The Shack

The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity

            by Wm. Paul Young

“Mackenzie Allen Philip’s youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later, in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend.

Against his better judgment, he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.”

In approximately 250 pages, Young adapts his own story of change and tells us where God is in a world filled with such unspeakable pain. Young’s main character, Mack, encounters God—in all three forms—in very real ways. Man? Meet God.

Young recognizes the ability to describe a place where you have been, and he uses the land around him. The details give depth and honesty into Young’s story. The setting details and family crisis set the reader at ease, enabling the story to take hold of the heart.

Mack begins the adventure of talking with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, when he runs into Jesus, a large, loud, black woman. Mack continues to shock readers with his encounters and discussions. Talking with God and Jesus, readers quickly identify with Mack’s understanding, or lack thereof, of the divine trio.

God is represented by an overweight, African American woman. Jesus is represented by a young, average looking, Jewish man. The Holy Spirit is represented by an Asian woman who looks like a mirage and moves like the wind. Young compels the readers to unconsciously accept a god who transposes all generations and cultures.

While this idea of encountering God sheds great light onto the mysteriousness and misunderstanding of God, it also omits a very important element of the Judeo Christian belief: God is the father, Jesus the son, and Holy Spirit is God living inside humans. Even as Young writes for later chapters, most readers find that even with creative license, God should very much be portrayed as a male.

“I [Jesus] came as a man to complete a wonderful picture in how we made you [man]. From the first day we hid the woman within the man, so that at the right time we could remove her from within him. We didn’t create man to live alone; she was purposed from the beginning. By taking her out of him, he birthed her in a sense. We created a circle of relationship, like our own, but for humans. She, out of him, and now all the males, including me [Jesus], birthed through her, and all originating, or birthed, from God”

            Chapter 10

Young creates a character that anyone can immediately connect with. Even as readers learn more about Mack, they find themselves looking into a mirror at times. Readers learn in the first half of the novel that Mack cannot escape his pain, even while with The Great Comforter. And like most humans lost in this technology age, Mack cannot share his pain with those who care most about him.

When Young presents the discussion about the crucifixion, his presentation lacks a few important elements. Part of the identity of Judeo Christianity is based in the crucifixion and the resurrection, but Young brings in an element of creativeness that somehow detracts from the story laid out from the Bible.

Perhaps the most gripping chapters are very late in the book—incredibly climatic even within themselves. Mack is asked, by a new representation of God, to sit for judgment. Mack’s argument with her presents the limited human understanding and our urge for fulfillment through loving those around us. The most powerful moment of the entire reading is found on the pages when Mack verbalizes his understanding of the sacrifice Jesus made for all humans on the cross.

Ending with a surprise that will completely catch you off guard or that you see coming a mile ahead, Wm. Paul Young writes a fictional novel that is sure to catch the attention of your heart. Whether or not you believe in the God he writes about will not matter; the discussions and understanding that one human finds in his quest for peace may change your world. It change Young’s.