Summary: The Shack

The GIST

The Shack by William Paul Young is a novel about the worst thing that can happen to a parent and about what a person might say to God afterward, if God would sit still for the conversation. Its hero, Mackenzie Allen Phillips, known to everyone as Mack, has lost his youngest daughter to a killer. Years later a note turns up in his mailbox inviting him to the very place where the evidence of her murder was found. It is signed "Papa," his wife's affectionate name for God. He goes, and what he finds there is a weekend with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, none of whom looks the way he was raised to imagine.

The book's own story is nearly as unlikely. Young, a Canadian author, wrote it as a Christmas present for his six children with no thought of publishing. Friends pressed him to, and after sixteen months and four rewrites with two former pastors, Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings, and no interest from religious or secular publishers, they started their own imprint, Windblown Media, to print it in 2007. One partner ran twelve personal credit cards to their limits to pay for it. With a three-hundred-dollar website and word of mouth passing from church to church and blog to blog, it reached number one on the New York Times paperback fiction list in June 2008 and stayed on top for 70 weeks, with more than ten million copies in print by 2010. It also set off a fierce argument among Christians that has never entirely cooled.

The Story

The novel is set in the American Northwest. Mack is a husband and a father of five, a man with a hard beginning: his own father was abusive, and Mack left home at thirteen. His wife, Nan, is the spiritual anchor of the family, the one whose faith is warm and close enough that she calls God Papa. Mack's faith is more guarded.

The catastrophe comes on a camping trip. Mack takes three of his children to Wallowa Lake near Joseph, Oregon, stopping at Multnomah Falls along the way. Two of the kids are out in a canoe when it tips over, and his son is trapped in the webbing and close to drowning. Mack plunges into the water and frees him. In those frantic minutes his youngest, six-year-old Missy, has been left alone at the campsite, and when he gets back she is gone. The police are called. The search leads to an abandoned shack deep in the woods, where they find her bloodstained dress. Her body is not there. The investigators conclude she was taken and killed by a serial murderer known as the Little Ladykiller. Even reviewers who dislike the book's theology grant that these opening chapters are gripping and hard to bear.

What settles over Mack afterward he calls The Great Sadness. It colors everything. His relationship with God, never easy, goes cold and distant.

Then the note arrives. Papa would like to meet him at the shack that coming weekend. Mack is baffled. But he cannot shake the possibility that it is exactly what it claims to be. When Nan and the children leave to visit relatives, he loads up a friend's Jeep and drives back to the one place on earth he never wanted to see again.

At first there is nothing there for him but the empty shack. He turns to leave. And then the world shifts around him. The shack and the land around it are transformed into something lush and welcoming, and when he goes inside, three people are waiting.

Papa, God the Father, is a large African American woman who also calls herself Elousia. She cooks wonderful food, plays music in the kitchen, and is quick with a kiss on the cheek. Jesus is a Middle Eastern carpenter, unimposing, in a flannel shirt with a tool belt. Sarayu, the Holy Spirit, appears as an Asian woman who seems made as much of wind and light as of anything solid, and she tends a garden.

Most of the novel is the conversation that follows, spread across meals, chores and walks. Mack comes in furious and is allowed to be. He is sarcastic, he swears, he accuses, and nobody strikes him down. In his first long talk with Papa, she tells him she will be the papa he never had, and explains that God is neither male nor female; when Mack asks why Scripture speaks of God as Father, she says a broken world stood in greater need of fathering. Around the dinner table the three explain that relationships were never meant to run on hierarchy and rules, and that their own life together is one of mutual love in which no one lords it over another. Jesus tells Mack that filling roles is the opposite of relationship, and startles him by declining the label of Christian for himself. Sarayu, working beside him in the garden, confesses a fondness for uncertainty.

Each of them takes Mack somewhere. He lies out under the stars with Jesus and later walks across a lake at his side. He works in the garden with Sarayu. He is brought before Sophia, the personification of God's wisdom, and invited to sit in the judge's seat himself, an exercise that shows him how partial and pain-driven human judgment is. He is led toward the two people he least wants to think about: the father who hurt him and the man who took Missy. And always the talk circles back to his daughter, to why a good and powerful God did not stop what happened, and to whether Mack can trust a God who allowed it.

How the weekend ends, what Mack is shown before he leaves, and what he finds when he drives home are best left for the reader. It is enough to say that the last chapters cast the whole encounter in a new light.

What It's Really About

Young has said the title is a metaphor for the house a person builds out of their own pain, the place where we get stuck and where shame or hurt is centered. Mack's return to the shack is a return to that place, and the book's wager is that God is willing to meet people there instead of waiting for them to clean themselves up first.

Its great theme is suffering and the goodness of God. Mack asks what grieving people ask, and the three answer at length. The picture that emerges is of a God who responds to the evil people do and works through it, in a world that human beings have bent toward independence and power. One passage a reader singled out describes a world in which the individual is constantly sacrificed to the survival of systems, political, economic or religious, a pattern so common that, like water to a fish, it goes unseen. Against systems the book sets relationship: a God who is three persons in a circle of affection and who wants the same closeness with people.

The second theme is forgiveness. Mack is asked to let go of his right to vengeance, for his own release as much as anyone's. One reviewer was grateful that Papa draws a firm line here: forgiving someone does not require restoring a relationship with them or letting them back into your life.

Then there is the portrait of God itself, the source of both the love and the outrage. For many readers, including some who are not religious at all, a God who cooks, laughs and listens made faith feel possible again; one such reader says she never once felt preached at and found herself crying and nodding along. A psychiatrist used the novel with patients and co-wrote a study guide with Young, and the theologian Randal Rauser wrote a sympathetic companion volume. Others were alarmed. Prominent evangelical critics called the book heretical, and a Baptist pastor's detailed review objects that it gives the Father and the Spirit physical bodies, depicts God in feminine form, treats Scripture and the institutional church lightly, and lets a man lounge and curse before a God who, in the Bible, makes prophets fall on their faces. Even friendlier reviewers concede the craft is uneven: the dialogue can turn into lectures, Mack's questions sometimes feel set up for the answers, and the story thins once the talking starts. One summed it up as a book whose message outruns its writing.

Who Should Read It

It is for anyone who has sat with a loss and found the usual religious answers too small, and for readers curious to see what moved millions of people and troubled so many pastors. Believers who are questioning what they were taught will find a great deal to chew on, and skeptics may be surprised by its tenderness. Those who hold to a traditional view of God should expect to be provoked. Be warned that the early chapters, involving the abduction of a child, are intense.