Tears in Heaven: Review of The Shack

“Oh God!” I was watching a recording of my very first sermon that I had ever preached and listening to my professor's comments recorded over the video of my “presentation” in the preaching class; of my pompous pacing and nervous squirming; botching some verse from the Bible. I didn't even realize how bad it was until I heard the professor let out a gasp on the record: “Oh God!” He definitely uttered it unwittingly, as the two words where slurred into a whisper. The words were pronounced as if he was an Olympic diving coach watching a rookie giddily prance off and spread-eagle from a 24-foot elevated diving board into a slow-motion belly flop.

I was preaching my very first sermon to my class at Moody Bible Institute and brought up my dorm neighbor who killed himself in a hospital parking lot just three weeks before as an illustration. Half the people in class knew him personally. A few were from my floor and were his friends. And, my professor also knew him. Everyone had to change their seating posture. I had their attention, alright.

I learned a very valuable lesson that day. I absolutely butchered my first sermon, but my professor still told me “good job” and recommended that I would work on two things, as he did with all green preaching students. I had to get home with the DVD recording of my sermon with his overlaid comments and hear him say “Oh God!” when I brought up the suicide. He didn't need to explain anything to me – I got it.

The valuable lesson I learned that day is this: shock tactic is very good for manipulation, and I must never use it like that. Tell something really ugly, and the people are chained, sitting quietly, afraid to move and riveted to listen to you unload on them whatever else follows. It happens a lot. This year, one of the leading pastors in Uganda was showing gay porn in churches and public forums in order to promote capital punishment for homosexual acts in his country, ignoring Psalm 101:3 - “I will set before my eyes no vile thing”.

The thing is: life is ugly, and the fine line in movies, literature, and music between redeeming evil and manipulative propaganda is very thin and hard to discern. And that's really what I want to talk about. Let me summarize “The Shack” without spoiling it for you. A serial killer abducts and murders a little girl in an old broken down shack in a national park. The book doesn't say, but the crime scene hints that the little girl was also possibly raped. After many years, Mack, the father and the protagonist, returns to the same shack and has a magical encounter with God finding answers, grace, forgiveness, mercy, and wholeness.

The encounter with God is a drawn out dreamy allegory driven by dialogs with hospitable black woman as God the Father, mysterious Asian woman as the Holy Spirit, a jolly Arab figure as Jesus Christ, and a Hispanic impersonation of Wisdom. Yes, it is full of bad theology for which the book has been slammed. But I don't think that this is altogether fair. It really is impossible to construct such a detailed and extravagant allegory without bending and distorting the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

What bothers me more is the relationship of the mystical content of the book to its narrative frame. John Grisham's novel “A Time to Kill” starts with a scene of two racist men abducting and raping a little black girl. The rest of the story is about justice. In “The Shack”, I am not able to grasp the connection between the murder of the little girl and what follows. It is a story of a father with a broken heart. The reader can sympathize with that, but why must we endure reading about this horrid method of execution of the little girl?

I suppose, both authors were going for the worst case scenario. The difference is that Grisham uses his story to drive the plot to a single powerful message, but Young uses his story to launch a scattered slide-show of divine comedy and banter. The tone and demeanor of the characters representing God are entirely unfitting. Little girl got murdered. Let's all eat delicacies, hug, joke around, and later go for a walk to remember it all and chat about it. It is repulsive as this tone makes jest of the seriousness of what had happened. When Lazarus died, Jesus wept.

This disconnect between the narrative and the mystical parts of the book is really the main problem with it. The main character Mack cries all the time, but why does Jesus not cry? Why does Jesus always smile and twirl in the book? The rift between the words and actions of the divine characters is staggering, and, frankly, cartoonish and disgusting.

All of us struggle with understanding evil and dealing with emotional trauma. Clapton wrote the song “Tears in Heaven” after his son tragically died. The song is powerful; it asks questions instead of answering them for God. Job likewise lost his children and just had a question for God. The beauty of a good question is that it can express faith and trust, the benefit of the doubt. We cry out to God from our misery not because we believe that knowing would make us feel better, but because we know that believing would bring us closer to Him. When Lazarus died, Jesus wept. God will wipe every tear away in heaven, but there will be tears to wipe – there will be tears in heaven.