Christians in Cinema

In 2007, author William Paul Young ignited a firestorm within the Christian and publishing communities with his novel The Shack. Originally written as a story for his children, he had no idea that the allegory of his own journey would rise to the top of the New York Times’ Bestseller list, the USA Today Bestseller list, and that of any other publication tracking book sales.

He also did not expect to find himself at the center of so much controversy within the religious community. His characterization of God as a large black woman, Jesus as a Middle-Eastern carpenter, and the Holy Spirit as an Asian woman named Sarayu who loves to garden, raised many cries of heresy.

To talk with Paul Young is to realize he is a man who had an extraordinary encounter with his God that changed his life. He is a man so at peace with himself, with his Father, and others that it has an immediate calming effect. He is in the middle of supporting a friend whose son is in crisis but has the time to talk with me about all things related to The Shack.

It has profoundly increased our respect for the human creation and for the incredible wonder that’s inside of people.

You wrote the story originally for your family. How has it impacted them?

Paul:    I thankfully have a very healthy family. I’ve got six kids who all love Jesus. They all have their own relationship with him. I didn’t write this story to try to communicate something to them so they’d change. If anything, it has opened up our conversations about people because we’re around all kinds of people now that we weren’t before.

If anything, it has profoundly increased our respect for the human creation and for the incredible wonder that’s inside of people. It doesn’t matter if they’ve got position or power or money; those kinds of things really don’t matter at all, and we get to be around a lot of people that we wouldn’t have otherwise. It is such an incredible joy.

The book had a different impact on each of the kids because they’re different ages, and they’ve been involved in the conversations in different ways at different times in their journeys. They all love it, and have all responded to different parts in different ways.

It was a little tough at first, especially when there was harsh criticism against me that was not grounded. My kids felt it, and it was something they had to work through. Now they’re good; they just had to come to understand that people are people, and they bring to the table what they have.

Within theological constraints, there’s a bunch of junk, and it’s part of what they have. Where is it safe to expose that stuff, especially if you’re a strong “religious” person, and you feel you have to protect your religious orthodoxy? That’s part of your stuff, and you’re in transformation as much as anyone else.

You created a sensation in the publishing world with the release of The Shack. There’s an incredible amount of visual richness in the book. What is your writing and storytelling background?

Paul:    It’s always been a part of how I write. I was a missionary kid, so I grew up in another culture and I’ve been exposed to a lot of visual richness anyway. I think I’m just kind of built that way. I love art, I love nature, and I love music and theater. The arts are just phenomenal to me.

For me, most of my Christian life was so full of shame that I was the one that snuck in the back.

Bruce Coburn, a Canadian artist, is just about my most favorite artist/musician, and he’s had a huge influence on me. I have about 27 of his albums and three of my kids have that many themselves. He is a musician’s musician and one of the best lyricists I’ve ever run into, so he’s a poet who’s also a musician. When I was thinking about writing a story for my kids, my muse, or my desire, was to write a story the way Coburn writes songs. When I’m writing, I want to BE there. I want to taste, touch, and see it, and see the colors, because colors are amazing to me anyway.

After Mack’s reconciliation with his father, he is given a glimpse of the “real” world which is unseen by us. I get the sense that you are much more aware of that reality than most of us are on a daily basis. How?

Paul:    That little section is one of the most impacting sections. It’s the first time in the story that Mackenzie is in a situation where there is a large group of people. In that situation, Jesus is walking into the center of a worship scene, and Mackenzie is at a distance, on a hill with the Holy Spirit. For me, most of my Christian life was so full of shame that I was the one that snuck in the back. That’s the sense that I felt. I’m coming back, but if anybody found out I was here, they’d wonder why I was.

So God was always busy with the important and those kinds of things. So when Mackenzie is on a hill and Jesus walks in, Mackenzie hears Jesus say, “Mackenzie, I’m especially fond of you,” that was so significant.

Andrew, my 23-year-old, calls me up one day while he was reading the book. He was just bawling on the phone. That was the scene that got him. He said, “Dad, I heard him say that to me,” because Andrew’s a middle child.

I do live in the “real” world, and it’s because of a process that was excruciatingly difficult. You have to let go of all your blinders and pairs of glasses that you’ve been theologically trained with, and that’s a process. We need a Christological prescription.

The soul of one human being makes this whole physical universe just dull in comparison.

There’s a verse that says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” It’s one of the Beatitudes. That’s really important to me, because I think purity of eart is a process, not an event. The more your heart gets purified, the more you see God everywhere.

Because of the healing process that’s taken place in my life, I see Him all the time in everything everywhere. Even in the depths of the colors of the sofa. You know some human being made this sofa that I’m sitting on, and it’s got these colors in it. Maybe it was all made by machine, but somebody had the idea to do these kinds of patterns, so they’re present in that, and their humanity is present in it. But their humanity is so far beyond what they probably even think or can begin to imagine.

For me, the human creation is so amazing and so intricate. The soul of one human being makes this whole physical universe just dull in comparison. We get to be around them all the time – it’s incredible – and each of them has this universe inside of them, and most of them don’t even know.

The healing process is a big part of it. And another piece that’s tremendously central is learning how to stay inside the grace of one day. I really believe we get grace for just one day. I don’t know if it’s a Jewish thing; maybe you get it at six o’clock the night before or midnight or when you wake up – I’m not sure. But it is for one day.

The grace that we’re given empowers us to sense his presence and to hear his voice. What we tend to do, even though we can’t escape that presence, is run away in areas of the soul. We’ll run to the rooms of the shack, and they’re rooms where we put future fears or future “inevitabilities.” They’re really our imaginations of things in the future, but we think they’re real. So we run and take God’s grace for the day and we spend it on things that don’t even exist. We get freaked out because when we see those imaginations of the future that is infused with our fear, we don’t see God in those imaginations. There’s good reason for that.

God doesn’t live in anything that’s not real. He lives inside of us, and He lives in the present. He lives inside us now. There are so many scriptures about that. “Today is the day,” and “take no thought for tomorrow.” That doesn’t mean you don’t plan, but even when we plan, it’s all contingent. We say, “if we’re alive, and if God wills.”

When you are in the present, then everything around you becomes infused with that presence. There’s a country song out now that I love. I’m not a huge country fan, but I love that song. The name of it is “Everything Is Holy Now.” A lot of us, even inside the church, grew up in a gnostic or Buddhist sense that we have spiritual realm and the physical or secular realm, and we act as if they’re non-related.

Everything is infused with the “otherness” of God, and it’s around us all the time.

You spend your time in the spiritual realm on weekends or Sunday mornings when you go to church and hear scriptures or whatever. The rest of the time, you’re spending it on this side, and you don’t see God moving from one place to the other. You only expect to see Him inside the spiritual realm. You don’t anticipate seeing Him out here, so there are all kinds of words for coincidence and chance and randomness. You say, “Oh, look at that!” because your blinders say “God doesn’t live on this side, He lives over there. He lives in buildings with steeples where religious activities live.”

That’s Old Covenant. That perception is Old Covenant. Even if it isn’t actually true, that’s how they perceived it. They built a house for God to live in: the tabernacle. On the utensils and every piece of furniture, they would inscribe “Holy unto the Lord,” so they’d know when they were packing up and moving that it belonged to the tabernacle.

There are prophecies in the Old Testament that talk about one day, when the Messiah comes, there would be this city of God, and everything in it would be inscribed “Holy until to the Lord.” They even said the bridles of horses, the things you work with, even the pots you pee in, will be inscribed “Holy unto the Lord.” So this division between the spiritual and the physical is wiped out. Everything is infused with the “otherness” of God, and it’s around us all the time.

When you begin to see it, and you begin to weep for no reason, except that it’s all a manifestation of His grace and His care and His character and His intentionality and His affection and His goodness. When somebody comes up with a lyric in a song and they don’t have a relationship with Jesus, they’re still expressing the image of God that’s imbedded deeply in them: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Out of that they’re expressing something. In the way that a couple looks at each other, or the way they look at their child, God is all over that. As our hearts become pure, as the process continues and stuff gets dealt with, you begin to see God everywhere.