The Shack – Part One

Having just finished reading The Shack, the wildly popular book by Wm. Paul Young I intend to blog some of my thoughts about the book here.  It will take a few posts (not sure how many yet) to share my thoughts on The Shack.  I have intentionally avoided reading any other reviews on this book so that my impressions are not clouded one way or the other by other people’s ideas.  Once I finish penning my impressions I will read other reviews and after reading them I may change my mind about my conclusions.

Please feel free to comment, disagree, agree, add to or take away from what I post here.  Try to be respectful when you disagree and humble when you agree.  I will seek to do the same. 

As literature, The Shack was enjoyable to read.  The plot is well constructed and the story moves at a pace that held my attention.  While a few events were predictable the plot did have a twist at the end that was unexpected (I won’t say what – no sense in ruining it for you).

On of the first points I would make about The Shack is that it reminds us of the power of story-telling.  The Shack is loaded with theology, psychology, and philosophy.  It teaches, but because of its story-telling format it is able to by-pass some of the normal resistance some people might have toward what it teaches. 

If Paul Young had written a book about “why bad things happen to good people,” or “where is God when people suffer” it probably would not have gotten much attention.  It would have merely been added to the long list of such works already available.  It would have been read only by a few people and probably mainly academics or apologists.  Since it is in a story form, and an interesting story at that, it has received a wide reading and has become the rage and “the book to read.”

When we deal with big ideas and issues we tend to forget how important it is to be able to communicate what we learn in ways that go beyond mere information.  This book reminds us how powerful and life-affecting important ideas can be when put in the context of a narrative story. 

Stories touch the heart as well as the mind, the emotions as well as the intellect.  Truth should move the heart as well as the mind.  Truth that only touches the mind and leaves the heart unmoved will probably not find the will affected much.  Truth that moves both the heart and mind will find the will compliant and responsive also.

Is there a danger in this approach?  Sure.  We all know people who have made decisions based only on emotion and once their brain was engaged they wondered what they were thinking.  Of course, the answer is they weren’t.  I don’t see this as a problem with this book.  The Shack is a story that moves the emotions, but it also speaks to the intellect.  It is not raw emotion.

Jesus understood and used the power of story.  We call most of his stories parables.  The most famous probably being the story we call “The Prodigal Son.”  It is a simple story, yet it teaches deep and profound truths like the nature of God’s love, His forgiveness, what repentance looks like, why we should received returning prodigals, and what works religion looks like and how it acts to name a few.

So my first observation about The Shack is that Young does us a favor by reminding us about the importance and power of story-telling.  A lesson that should be taken to heart by all of us.  Parents will teach their children more through narrative story-telling than they ever will through didactic instruction.  People will remember the stories we tell long after they forget the principles we impart. 

That doesn’t make factual information impartation evil.  It just means we need to be able to do more than that.  We need to learn to tell good stories – stories that have a deeper meaning and impart an important transformational truth.