courtesy to ask for the cup as well as to fetch it. — Sheldon Vanauken

Between the probable and proved there yawns
A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd,
Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse,
Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns
Our only hope: to leap into the Word
That opens up the shuttered universe. — Sheldon Vanauken

But Love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom. — Sheldon Vanauken

Those who condemn what they do not understand are, surely, little men. — Sheldon Vanauken

What was so odd was that quite a lot of people, not just sheep but highly intelligent people, did apparently believe it. T. S. Eliot, for instance. Or Eddington - in fact, quite a few physicists, the very last people one would expect to be taken in by it. Philosophers, too. Was it possible - was there any chance - that there was more to it than I had thought? No, certainly not. Of course not! Still, it was odd. Damned odd. — Sheldon Vanauken

It is not possible to be 'incidentally a Christian.' The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non-Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming first but many balances. — Sheldon Vanauken