So, I finished reading ‘The Shack’ this morning and decided I should try to put some thoughts down before going out to the internet and seeing what the general response is there. About 2 months ago, a small group of people were talking about it while I was over at their house. They highly recommended the book but at the time I was reading something else, probably the Twilight series and I decided it could wait. Then a couple of weeks ago, my mom called me to ask me if I’d read it…My mom is a voracious reader and I’m the only child she has that loves reading as much as she does. I told her that I was re-reading The Lord of the Rings but that when I was finished, I would pick it up and read it…Now, if you haven’t read it yet and plan to (which I recommend), stop reading here as there will be some spoilers in this review…Okay, here we go…

Even though I’ve been in the room with people who’ve read the book, I had not heard anything about the premise of the book other than it was spiritual in nature. To say that the blatant religiousness of the book took me by surprise would be a major understatement. I was expecting some sideways reference to Jesus or possibly the Holy Spirit, not a weekend with the Holy Trinity. First, I’d like to cover what I liked about the book but I don’t want to cover the reason why he finds himself in a shack with the Trinity because I think each person will respond differently to that situation and I don’t want to tarnish it with anticipation.

• Anyway, much of what is written resonates deeply with my interpretation of religion. The thought that the basis of life is relationships and that the greatest relationship in the universe is that of the three persons of the Trinity should be very comfortable with everyone. I have always had a rather weird view of ‘organized religion’. There is a big part of me that believes the Church is necessary but there is another part that knows deep down inside that a lot of what we consider to be ‘Christian’ probably has nothing to do with what God set out to do when he created the first man. While I was reading the book, I thought often of my father, who I’ve tried to get to go to church many times, and many times he’s told me that he has a different kind of relationship with God and that he doesn’t need to go to church to experience it. For the first time, I think I actually believe him…
• I love the way the author paints the scenes with colors and scents. I’m a visual person and the better a person can draw their world, the easier it is for me to understand it.
• I love the way this book treats forgiveness. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase ‘forgive and forget’ as if these two things were linked and that one begets the other. In practice, I’ve given and received forgiveness many times and, knowing the situation has not been forgotten, felt like forgiveness has not taken place. In reality, we are not capable of consciously forgetting anything (that doesn’t come from this book) and life would be a lot easier to deal with if we understood that we may have to forgive someone many times for the same thing before true healing takes place.

There are one or two things about this book that I tend to disagree with though and I think it’s only fair to mention these also.

• First and foremost, you get the definite impression that the author does not believe in evil; especially in a personage such as the devil. Not only does he treat bad things as the absence of goodness (he says so much in comparing darkness to the absence of light); he doesn’t even mention the serpent in the Garden of Eden when Eve took the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
• I’m not particularly thrilled with the way the book ends either. You almost get the impression that once the ‘real story’ has been explained, the author completely ran out of material and just shut the book down. It’s not very graceful and leaves the reader feeling disconnected somehow; like something is missing but not in a ‘I need to go and explore this mystery’ kind of way…It’s much more of a letdown feeling.

I’m sure there are many more theological debates that could be held but as this is a work of pseudo-fiction, we should probably not debate them here.

I feel quite certain that the author (or at least one of the co-authors) read and very-much liked ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ and ‘One’ by Richard Bach. Reading this book, I got very close to the same feelings I had when I read those books as a young adult.

So, the long and the short of it is that The Shack is a very good read and will make you think about your relationship with God (all 3 of Him) and with others.