In mid-October of 2007, Wendy Marchant of Sault Ste. Marie, Canada, rang me on the phone. Her first words were, “Baxter, I am not getting off the phone until you promise me that you will read a book called The Shack.” My first thought was Wendy, come on, not you. From time to time people send me manuscripts of “the best book that has ever been written.” And then two or three days later an e-mail follows wanting to know what I thought of the book. But Wendy is no stranger; in fact, she is a dear friend, a sister who loves me and prays for me and my family all the time. So with my mind shuffling between not again… but this is Wendy, I asked her what the book was about.
“Baxter, I am not going to tell you; it would ruin it. Just trust me on this one.”
“Okay, Wendy, here’s what I will do. Deer season is just around the corner, so I will get this book and put it on the top of my deer-stand reading pile.” And I did.
A month later, on the opening day of gun season, I headed for my deer stand, The Shack dutifully placed in my backpack. Now understand, I am not much of a deer hunter. I have only killed three deer in my entire life. But I love being in the woods. So some years ago my friend Jeff and I built what we affectionately call “the Cadillac stand,” complete with tin roof, carpet, and two seriously comfortable chairs. For me it’s more an outdoor study and a private sanctuary with fantastic views. In the Cadillac I read, write, pray, and sometimes hunt. So I walked up the stairs, got everything situated, sat down, and opened The Shack.
The opening words from Willie’s introduction got my attention: “Who wouldn’t be skeptical when a man claims to have spent an entire weekend with God, in a shack no less?” So, I thought to myself, this is a book about a man meeting God in the woods, in a shack. That’s good. I wonder if this shack is an old hunting camp? But which God? That’s the question, and please tell me this is not going to be the same old, same old. But then came the story of Mack’s “dad” tying him to a tree and beating him for two days, and then the phrase “the Great Sadness,” and then the Multnomah princess story—then Missy—and then I found myself crying my eyes out in the Cadillac.
With my soul ripped open, I wailed. When they found Missy’s dress in the shack, I stood up, blew my nose, dried my tears, and shook The Shack in my right hand. “William P. Young! I don’t know who you are, but I promise you this: if you deliver the same old distant, untouchable, legalistic god who scans the universe with his disapproving heart as the answer to this gut-wrenching trauma, I will take your book and walk two hundred yards, lean it against a tree, and personally eliminate this copy from the cosmos.”
But the brother delivered. Paul Young knows Jesus’ Abba. The Shack is not about the disapproving god of our fallen imaginations; it is about the shocking fondness of the triune God for sinners. It is about the freedom of the Father, Son, and Spirit to love and to embrace us in our terrible brokenness. It’s about the determined passion of the blessed Trinity1 to deliver us from ourselves, so that we can live loved—because we are. We belong to the Father, Son, and Spirit. We always have, and always will. We just can’t see it. And because we can’t see it, we live with the poisoning weight of Mack’s burden, which we unwittingly share with all around us, including creation.
There is no more beautiful picture of the truth of the triune God than the scene of Papa lifting Mackenzie Allen Phillips off his feet in the greatest hug in the universe. I was stunned, and thrilled, and thrilled again. Somewhere inside we all know it to be so, that this is what Jesus’ Abba is like, that this is the truth that sets us free, that this divine love is real. It just does not square with our heads, with our entrenched ideas, laden as they are with our proof texts and wounded hearts—with what Athanasius called “mythology.”
I read all afternoon, determined to finish before dark. But I didn’t make it. So I sat riveted in the Cadillac with a flashlight in my mouth until my son texted me that he was waiting at our base camp.
Never intended for publication, The Shack was written by William P. Young (known to his friends as Paul) as a story for his children. He had two aims: first, to give a gift that would express his love for his kids; and second, “to help them understand what had been going on in his inside world” (14),2 as his friend Willie put it. Paul’s goal was to get the story to Office Depot before Christmas to make fifteen copies for his children, his wife, and a few others. But even working three jobs, there wasn’t enough money. Eventually copies were made, and the story circulated through his family and friends. He was encouraged to have it published as a proper book, but found that it was rejected by every publisher he contacted as being “too out of the box” or “having too much Jesus.” For Paul, its actual publication as a real book, now one of the bestselling books in history, is lagniappe, as the Cajuns say—a little something extra. His dream was fulfilled when the first copies were made and his children had a story that would explain something of their father’s journey into the real world.
I heard Paul say that he reached the point in his life when he cried out, “Papa, I am never again going to ask you to bless something that I do, but if you have something that you are blessing that I could share in, I would love that. And I don’t care if it’s cleaning toilets or holding the door open or shining shoes.” And Papa replied, “Paul, I’ll tell you what, how about I bless this little story you are writing for your kids? You give it to yours, and I will give it to mine.” The rest, as they say, is history.
But is it? There is far more going on in an average person’s life than anyone would dare to dream. And that is certainly true of Paul Young. The Shack is not a novel written by an academic who finally learned to communicate with regular people. There is a story behind the story—several stories, in fact, but I will stick to Willie’s explanation: “to help them understand what had been going on in his inside world” (14). The inside world, the world of the invisibles, of pain and turmoil, of shame, broken hearts, and broken dreams, is the world that drives us all, and especially the larger-than-life tale in The Shack. The story behind the story is the gut-wrenching hell that Paul Young suffered in his own life. I have seen a picture of Paul when he was six years old. He looked like an old man—weary, miserable, spent, and terribly sad. His eyes screamed despair. The picture made me cry. But that is the beginning of this story we have all—or at least most of us—come to love.
By the time Paul was six years old, he had been emotionally abandoned, physically and verbally beaten, and sexually abused—repeatedly. To say the least, he was crippled inside from his early days in life. No child—no person—can withstand such trauma. It creates a lethal roux3 of shame, fear, insecurity, anxiety, and guilt. These invisibles coalesce into a damning, debilitating, and unshakable whisper: “I am not all right. I am not good, not worthy, not important, not lovable, not human,”4 which haunts every single moment of life. How does a child, or anyone, cope with an inner world of such anguish? No one can.
As a fish was not made to live on the moon, we were never designed to live in shame. But what do you do? Where do you go? Most of us bury it all in a garbage can in the back room of our souls, and move on. Or try to. But what we bury rules us. What we don’t know that we don’t know will destroy us. “I am not” becomes “I will be,” and we dream a dream of becoming. “If I can just get married and have children…” “If I can just get that job or promotion, that money, that car, that house, that power, that position, that new relationship…” And off we go. But such “things” are incompetent to address spiritual pain. They never work, though we will defend them till they kill us. So we medicate, go on autopilot, check out; or we stay busy, we get involved in a great cause, manage other people’s inner worlds, live through our children, or just stay drunk in one way or another. It’s too much to cope with head-on.
Paul Young turned to religion, partly because it was the environment he grew up in and therefore readily available, and partly because it presented a possible way to perform his way into becoming valuable. He was born in Alberta, Canada, but before his first birthday found himself on the mission field in the highlands of Netherlands New Guinea (West Papua). Around the age of six, as was required by the particular mission board, he was shipped off to boarding school. Before he turned ten, the family unexpectedly returned to Canada, and by the time he graduated from high school, Paul had attended thirteen different schools. His dad had made the change from missionary to pastor.
These facts don’t tell you about the pain of trying to adjust to different cultures, of life losses that were almost too staggering to bear, of walking down railroad tracks at night in the middle of winter screaming into the windstorm, of living with an underlying volume of shame so deep and loud that it constantly threatened any sense of sanity, of dreams not only destroyed but obliterated by personal failure, of hope so tenuous that only the trigger seemed to offer a solution.5
Religion was the only world Paul knew, the cards he had been dealt. So he played them. He believed in the “religious” version of Christianity. He had to. With “I am not good” whispering in every breeze, he set out to prove that he was. He graduated at the top of his class in college, became a shining star; a people-pleasing, religious performer on his way to the top. But every moment involved the exhausting task of hypervigilance, constantly scanning each group, each discussion, each meeting and moment to manage people’s impressions of himself. For how could Paul, how can any of us, let people know of the dying inside?
With one hand pushing down on the lid of his garbage can, he smiled, taught the Bible, and became the “nice guy,” the counselor, while keeping everyone at a safe distance. But he found no relief from the raging turmoil in his inner world. He cried out to God for healing, rededicating himself and his life a hundred times, until his “rededicator” finally burned out. His life became a form of hiding, while he desperately searched for relief and help anywhere he could find it. But there is no healing in religion. Healing happens when you meet Jesus in your garbage can—or your shack—a place Paul, like most of us, tried hard to deny even existed.
He performed himself into ministry, into business, into marriage, into fatherhood, trying to the point of exhaustion to become an authentic human being while hiding the underlying shame and personal failures.
A single phone call rocked his world forever—two words, in fact: “I know.” Kim, Paul’s wife, had found out about the affair he was having with one of her friends. An affair is one way that shame works its poison in our lives. There are millions of others, of course, but one is that we turn to another person, a “magical other”6 who will be our all, our life, our salvation. I suspect Paul found out what the poet meant when he said, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”7 But that’s not the whole truth. Heaven has no ally like a woman who knows how to love. The dedication in Paul’s book reads, “To Kim, my Beloved, thank you for saving my life.”
While Mackenzie’s weekend at the shack represents eleven years of Paul’s actual life—eleven years of pain and emotional torture, depression, and mere flashes of hope—it was Kim’s heroic love wrapped in fury that held it all together. From a human perspective, without Kim and her heart, Paul Young would probably be dead, tucked away in some cold asylum, or an empty man still performing. There would have been no story to tell—at least, not one about meeting the blessed Trinity in the garbage can.
On the other side of hell, as real freedom and life began to dawn, it was Kim who insisted that Paul write something for the children to explain his journey and newfound liberation. She didn’t mean a book, and neither did Paul, but most folks are thrilled that it all turned out this way. On more than one occasion, I have heard him speak of Kim and their children with tears streaming down his face. The book was born in the crucible of life, of trauma and abuse; of empty religion, misery and betrayal; of mercy, love, and reconciliation. Luther said somewhere that God makes theologians by sending them to hell. In hell, of course, no one is interested in mere theology. In the emptiness of grief, in the pain, the trauma of suffering, we are not interested in pseudo-promises, intellectual masturbation, or “Skippy, the wonder-Christ,” as my friend Ken Blue puts it. What we learn in hell is that we want out. We learn desperation for life, for healing, for real salvation, for a Savior who saves here and now, who reconciles, who heals our brokenness and delivers us from our shame. We need something that works.
This is the story behind the story. The Shack could have easily been titled From Hell to Heaven, or From Overwhelming Shame to Being Loved into Life, or How Jesus Healed a Screwed-Up Man, or even With Gods Like Ours, No Wonder We Are So Sad and Broken. For the story is about hell and heaven, trauma, shame, and finding love—the real Jesus accepting a broken man; and it is about the Father, Son, and Spirit finding us in the far country of our terrible and powerless mythology—to share their life with us. For the truth behind the universe is that God is Father, Son, and Spirit; and the one unflinching purpose of the blessed Trinity is that we would come to taste and feel, to know and experience, the very trinitarian life itself.
What Paul and Kim have lived through and have discovered in the love of Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu is the “joy inexpressible and full of glory” that Peter talked about,8 and the abounding life that Jesus promised.9 They cannot go back to the same old do-more-try-harder religion with its properly attested Bible verses. Like C. S. Lewis, in the midst of misery they were “surprised by joy.”10
Some have taken offense at the theology of The Shack. Paul’s response is not one of theological argument or biblical prooftexting, though he is very adept at both. His response is his own life and relationships. He would say, “I have a T-shirt from hell—several of them, in fact. Religion doesn’t work anywhere, and especially there, but the Father, Son, and Spirit came to find me in my hell. They accepted me, loved me, embraced me, and are healing me with their love.” I think Paul would also ask a simple question: “How’s your theology working for you?” And, knowing Paul, he would follow that with, “How does your wife or husband and your friends think your theology is working for you?” So, while The Shack is a story for his children, it is a bit more complicated than that. This story is a matter of life or death. Paul Young is serious. He wants his own children to see the disastrous incompetence of religion to heal our broken souls, and he wants them to know the astonishing liberation of Papa’s embrace.
The Father, Son, and Spirit, whom he calls Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu, are not myths like Santa Claus, the white, blue-eyed Jesus, and the tooth fairy. They are real. They meet us in our pain; in our anger, bitterness, and resentment; in our shame and guilt and powerlessness; in our miserable, broken relationships—and in our deadly religion—and there they love us into life and freedom. Hence the second dedication: to “all us stumblers who believe Love rules. Stand up and let it shine.”11
Like Paul Young, though for different reasons, Mackenzie Allen Phillips is a shattered man. A few years ago he began living a parent’s worst nightmare: his youngest daughter, Missy, was kidnapped, murdered, and thrown away. “It all happened during Labor Day weekend, the summer’s last hurrah before another year of school and autumn routines” (27). Mack took three of his kids on a camping trip; it was then that Missy was taken. Since then Mack has been trapped in “The Great Sadness,”12 as he calls it, a gross and unholy cesspool of his own helplessness, Missy’s absence, and the silence of God. He is surrounded by four great kids and his wife, Nan, who knows how to love, but Mack’s inner world is as gnarled as a box of loose coat hangers. He is trying, trying to live in his grief, but hell itself would be a relief for those who suffer the loss of a child. It is just wrong. Overwhelming.
You will never again hear your daughter’s laughter, see her smile, or hear her speak your name—except in nightmares. There will be no sleepovers, no first dates, no boyfriends, no proms, no field trips, no shared pain, no surprises. It’s all over, gone, like the last ray of light before dark. And then there is silence. The grief of it all, the despair and anger and guilt and powerlessness swirl together to cast a spell of numbness on your being. Your mind is dazed. Your capacity to notice, to connect, to feel—to feel alive, to feel others, to feel anything—slows like molasses in winter as the hurt dissolves the color of a rose, and the world becomes essentially joyless. And then the horrible quiet of absence begins eating away the memories (168).
The Great Sadness drains the life of your already-broken soul, stealing your very “sense of being alive” (76). Then there are the horrible dreams of powerlessness. Mack dreams of being stuck in mud, frantically trying to scream a warning to Missy, but no sound ever emerges from his screams (27, 118). He wakes in a sweat, emotionally tortured, full of guilt, stewing in regret, helpless and despairing. Then there is the question of God. Why did this happen? Where was God? Why did he allow Missy to be taken? Didn’t he care? Mack’s mind races, trying to find some way to make sense out of such appalling injustice. But anger, blame, resentment fester in the scars of his wound:
“You don’t believe that Father loves his children very well, do you? You don’t truly believe that God is good, do you?” [Sophia asked.]
“Is Missy his child?” Mack snapped.
“Of course!” she answered.
“Then, no!” he blurted, rising to his feet. “I don’t believe that God loves all of his children very well.” (158, my italics)
“Isn’t that your just complaint, Mackenzie? That God has failed you, that he failed Missy? That before the Creation, God knew that one day your Missy would be brutalized, and still he created? And then he allowed that twisted soul to snatch her from your loving arms when he had the power to stop him. Isn’t God to blame, Mackenzie?”…
“Yes! God is to blame!” (163, my italics)
Lost in the cosmos of his pain, Mack is left holding the bag of God’s incompetence. In such a place, “reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.”13 Bewildered and angry, he has quietly become a broken, tired ghost of a man. The days, months, and years pass by, mired in his Great Sadness. Then, on an icy winter day, he slips and slides his way to his mailbox to discover a single note—from God:
Mackenzie,
It’s been a while. I’ve missed you.
I’ll be at the shack next weekend if you want to get together.
—Papa (18)
And so begins the tale of the healing of Mackenzie Allen Phillips. His liberation involves the thrilling love of the Father, Son, and Spirit in patient, tender care and astonishing respect for Mack. They meet him in his nightmare and nurture him through a revolution in his notions of God, the purpose of human existence, who he is and who others are, the meaning of Jesus’ death, and what it means to live life.
While Paul Young may never have intended the story for publication, that is not to say that the Holy Spirit didn’t have plans of his own. The wild popularity of The Shack tells us that something in this story strikes a very deep and common chord. And while Mack is a fictitious character, he is no foreigner to any of us. This is the story within the story. We are Mackenzie; he is us. We may not have lost a child so brutally as Mack, but not one of us left our own childhood without wounds, and I dare guess that most of us have had a bellyful of pain and bitter disappointment. Mack’s hurt is intense, and his pain raises questions that are deep, and they are our questions, too. He is caught between the proverbial rock of a terrible tragedy and the hard place of a God who is silent, if not cruel. And that hard place haunts us. Mack has nowhere to go in his pain. His religion is inept at best. He is alone, on his own, bearing the horror of Missy’s death as a man with no answers. So the story within the story is that The Shack is our story, too, the story of our pain and blindness, of the God who seems so absent, so uncaring and impotent when it really matters, and of our lives paused in shame. But it is also the story of our liberation—if we want it.
In that moment when Papa opened the door of the shack and embraced a broken, saddened Mackenzie Allen Phillips in utter love, was it not the case with you that an ancient hope sprang to life in your soul? Did you not cry? It’s a love story that we desperately want to believe, but we can’t. We know it’s true. But how could it be? One scene raises a universe of questions. Could God be this good? Could I be so wrong? Could it be this simple? Yes! Yes! Yes!
Mack found no real help in the very “religion” with which many of us have grown up. To be sure, he eventually found serious healing, but the price was the deconstruction of almost everything he had ever been told about God, about himself and others, about life—though not of what he had heard whispered to him in the Spirit. And here is the fascinating part for me as a theologian. What Mackenzie discovered was the sheer goodness and love of the Father, Son, and Spirit, the ancient truth that once changed the world. The Shack is the voice of the early Church calling us back from our craziness to our true home in the Father, Son, and Spirit.
The story within the story is that Paul Young—through the tragic life and healing of Mackenzie Allen Phillips—has found a way to steal behind the watchful dragons14 of our deism, legalism, and rationalism, and introduce us to the truth that sets us free. And the truth is a person (97), who shares life and all things in other-centered love with his Papa, in the wonderful freedom of the Holy Spirit. And a person who has crossed all worlds to find us in our pain. And a person who brought his Papa and the Holy Spirit with him. Somewhere inside we know it’s true. But we’re afraid. For when you pull on this thread, a lot of rug begins to unravel. Nevertheless, just when you fear that your world is vanishing, you discover that Someone is weaving a new carpet of unimaginable simplicity, freedom, and life.
In the midst of the story, when Mack is being loved through a fifteen-or-so-step process of healing, Sophia exhorts him with words that all lovers of life must heed: “Maybe your understanding of God is wrong” (166); and then Sarayu, “Be willing to reexamine what you believe” (199).
A little over a week after I read The Shack in the Cadillac stand, my son and I were watching Eli Manning and the New York Giants on TV, when my cell phone rang. It was Sunday afternoon. As I looked at the number, my son asked who it was. “I don’t know this number. Where is the 503 area code?”
“Got no idea,” he said. “It’s not from around here.”
“I don’t either,” I muttered, and moved my finger to mute the call, when something told me to answer.
“Hello, this is Baxter.”
“Baxter, this is Paul Young.”
The name didn’t register, at all. I don’t know a Paul Young, I thought to myself as my mind reeled through people I have met in my travels.
“You may know me as William.”
“William Paul Young,” I whispered to myself, the name still not registering. Then it hit me, and I blurted out, “William P. Young?”
“I am,” he said in a way that I could tell he was enjoying himself.
“The William P. Young?”
“Well, I don’t know about the ‘the’ part, but I am William P. Young. My friends call me Paul.”
“Are you the dude who wrote like the best book that has been written in the last five hundred years?”
“I don’t know about that, but I wrote The Shack.”
“Dude! Why in the world are you calling me? The whole world wants to talk with you.”
“Well, I got an e-mail from your friend Tim Brassell. He said that I needed to get in touch with you because you have written the theology that goes with The Shack. So I called.”
It took me a full five minutes before I could believe what was happening. And then I told him about the Cadillac stand, and he laughed, and then I asked a thousand questions, and he answered most of them.
An hour and a half later we said good-bye, and I immediately phoned Tim and told him what had happened. I was already scheduled to do a conference for Tim and Bill Winn at Bill’s church in Virginia in April, so I was eager to get Tim and Bill to invite Paul, which they did.
Since that phone call and the April conference,15 Paul and I have become close friends, and I have had the privilege of teaching with him on The Shack in three countries. It is always amazing to hear his story, and equally amazing that so many millions of people relate so readily both to Mackenzie’s struggle and to Paul’s life.
Let me relate a story that gives some perspective on Paul, and a hint on the appeal of The Shack. Paul and I were touring across Australia in November 2008. We were with singer-songwriter Vanessa Kersting and just settling in for a flight from Melbourne to Brisbane. Vanessa and I were sitting together, and Paul was somewhere behind us, when over the intercom came the captain’s voice: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. Today we have a very special guest on board.” Smiling, I turned to Vanessa and said, “Someone found out that Paul is on the plane.” She smiled, too, and then the captain said, “Today is Baxter Kruger’s fiftieth birthday.” With that the passengers erupted in cheers and applause. I was shocked, and a little embarrassed, and as I turned around, waving and thanking the people, I caught the gleaming eye of Paul Young, grinning from ear to ear like a little boy who had surprised his parents with a special gift. Such a gesture meant the world to me on my birthday, especially as I was halfway around the planet from my own family. But what struck me was that in spite of all the trauma that Paul had endured, he was getting to play.
What Willie said about Mack is true of Paul:
But I have to tell you that I’ve never been around another adult who lives life with such simplicity and joy. Somehow he has become a child again. Or maybe more accurately, he’s become the child he never was allowed to be; abiding in simple trust and wonder. (249–50)
I think this freedom sings throughout the story. And it’s the haunting tune we all long to hear—and to live to. For it is our song, too.