A Bedside Wedding

“Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”

— James 5:14-15, KJV

18 October 1956

For some months in 1956 Joy had been suffering pains in her hip and leg. Her doctor thought it was rheumatism. On the evening of 18 October 1956, her thigh bone snapped. She was taken to the Wingfield-Morris Orthopaedic Hospital in Headington. X-rays showed that the femur had been eaten away by cancer, and further tests found cancer in her breast and in other bones. The doctors did not expect her to live long.

It was this, Lewis afterwards said, that made him understand his own feelings. Faced with the prospect of losing her, he found that what he felt for Joy was not friendship at all, or not only. He was in love with her. The civil marriage, which he had treated as a formality, now seemed to him a mockery: he was legally married to a woman he loved and who was dying, and in the eyes of the Church, and in his own, he was not married to her at all.

Speaking Openly

He began, for the first time, to tell his friends. Some were astonished, some were dismayed, and one or two were hostile. Tolkien in particular seems to have been hurt not to have been told of the civil marriage, and he never warmed to Joy. Warnie, who had known all along, supported his brother completely. On 24 December 1956 a notice appeared in The Times announcing that a marriage had taken place between Professor C. S. Lewis and Mrs Joy Gresham, and asking that no letters be sent.

Joy was moved from one hospital to another, and her treatment was long and painful: operations, radiation and great suffering. Lewis visited her every day he could. When he was in Cambridge, he wrote to her.

The Bishop’s Refusal

Lewis wanted a Christian marriage. But Joy had been divorced, and her former husband was still alive. The Church of England in the 1950s did not marry divorced people in church while a former spouse lived, and the Bishop of Oxford, Harry Carpenter, refused permission for the marriage. Lewis argued that Joy’s first marriage had not been a valid Christian marriage at all, since Bill Gresham had himself been married and divorced before he married her. The bishop was not persuaded. Lewis, who had always been a loyal and obedient churchman, would not go behind his back.

Peter Bide

In March 1957 the doctors told Lewis that Joy had very little time left. Lewis thought of a former pupil of his, Peter Bide, who had become a priest and was serving a parish in Sussex. Bide was said to have been used by God in the healing of a sick child. Lewis asked him to come to Oxford, not to marry them but to lay hands on Joy and pray for her healing.

Bide came. When he arrived and understood the whole situation, he was moved by it. Lewis had not asked him to marry them, but Bide decided that he would. He later explained that, faced with a dying woman and a man who loved her and wanted to be married to her before God, he could not in conscience refuse. He knew that the Bishop of Oxford would not be pleased, and he was right.

21 March 1957

On 21 March 1957, in Joy’s hospital room, Peter Bide married C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman according to the rites of the Church of England. Warnie was there. Joy could not rise from her bed. After the marriage Bide laid his hands on her and prayed for her healing. Then he went home.

In letters written at the time, Lewis prepared his friends to hear that he would very soon be a widower.

In April Joy was sent home to the Kilns to die, and a nurse came to care for her. Lewis, Warnie, the boys when they were home, and the household gathered round her.

Remission

She did not die. Over the following weeks and months, to the astonishment of her doctors, the cancer stopped advancing. Then it began to recede. The diseased bones started to heal. By the summer she was able to sit up, then to move about the house in a wheelchair, and by the end of the year she could walk with a stick. By 1958 she was strong enough to go out, to visit friends, and to go on holiday. The doctors had no explanation for it. They could only say that remission of that kind sometimes happened, though rarely.

Lewis believed that God had answered prayer, and so did Joy. They did not claim to understand why. Many people had prayed for her, in Oxford and in America and elsewhere, and the prayer Bide had offered at her bedside was one among them. Lewis was careful not to say too much, and he never treated her recovery as a proof of anything. But he was grateful with all his heart.

Something Borne

At the same time, something odd happened to Lewis himself. In the summer of 1957 he began to suffer from severe pain in his back and legs. The doctors found that he had osteoporosis, a loss of calcium from his bones, and he was forced to wear a surgical belt and to give up many of the long walks he loved. As Joy’s bones grew stronger, his grew weaker.

Lewis wondered, in letters to friends, whether he had been allowed to bear a little of her suffering. He remembered what Charles Williams had taught about the possibility of carrying another person’s burden in love, and he had prayed that he might be allowed to take some of her pain. He did not claim that this had happened. He thought it possible, and he was glad if it had. The idea will strike some readers as strange. But it is not very far from the verse in Galatians about bearing one another’s burdens, or from what Paul says of filling up in his own flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ for the sake of his body, the church. And whatever the truth of it, it was an act of love.

The Prayer of Faith

The verse at the head of this chapter is James’s instruction to the sick: call the elders, let them anoint and pray, and the prayer of faith will raise the sick up. A parish priest from Sussex came to Joy’s bedside in March 1957, laid his hands on her and prayed, and she was raised up, for a while. It would be wrong to say that the prayer of faith always brings healing in this life, and James does not say so. Joy herself would die three years later. But for those three years, Lewis and Joy believed that God had heard them, and they received the time that was given them as a gift. It was the happiest time of Lewis’s life.