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THE SHACK
By William P. Young
Windblown Media, 248 pages
The Shack, a new addition to the overburdened tower of spiritual books, is first-time author William P. Young's inadvertent foray into self-help stardom.
Raised by missionaries among a Stone Age tribe in New Guinea, Alberta native Young worked as an office manager while writing The Shack as a gift to his six kids. They liked it so much that they coaxed him into taking it public. Publishers weren't so supportive, however, forcing Young into the hands of former pastors, who created a press expressly for his book. Over the past year, America's appetite for a redemption story has proved stronger than Penguin's seal of approval, earning The Shack a spot on both Globe and Mail and New York Times bestseller lists and the praise of country singer Wynona Judd.
In centring his plot on a despicable crime, the kidnapping of Mackenzie Allen Phillips's daughter Missy during a camping trip in the Oregon wilds, Young creates the setting for his homily on the strength it takes to forgive. Mack's grief-laden guilt directs him to discover his relationship with God.
Four years after the incident, admiring the beauty of an ice storm, Mack considers how "unlike illness, [this experience] is largely a corporate rather than individual" one, in that it unites people in a communal excuse not to go to work. Walking out into the winter chrysalis that used to be his yard, he finds a note in his mailbox signed "Papa," his wife Nan's nickname for God, summoning him back to the shack where evidence of Missy's abduction was found.
Once reminded of that day, he finds that nature turns from awe-inspiring to paralytic. He hits his head on the once wondrous ice as he returns from his mailbox, and we enter his nightmare: endless replays of the moments before Missy disappeared. While he was saving his two older kids from a capsized boat, his youngest was left vulnerable on the shore. Mack cannot resist responding to the note, be it from God, a prankster or even the kidnapper.
He drives to the shack, whereupon any doubt as to the note's creator is obliterated as the murky dwelling converts into a heavenly abode. The ethnically balanced Holy Trinity includes Papa, or God, a loving but cheeky African-American woman; Jesus, a gregarious Jewish man; and the Holy Spirit, a wispy light-hearted Asian woman. These portrayals have ignited controversy among some Christians, exacerbated by Young's characterization of Jesus, who makes anarchic proclamations like "as well-intentioned as it might be, you know that religious machinery can chew up people!" and "Who said anything about being a Christian? I'm not a Christian."
Attracted to this feisty attitude, Mack quickly becomes fond of Jesus, while ephemeral Sarayu, more abstractly, "is Action; she is the Breathing of Life." Mack must let go of alienating hierarchies, of which Jesus says with typical candour, "Chain of command? That sounds ghastly!" There is order in chaos, however, as Sarayu proves in her garden patterned after "[a] fractal … something considered simple and orderly that is actually composed of repeated patterns no matter how magnified."
To overcome grief, Mack must appreciate good and evil, flowers and weeds, and join the "circle of relationship." Jesus also pushes spiritual relationship as antidote to sorrow: "The world is broken because in Eden you abandoned relationship with us to assert your own independence." Relating to Jesus and Sarayu comes easily, but Mack's disappointment in his real father complicates his relationship with the Holy Father. Nonetheless, Papa needles him: "Like most men you find what you think of as fulfilment in your achievements, and Nan, like most women, find it in relationships."
Clichés permeate Papa's vernacular. In response to Mack's guilt, Papa pulls a Dr. Phil: "Let me know how that works for you," and in educating Mack on the needlessness of expectations he says, "You ain't heard nuthin' yet." Young wants us to know this is a freewheeling God, a God who shares Mack's affinity for Bruce Cockburn; "I am especially fond of Bruce, you know," confides Papa.
For all Papa's slaphappy charm, Mack struggles to comprehend why he allows horrific acts to occur. Papa's response: "We're not justifying it. We are redeeming it." Though redemption stories carry obvious lessons, they can also inspire further reading. Simone Weil and Walt Whitman are just a couple to turn to if what you're looking for is a liberal but deep analysis of independence and the God subject.
Janine Armin is coeditor of fiction collection "Toronto Noir," and New York editor of new fiction website www.Joyland.ca.
