Joy Davidman, a brilliant writer, was at the time of her death the wife of C. S. Lewis. She was raised by parents who were militant nonbelievers. She graduated with top honors from Hunter College and began her adult life with a kind of cynical sophistication and skepticism that expects the worst and believes the least. She disdained religion and morality. In her arrogant, intellectual pride, she conceived of them as havens for the neurotic, ideas on which only the untutored would depend. Peak experiences of poetic insight were dismissed as some glandular disturbance that science would in time explain.
Then one day her husband, who had been growing more and more depressed, called from another city and told her that he was losing his mind, that life no longer mattered to him, and then sent her into shock and despair by abruptly hanging up and saying no more. Joy Davidman was in the country with her children. She didn’t know where her husband was in the city, so she was desperate, hopeless. All she could do was telephone some friends in the city to help, and then wait in quiet desperation and despair.
Then something happened. In her words, “There was another person with me in the room – a presence so real that all my previous life was by comparison mere shadowplay. . I think I must have been the world’s most astonished atheist. My awareness of Christ’s presence was not conjured up to bolster me about my husband. No, it was terror – terror, and ecstasy, repentance and rebirth.”
Even in the life of a supposed atheist, God works with loving patience and long-suffering grace to reveal Himself as the one who cares for each one of us, who is concerned about our coming out and our going in, who notes the fall of a sparrow.
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A different version from The Rev. Ed Hird, Rector, St. Simon’s Church, North Vancouver, Canada:
Joy Davidman, a self-declared atheistic Communist of Jewish heritage, loved to read the NARNIA CHRONICLES to her sons. In the process, she came to faith in Aslan, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah (Revelation 5:5). Looking back, Joy Davidman commented: “My first published poem was called “Resurrection” — a sort of private argument with Jesus, attempting to convince him (and myself) that he had never risen. I wrote it at Easter, of all possible seasons, and never guessed why.”
As Joy Davidman wrote in ‘The Longest Way Round’, God “had been stalking me for a very long time, waiting for his moment; he crept nearer so silently that I never knew he was there. Then, all at once, he sprang. For the first time in my life I felt helpless; for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, ‘the master of my fate’. All my defenses — the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God — went down momentarily. And God came in. Since childhood, I had been pouring half my energy into the task of keeping him out. When it was over I found myself on my knees, praying. I think I must have been the world’s most astonished atheist.”