William Paul Young wrote the book originally for his family and friends. It was never advertised and never picked up by a major publisher, yet it has been on the New York Times best-seller list for several months, all because of word-of-mouth recommendations.
I first read it because I was curious as to what all the fuss was about. I was captivated at first reading. I have been a student of spiritual and mystical theology for many years, but this small book opened up vistas of understanding and excitement different but still not in conflict with anything I have read before. The Shack is a novel, a work of fiction. As such, it is not a particularly good novel. The writing is somewhat stilted and artificial. The reason for its success is not the story or how the story is told, but what the story reveals about God’s love for us, God’s relationship to us and to the evil and suffering that comes into our lives.
There are no new Revelations here. Everything is based on the author’s remarkable understanding of New Testament theology, most of it consonant with Church teaching and most classical spiritual writers. This is one of those books that is "true to life" in the sense that it speaks to our hearts. We recognize "truth" here, our minds say "yes" to what is said as it does when we hear or read something it seems we have always known but never heard expressed in such a clear way. Even where it breaks new ground, it makes us think "I want to believe" or "I do believe, Lord, help my unbelief". The book is an eloquent testimony to a life of profound faith.
The story revolves around Mack’s 6 year old daughter who is kidnapped and horribly murdered by a perverted maniac. Mack can’t handle his grief, despairs and slips into what he later calls "the Great Sadness". After a couple of years he finds a mysterious note in his mailbox inviting him to return to "The Shack" - the very place where his daughter was murdered. The note is signed "Papa" which has been his nickname for God since he was a child.
He arrives at the shack to find it empty. The place evokes too many bad memories and he rages at God "Why did you let this happen? Why did you call me here, of all places? Wasn’t it enough to kill my baby?"
Then he lapses into guilt that he was unable to protect his daughter and says to God: "I’m done - I’m tired trying to find you in all this". He begins to leave and notices things are changing around him. He goes back to the shack and meets a "large, beaming African-American woman" whose first words to him are "How I do love you". As he begins to cry, she says "It’s OK, let it all out". He quickly meets the other two characters: a small, distinctly Asian woman and a very ordinary looking Semitic man.
When Mack comments on how unusual this is, Papa comments "We is all that you get and we’re more than enough".
This, of course, is a very clever shattering of stereotypes or habitual ways in which we think of God who is a Spirit, after all, and capable of revealing Himself in any form She chooses. Here, the Trinity is two women, a man, and none of them are white. Astounded, Mack asks "Which one of you is God?", to which all three answer simultaneously: "I am" - an echo of the way God responds to Moses in the book of Genesis "I am Who am" and tells him to say to Pharaoh that "I am" has sent him. So, having completed the preliminaries and set the scene, Mr. Young launches into what the book is really about: God’s relationship to us, to evil and to the world.
Note:
For the rest of this presentation, I will refer to Chapter numbers where various ideas can be found. You may interrupt me at any time if you have an urgent questions, but it’s probably better to wait until the end. Some of the earlier questions may be answered in later Chapters. Please refer to the Chapter number about which you have a question.
Chapter 6
: Mack is in a conversation with Jesus and decides he "should" go and talk to Papa. Jesus tells him: "Don’t go because you feel you have to, because you feel obligated. Go because you want to". This is one of the principal themes of the book, God’s great respect and reverence for human free will. Mack’s first perception about God is the depth of her love for him. "She cared about him more than anyone else ever had." Gradually, Papa demolishes all of Mack’s preconceptions and stereotypes about God.
Papa reveals that she loves both Mack and Missy very much, using a phrase that is frequent in the rest of the book "I am especially fond of that person". Gradually, the phrase reveals how God loves each of us, not with the same love, but with a different love for each of us, a love which recognizes and treasures our uniqueness. Mack is angered by God’s declaration of love and thinks of walking out. Papa tells him: "Just because I know you are too curious to leave, does that make you any less free?" God’s knowledge does not destroy free will. There is no predestination.
Mack accuses Papa of having abandoned him, just as She abandoned Jesus on the Cross. God’s answer is "I never left Him (Jesus) and I never left you". God is always with us, even when we feel most abandoned. Papa says: "When all you can see is your pain, perhaps you lose sight of me". Ultimately, Jesus put Himself into God’s hands ("into your hands I commend my Spirit"). Part of suffering is feeling unloved, alone, abandoned - causing us to limit ourselves, to narrow our horizons, to shrink our ability to see beyond ourselves.
Original Sin
: Adam chose "to go it on his own" - thereby messing everything up. Cf.unity/orientation of us w/God, within ourselves, with others and with nature is shattered by Adam’s option for independence, deciding for himself what would be right and wrong for himself, ignoring God’s commands. God’s response to Adam’s "declaration of independence" is not ultimate rejection but rather a dramatic break into human existence and history as one of us.
Jesus performed miracles (healing, etc.) as a human being who was consciously so totally dependent on God that he trusted God absolutely and unconditionally. Love and relationship is possible for us only because it already exists in God (the fundamental meaning for us of the Trinity - an answer to the question about why God revealed the Trinity). There can be no love without relationship and no relationship without trust. This is one of the ways in which we are made "in the image and likeness of God." In Jesus, our loving and harmonious relationship with God is restored.
Chapter 7
: We relate to children, if we want to do so successfully, by adopting their perspective, since they are incapable of adopting ours. In this way, we respect them and their limitations. This is the way God relates to us, by adopting our perspective. Jesus "emptied Himself," becoming like us.
Relationships must transcend appearances or they wither and die. God’s purpose is to live in us in order that we might live in Him. Cf. Jesus’s prayer "that all may be one as we are one, Father". God is talking about a real indwelling here, a "dynamic and active union". Cf. St. Augustine: God became like us in order that we might become like God. At times, we may feel lost and separated from God but in reality we never are. God is always with us and in us even when our pain and suffering are blocking our ability to be aware of it.
Chapter 8:
In order for us to relate to God, we must abandon all preconceptions and accept Him as He is "I am not who you think I am". This was one of the most difficult of Jesus’ problems, to avoid the preconceptions people wanted to project on him: messiah, king, etc. - even after the Resurrection! It is still one of our problems with God.
God does not punish us for sin - sin is its own punishment "devouring us from the inside". Essentially sin is a turning away from God and towards another creature. Here, the absence of a personal evil is a weak point in Young’s theology. It is not just God, us, the world and the evil we create. There is a living principle of incarnate evil alive and active in the world.
Hierarchy, Young claims, is a human need which often destroys relationship instead of promoting it. N.B.: while warning us against our tendency to seek too much independence, Y. seems to foster it, especially in his attitude towards institutional churches. Historically, this has led to a proliferation of sects, not all of which lead us to God. We must also reflect on how easily we fool ourselves. History, psychology and spirituality seem to indicate we need some help in discerning good from evil. We are virtuosi at self-deception because we have so much practice.
God carefully respects our choices as He works within them to free us from them. The goal may be a kind of "church" of those who love one another while following the God who dwells within them. This may be Heaven, but we are far from this ideal during the present earthly life. It is true that "we must learn to respond to others’ concerns and needs as lovingly as we do to our own." We must learn to love others as we love ourselves. Only God can teach us how to do this. God works "without the violation of one human will" and achieves salvation of all through the suffering of Christ. The secret is to trust God in all things and in all circumstances. True trust results from our awareness of being loved or "living loved" at all times, as Young calls it.
God does not justify evil, but redeems evil through His love. (NB: this is the most profound and meaningful part of Young’s theology).
Chapter 9:
We often mistake good for evil and vice versa. This failing results from our (Adam’s) choice to decide for ourselves what is good and evil for us. A purely subjective determination with no reference to a possible higher good equates "good" with "good for me, right now". It is this kind of subjectivism which leads to clashes when others define "good" differently than we do. We only think of the consequences for us, not for others or for the greater community. God reminds Mack that Adam’s sin "divorced the physical from the spiritual". The physical is intended to be an icon of the spiritual. We see only the picture and not what it represents.
Evil is merely the absence of good, of what belongs there. It is not a reality in itself. When "what belongs there" is missing, it is substituted by a "wrongness" or what does not belong there. Instead of unselfishness and altruism, their absence is replaced by selfishness and self-indulgence. "Good" is twisted into "what makes me feel good" and we use other people for our pleasure. In the maniac’s mind, Missy’s torture, abuse and death was something "good" because he enjoyed it! His "good" was totally divorced from any consequences for other people, that was irrelevant. All that mattered was it seemed good for him, right now.
From this perspective, evil can be traced to our clinging to our "rights". This leads, ultimately, to discord, evil and chaos (cf. Abortion). By contrast, Jesus did not cling to His rights as God, but emptied Himself (Phil. 2).
Chapter 10:
is about living in the present. Jesus is with us NOW. Many writers have noted how we have no control over the past and future but only over the present. Still, we persist in thinking mostly about the future and sometimes about the past. We think about past injuries or pleasures, depending on our proclivities. We construct scenarios about the future in order to be prepared for what might happen. Much of our thinking about the future is a quest for control which betrays a basic lack of trust. We are afraid of losing control over a future which we can’t really control anyway. We often fantasize about what we will do or say in situations which usually end up differently than we imagined, so our efforts at control are wasted. Still, we do it all the time.
God does not "fix" the world to make it better because He has given it to us. Love never forces its will on the beloved. Jesus tells us "I want brothers and sisters who will share life with me" - but more often than not we turn our backs on God’s love and choose our own independent paths (cf. Hound of Heaven). Jesus does not want us to imitate his actions but to do what He did on a much deeper level: to give up our independence and live in full dependence on God and then to let our actions flow from this sense of dependence. Whether we like it or not we are fully dependent on God for every breath we draw. God merely wants us to acknowledge this dependence and live accordingly. There is no such thing as genuine independence from God!
Chapter 11:
It is amazing to realize how much and how often we judge others because we like to think we are superior to them. God does not judge us casually any more than we could judge our own children. Mack is asked to pick one of his children to suffer and die and after a difficult struggle he finally asks to suffer instead of his child - just as God did. Far from causing evil, God has come into our world in order to be with those who suffer.
Chapter 12:
God was with Missy in her suffering. "Living loved" is to be truly human because it is living the truth.
Young has God saying She did not create institutions - political, economic or religious. Does that mean we can do without them? Not really! Because of our almost unlimited ability for self-deception, we need help in discerning whether or not we are on the right path. At a certain stage or level of spiritual development, we might begin to develop in ourselves the "freedom of the sons and daughters of God" which involves the ability to be in but not of institutions or the world itself. Gradually we might grow in the direction of loving those who are both of and in the world, without feeling superior to them. We need to be free to live and love without any agenda. Love reveals to us the best thing to do for the good of all in every circumstance.
Chapter 13:
"For those who believe, all things work together for the good". Where there is suffering, there is grace. Feeling guilty does not help us to find freedom in God . Guilt is about our failure to conform to some external criterion or model. God’s love guides us internally.
All evil flows from a false sense of independence. If God would take away the consequences of our actions, He would by the same token take away the possibility of love. "We are now fully human in Jesus in whom God is reconciled to us and to all creation."
Chapter 14:
Mr. Young begins to wrap up the conversation with God - "Life and living in God and in no other" is the only way we are able to live a righteous life. Young is vague about the need for discernment in this process. He goes on to say that "many have the right answers but still do not know God." Answers tell us about God but do not reveal Him within ourselves, experientially. Jesus is the "living answer" who changes us from the inside. The 10 commandments are merely a "mirror" held us to us to show just how filthy we are (cf. Romans and how the law teaches us what is sinful without helping us to avoid sin) when we try to be independent of God. There is no mercy or grace in rules. Trying to live according to the Law is a way of keeping control, of judging others and feeling superior to them. Rules do not bring freedom.
We must live in "expectancy" (watchful, loving waiting), not expectations which promote performance as the basis for identity and value. Expectations are a way of trying to control the future, thereby neither knowing nor trusting God. He does not want to be our "first priority" but rather the center of our lives around which everything else revolves as in a mobile.
God did not intend Missy’s death any more than He intended the crucifixion, but he uses both for good.
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