Sunday, March 8, 2009

"The Shack"

-by Wm. Paul Young
2011
This book is a bit of a sensation in the world of letters. As they say, it's moving a lot of popcorn. No, that's not it...well anyway, people are reading the heck out of this thing.
And for a while, that knowledge was a source of no small agony for me.
The book was loaned to me by my brother-in-law, Steve. Due to our religious differences, and ascertaining that it was a spiritual book, i approached it with a certain amount of wariness. I determined to read it all though, in part because i very much hoped that Steve would read an entire book of my recommending, in turn.
The foreword was charming, and gave me cause for hope.
And then the first five or six chapters were possibly the most excruciating reading experience of my life. I truly wondered whether Mr. Young weren't some fifteen year-old. The event that sets the story in motion is an affirmation of the irrational child predator panic that grips our country. How many of you personally know a child who was abducted or hurt or killed by a stranger? I'm not seeing raised hands. Our societal taboos against hurting children are SO strong that prisoners, people supposedly at the bottom of the ethical food chain, reserve special punishment for anyone who hurts a child.
The writing was so achingly bad i'm not at all sure how i kept on. I had the passing thought that Steve loaned me the book to motivate my own writing career, implanting the idea in my head that if this moron got published, then i would almost have to try like hell to AVOID being published myself.
And then, a teeny miracle happened.
The book became an intelligent meditation on the nature of godliness.
Young writes about how "good" and "evil" are illusions, a point i've been making for years. My favorite line is about relationships, and how "love" is just the skin of knowing. He showed enough intelligence that i began to ponder the sincerity of his methodology. It seemed inexplicable that he would trot out the christian paradigm of father/son/holy ghost, as his intelligence seemed to run deeper and more all-encompassing. Put another way, i couldn't figure out why he would be content to automatically alienate all those billions of people with non-christian sensibilities. The best answer i can come up with (and it's actually a plausible one) is that he made a "deal with the devil". If this book had removed all reference to any specific religion, there's a fair chance that it would have been read only by academics. So congratulations, Mr. Young, that movie deal is on the way, and more importantly, a lot of people are being exposed to your more unconventional ideas.
As for my brother-in-law Steve, i offer my thanks, and an apology for the somewhat uncharitable thoughts that may have been lurking in my psyche, during those early unbearable chapters.

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