Well, Mackenzie, don’t just stand there gawkin’ with your mouth open like your pants are full…. Come and talk to me while I get supper on.
—Papa
In an old abandoned shack in the outback of the Oregon mountains, Mackenzie Allen Phillips is shocked by three unusual characters. It is supposed to be a showdown with God in “the place of his nightmares” (71), the very place where his Missy was murdered. But the three people he meets, a large African American woman with beaming eyes, a strong carpenter of Middle Eastern descent, and an Asian-looking woman who appears and disappears at will, are nothing like the God Mack imagined he would meet. In fact, the God he imagined is a no-show.
In all, Mack makes four trips to the shack. The first is the terrible night when the authorities find fragments of Missy’s red dress, and blood on the wooden floors. The second, several years later, is when Mack answers an invitation from Papa, his wife’s favorite name for God. Mack has mixed emotions, to be sure. He is a little intrigued, a little scared, and a lot angry. He borrows his friend’s Jeep and heads out, knowing that he is driving “into the center of his pain” (76).
After several hours of driving, Mack parks the Jeep a mile or so from the shack, but he can only take five steps before the knot in his gut makes him panic. “Please help me!” (77) he cries out, but there is no answer. At length he manages to follow the treacherous trail until he sees the shack. “The shack itself looked dead and empty, but as he stared it seemed for a moment to transform into an evil face, twisted in some demonic grimace, looking straight back at him and daring him to approach” (79). The fact that Mackenzie takes another step toward the shack is a lesson in courage, or anger. He has a lot to talk to God about.
Standing at the door, his mind flashes back to that terrible night, his emotions in turmoil. He calls out to God, but as before, there is no answer. Then again he calls and again there is no answer. Courageously facing his fear of what may be inside, Mack opens the door. And that’s just it: there is nothing inside. No God, no life; just emptiness, shadows, the barren nothingness of the god of our fears, and the bloodstains of his Missy. Mack’s god, our god, the god of our fallen imaginations, is not real—never has been, and never will be. But the trauma this god inflicts is real to us.
This is a brilliant move on Young’s part. Without a single theological word, he has ripped open the tragedy of Western theology—and made us feel it. At this moment in the book, and hopefully at this point in history, the sterility of that imaginary god is exposed for all to see. To be sure, Mack’s Great Sadness is rooted in the horrible loss of Missy, but it’s also rooted in the terrible absence of God. That is a lonely place.
Inside, alone and helpless, Mack explodes with pain. “Why? Why did you let this happen? Why did you bring me here? Of all the places to meet you—why here? Wasn’t it enough to kill my baby? Do you have to toy with me too?” (80). In a fit of rage he all but destroys the room, exhausting himself as he throws a chair and beats the floor with one of its broken legs. And then his pain, his anger, his wrath at God are funneled into three screaming words: “I hate you!” (80). It is the scream of honesty, the only real response when our pain and the cold, heartless impotence of this god collide in real-life tragedy. I hate you!
He slumps down in tears, engulfed in his Great Sadness. Once again, taking “aim at the indifferent God he imagined” (80), he shouts sarcastically:
So where are you? I thought you wanted to meet me here. Well, I’m here, God. And you? You’re nowhere to be found! You’ve never been around when I’ve needed you—not when I was a little boy, not when I lost Missy. Not now! Some “Papa” you are! (80–81)
I’m done, God… I can’t do this anymore. I’m tired of trying to find you in all of this. (82)
I hate you! The last word of the human race, trapped in the great darkness. But such awful desolation is not the end of the story. For the lover of our souls meets us in our pain. This, too, is a brilliant move, to my mind, and one of the great themes running throughout The Shack. Unlike the indifferent god of our imaginations, the Father, Son, and Spirit do in fact meet us in our pain, in our tragedy, and especially in our darkness and sin. It is not so much—as we will see—that the blessed Trinity is absent to the rest of our lives; it is that, in the trauma created by the collision of life and the false god of our imaginations, we begin to get new eyes.
Having screamed his final word, rejecting god, Mackenzie leaves the shack and heads back to the Jeep. It is then, after he has spoken his “peace” with god, that the world changes—his world and, hopefully, ours. Thirty or so yards toward the Jeep, the woods come alive with light. A bizarre life shines in the stillness of Mack’s disgust. A month of spring’s thaw unfolds in a few short moments. New hope emerges as the snow melts around him, and the flowers unveil their glory. Intrigued yet cautious, he makes the decision to go back to the shack. But it, too, has changed. No longer a dilapidated shack, it is now a finely built log cabin with a white picket fence, and smoke wending from the chimney. He thinks he can hear laughter (83). Mack has no idea what lies before him, but it is not to be missed that his first hint was laughter.
But how is a man supposed to believe such a miracle? Half convinced that he has lost his mind, Mackenzie doesn’t know what to think, or what to do. But it’s too late. Standing on the porch trying to decide if he should knock, Mack, like the prodigal son, never gets a chance to say a word. The door flies open. A large African American woman, whose face beams with life and love itself, runs to embrace him, lifting Mackenzie off the ground in joy while shouting his name as if she has known and loved him all his life.
Mack is stunned silent, clueless as to who this woman is, but finding his soul drinking in every ounce of the moment. Who doesn’t want to be embraced? Who doesn’t want to be called by name by someone smiling with delight? His defenses are up, to be sure, but his heart is helplessly melting. Shocked but delighted, bewildered yet moved to tears, he loves the way she shouts his name. “ ‘Mack, look at you!’ she fairly exploded. ‘Here you are, and so grown up. I have really been looking forward to seeing you face to face…. My, my, my, how I do love you!’ And with that she wrapped herself around him again” (85). You can see the wheels turning in Mack’s mind: Who is this woman? And why is she here? How does she know me, and why does she care? What on earth is going on?
But he hardly has time to process what is happening before an Asian-looking woman, whom he can barely see, invades his space, brushing his cheek. As best he can tell, she is dressed something like a gardener, but she is almost invisible, shimmering in light. “ ‘I collect tears,’ she said” (86). Then Mack notices a Middle Eastern man leaning against the doorjamb. He is rather ordinary-looking, but strong, and his smile somehow speaks volumes. “Mack knew instantly that he liked him” (87). Covered in sawdust, with a tool belt around his waist, he looks like he might be a carpenter.
Overwhelmed, Mack tries to steady himself, asking somewhat humorously, “Are there more of you?” (87).
“ ‘No, Mackenzie,’ chuckled the black woman. ‘We is all that you get, and believe me, we’re more than enough’ ” (87).
Less than thirty minutes ago Mack was fuming at god, screaming out, “I’m done! I hate you!” as his final verdict. Now he finds himself in the astonishing embrace of a black woman who obviously knows him and loves him. Mackenzie has no clue what to do or say. Even though he is still hurting, still stewing in anger at the god of his imagination, Mack stands surrounded by two beautiful women and a carpenter, the three of whom somehow know him and accept him—even like him—just as he is. He feels strangely at home. He feels noticed and known, cared for, even wanted and certainly welcomed. Then he catches the unmistakable whiff of his own mother’s perfume coming from the black woman. Still guarded—and who wouldn’t be—he feels tears welling up in his eyes.
And so Mackenzie Allen Phillips unexpectedly finds himself included in a fellowship of love. In a few short hours he will marvel at their relationship, at their other-centeredness, mutual respect and delight, and the way they accept him as he is. Little does he know that this gentle acceptance will transform him from the inside out.
In many ways the whole story of The Shack is crammed into this scene, as are some rather large theological issues. It’s a picture that stirs longed-for hope within us, and begs a thousand questions—from the character of God to the fact that Mack was included before he repented and believed, from the purpose of the Incarnation to the meaning of Jesus’ death, from what it means to be human to the real meaning of heaven and hell. And we will get to these in due course. But first, a simple question: What if this moment—this scene of Papa’s embrace—is what happens to us when we die? What if we wake up on the other side hearing Papa shout our name, surrounded by Sarayu collecting our tears, and Jesus, covered in sawdust from the coffin for our Great Sadness?
Let me go a little further. What if it’s already true now? What if we are already so known and loved and welcomed now?
Lesson One of the story is that we are Mackenzie. The astonishing embrace enfolding him is the truth about us. We are known, loved, and delighted in by the Father, Son, and Spirit, just as we are, whether we believe in God or not. The truth is we have already been embraced by Jesus’ Papa and by the Spirit. That is what the coming of Jesus was all about. The blessed Trinity has already met us in our shacks. In Jesus they have pitched their tents inside our garbage cans. We belong to the Father, Son, and Spirit. We always have, and always will; Jesus has seen to that personally. But like Mackenzie, we have wrong eyes; there is so much hurt, we cannot possibly know the truth or believe it—yet. But so it is.