Helen Joy Davidman [1915–1960]

Helen Joy Davidman was born in New York City to a Jewish family. A child prodigy, she was reading by age 3, composing poetry by 8, devouring philosophy by 12, graduating from Hunter College at 19, and earning a master’s degree from Columbia University by 20.

An American poet, novelist, and essayist, Davidman began her literary career during the 1930s, publishing Letter to a Comrade [1938], which reflected her early leftist political leanings and won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award.

Joy met William Lindsay Gresham in 1938 through their shared involvement in the left-wing literary and political circles of New York City. They were introduced by poet Robert Lowry while Gresham was recovering from the trauma of volunteering in the Spanish Civil War. Both were intellectuals drawn to socialism and the ideals of social justice that flourished during the Great Depression.

They married in August 1942, at the height of World War II. Settling in upstate New York, their marriage at first appeared a meeting of minds - two brilliant, restless people bound by literature, politics, and an intellectual intensity that bordered on spiritual hunger. They had two sons, David and Douglas.

But shared idealism soon gave way to tension. Both had abandoned their Jewish heritage for atheism and Marxism, and their marriage began to unravel under the weight of Gresham’s alcoholism, infidelity, and depression. He became violent and unstable. By 1949 they had separated; their divorce was finalized in 1954.

Disillusioned, Joy found herself spiritually bankrupt. The ideologies she had trusted - reason, progress, and politics - had all failed. In that dark season, she experienced what she later called “the living God breaking in.” Alone one night in her Ossining, New York home, she found herself kneeling by her bed and praying - unplanned, almost against her will.

“For the first time in my life I felt, not thought, but felt, the presence of God - a God who was not the God I wanted or expected, but the God who was there … overwhelmed by a Presence.”

Following that encounter, Joy’s formidable intellect demanded to make sense of what she had experienced. She turned to Christian thinkers - Augustine, Aquinas, George MacDonald, and especially C.S. Lewis, whose The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity provided a rational framework for what she had already encountered spiritually.

In 1953 she wrote Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments, a passionate exposition of faith and moral law. Living in New York, raising two sons, and enduring the collapse of her marriage, she declared, “Faith is not a substitute for thinking. On the contrary, it is thinking of the highest order - because it begins from the right premises.”

For Davidman, Christianity did not erase her Jewish identity; it fulfilled it. She saw the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob revealed in Christ - the completion, not contradiction, of Israel’s covenant.

“I was at the end of my rope - physically, mentally, morally - when I turned to God. Not in joy or hope or confidence, but in sheer, desperate honesty. I said, ‘If there is a God, will He show Himself?’ And He did.”

Yet her new faith left her restless. In a 1951 letter she confessed, “I had found Christ - but not a home for my soul. The churches seemed lifeless, my marriage hopeless, and my country sick with unbelief. I needed air to breathe.”

It was during this period that she began corresponding with Clive Staples Lewis [1898-1963], whose works had guided her toward faith. Their letters became a spiritual lifeline. England -the homeland of Lewis, George MacDonald, and G.K. Chesterton - seemed to her the wellspring of the faith she had embraced.

So, in November 1952, at age 37, she sold what she could, arranged passage, and sailed for England with her two sons. Divorced in all but law, armed with her typewriter, wit, and courage, she later described the move as an act of Providence:

“I came here a stranger, seeking faith. I found home, work, and friendship - and in time, the love of my life. But none of that was planned. I simply obeyed the next step God showed me.”

C.S. Lewis - the Oxford scholar and Christian apologist known for The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity - first met Joy through those letters in 1950. At that time, she was still in America, a recent convert writing to thank him and to ask questions about faith and writing.

When they finally met in England, their relationship was entirely intellectual and spiritual. Lewis considered her “a soul in distress,” a fellow pilgrim whose mind was as sharp as his own. He was charmed and disarmed by her humor, warmth, and lack of British reserve. His brother, Warren [“Warnie”] Lewis, noted that Joy had become one of Jack’s “closest friends and most constant companions.” [Lewis was always called Jack by his family and friends.]

Still, Lewis viewed her affectionately, not romantically. He had long believed himself unsuited for marriage and had resigned himself to bachelorhood; besides, he was 54 and 17 years her senior.

When Joy’s British visa was about to expire in 1956, Lewis faced a practical dilemma: if she returned to America, she would lose her home, stability, and medical care. Out of friendship - not yet romantic love - he offered to marry her in a quiet civil ceremony so she could remain in Britain. The wedding took place on April 23, 1956, at a registry office in Oxford.

Soon afterward, Joy was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer and hospitalized. Lewis visited her daily, reading and praying with her. Confronted with her suffering, he realized his affection had deepened into love - fierce, sacrificial, and unmistakable.

“It is strange that after all these years of bachelorhood, I should find myself learning to love - really love - at the very moment I might lose her,” he wrote to a friend. “I asked for friendship, and God gave me love. I thought He had taken everything from me, and instead He gave me everything.”

Lewis arranged for a Christian wedding to solemnize their marriage in faith. Rev. Peter Bide performed the ceremony in Joy’s hospital room on March 21, 1957.

Miraculously, her cancer went into remission. The couple traveled together - to Ireland, Greece, and the English countryside - and shared three radiant years of marriage. Lewis later wrote,

“We feasted on love; every mode of it - solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers.”

Her death in July 1960 devastated him. In A Grief Observed [1961], he reflected,

“She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign - and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time, all that any man friend … has ever been to me.”

What a wonderful story. Love is a marvelous thing. The One who cares for each of us, who is concerned about our coming out and going in, and who notes the fall of a sparrow, is interested in the most intimate details of our lives.¹

Solomon explained in Proverbs 12:4 to his son that “An excellent wife is the crown of her husband.” The Hebrew word translated as excellent carries the sense of “virtuous” as well as “noble.” The most prominent adornment of a man is his godly wife - not her physical beauty, but her “flint-like” character.

Renowned American Reformed evangelical scholar Dr. Bruce K. Waltke [b. 1930] explains:

“The noble wife strengthens her husband’s very being by giving him social honor and empowering him to rule the community. The proverb assumes that her husband is himself pious and prayerful, wise and righteous, kind and generous, sacrificing himself for her good and not self-serving. Marriage is no light matter. The wife either makes or breaks a man - in his home and in the community.”

Thankfully, Gideons and Rahabs are beginning to enter the public square of America - men and women whose lives bear the marks of the living Christ: grace, love, gentleness, humility, and unwavering devotion. They will love the Lord and the souls of men, willing even to lay down their lives for the glory of the One and the salvation of the other. They will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath, because their hope is anchored in the Eternal.²

David Lane

American Renewal Project

1. Maxie D. Dunnam, Exodus; 1987.

2. A.W. Tozer, Of God and Men: Cultivating the Divine/Human Relationship [1960].