The Shack

A month or so ago my friend said, “Read The Shack.” Respecting her judgment, I got a copy when I got home and read The Shack. Definitely worth the read.

Some of the plot is predictable – man who had a hypocritical and cruel father loses youngest daughter to brutal murder, blames himself, helps the rest of the family get past the pain but is himself still gripped with what he terms The Great Sadness, and definitely angry with God. By the end of the book, depression and anger are gone. But so is predictable theology.

It is the free-wheeling characters inhabiting the pages that make the book interesting. Characters that poke holes through most of courteous religiosity, form and rules. God, for example, is a large African American woman named Papa. Why? “To reveal myself to you as a very large, white grandfather figure with a flowing beard, like Gandalf, would simply reinforce your stereotypes…Hasn’t it always been a problem for you to embrace me as your father? After what you’ve been through, you couldn’t very well handle a father right now, could you?”

C.S. Lewis would like how The Shack deals with The Problem of Pain. “We created you, the human, to be in face-to-face relationship with us.... As difficult as it will be for you to understand, everything that has taken place is occurring exactly according to this purpose, without violating choice or will.”

“How can you say that with all the pain in this world, all the wars and disasters…what is the value in a little girl being murdered by some twisted deviant?”

Honest questions. Honest answers. “We’re not justifying it. We are redeeming it.” Allowing man to take power in his own hands is costly, but the cross was more costly.

“You really don’t understand yet,” Papa says. “You try to make sense of the world in which you live based on a very small and incomplete picture of reality. It is like looking at a parade through a tiny knothole of hurt, pain, self-centeredness, and power and believing you are on your own and insignificant.”

There is more. Not deeply profound, but interesting. Some predictability, some sheer fantasy. Definitely outside the ring of pious drivel that makes one gag, and perhaps approaching the realm of thoughtful reality.