Two Stories: The Shack and Contact

[Warning: Contains plot spoilers for The Shack and Contact]

I recently finished reading William P. Young’s novel The Shack. It is a fictional novel portraying a man’s struggle with grief over his young daughter’s abduction and murder during a vacation trip many years earlier. One day Mack receives a cryptic note inviting him to a meeting with “Papa” in the very same country shack that his daughter had been killed in. Angry at first, he decides to go there and see who “Papa” is. And he ends up meeting God in the three persons of the Trinity (“Papa” is one of them and appears to him as an elderly, ebullient black woman). When Mack arrives at and enters the dilapidated, bloodstained shack, it and its surroundings are instantly transformed into a beautiful little cottage and well-kept grounds. Mack stays the weekend there, and through his dialogues and interactions with the three persons of God (“Papa”, Jesus, and holy spirit), he renews and strengthens his faith. Coming back, he suffers an automobile accident and wakes up in the hospital to find that time had apparently stopped in the “outside” world, for it is still the same day that he had set out for the shack! Mack recounts his experiences to his best friend Willy and his wife. Both accept his honesty behind his told experiences. But in the end, Mack knows that his encounter with God was essentially unprovable and always meant to be very personal.

The late scientist/educator Carl Sagan was quite vocal in proclaiming his atheism. He was equally adamant about his disbelief in the paranormal as well. But that did not stop him from writing his acclaimed novel-turned-movie Contact, which starred Jodie Foster as an astronaut who travels through space to have humanity’s first direct encounter with alien life. When she finally reaches the targeted planet for the contact, she discovers that the alien entity is presenting itself in the form of her beloved father. That experience is very personal in nature, much like Mack’s is in The Shack. And also, Jodie comes back to Earth to discover that her ship never took off. As was the case with Mack, the long stretch of time in which she experienced her voyage and encounter happened in an instant. And also like Mack, she had to reconcile with herself and others the extent to which her experiences were real.

In Contact Carl Sagan explored, from an alien’s point of view, how a first encounter with humans would most wisely be set up. He concluded that it would be done in such a way as to reduce the culture shock that would inevitably emanate from a highly publicized contact. Hence the very personal, subjective, and unprovable nature of the experience. In The Shack, it is God who is seeking contact. The message is that God wants relationship with all of humanity, but like the alien in Contact, goes about this one human at a time. And once again, the experience has a very personal, subjective, and unprovable nature to it. Both Foster’s character and Mack nevertheless, after some personal doubts, come out of their experiences personally transformed and feeling positive about their new (in Contact) or strengthened (in The Shack) relationships with the alien/God.

Just noting the similarities between The Shack and Contact doesn’t necessarily imply that William P. Young incorporated Sagan’s theme and transformed it into a Christian message. The two authors may each have been drawing on an common idea that’s been around for a while: when approaching an animal in friendship, go slowly and come down to its level to alleviate its fear and distrust. And assuming a role in that animal’s own social structure can both make it feel comfortable and go a long way toward successfully establishing contact.

Similarly, more technologically-adept cultures now tend to go easy on exposing themselves to more primitive cultures when encountering them. The idea nowadays is to avoid affecting the technologically-primitive culture adversely by quickly learning and imitating its ways so as to be as familiar and acceptable to it as possible.

The Shack will read differently, depending on whether or not you have been discipled in the tenets of evangelistic Christianity. To someone like me who knows the essential “ins and outs” of this faith, the book is just a repackaging of its doctrines to both seem more palatable to the believer and attract the interest of nonbelievers. Nothing wrong with that, but I would like to make one strong point. The big, big issue a lot of folks have with religion is that God chooses to be invisible and directly unapproachable . The Shack totally refutes that by making the deity visible and directly approachable. But it’s fiction, not real! And I think some people are reading and interpreting it reverently almost as if it were an added book of the Bible! Please don’t do that!
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Yesterday's Personal Stuff
I practiced a little piano, but laid off of the running to drive up to Jacksonville, pick up my son from college there, and bring him back home for Christmas vacation. What a wonderful reunion! It's great having the whole family back together again. I continued reading Twilight and Black House, both stories beginning to take a rather sinister twist.