An Equally Awesome and Awkward Experience

I’m in a Real Live Face To Face book club here in Portland with my dear friend Jessica. We refer to it as the Super Serious Not Stupid book club because we’ve both had bad experiences with book groups before and we both like alliteration. During one of our chats a few months ago, we also started talking about The Shack; I was currently reading it, and Jess had read it last fall. She had a great experience to share, so when I found out it was this blog’s first book, I bugged her to write about it. She really is quite lovely with her words.

Also – no spoilers, so read on.
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I had just joined a book club through my church, and was fairly disappointed when I saw the cover of the first book we were supposed to read: The Shack. In all honesty, had this not been the first book that we read as a group, I would have most likely returned that puppy to Powell's, forgotten about the book club, and found something else to do with my time. But out of that old Southern Baptist guilt, I decided to give it a try. After searching EVERYWHERE for this thing (amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Powell's, etc.) I finally found it at the Multnomah School of the Bible bookstore. Sigh. So, I took it with me on my bus commute to work, hiding the cover all the way, ashamed that I was ashamed.

The first few chapters were nothing to write home about. In fact, I felt a sense of pity for the author - he evidently hadn't written much, and the dialogue was terrible. And predictable. And trite. But our looming date for the first book club meeting was coming up, so I ended up blazing through it in a frenzied two-day-span before our group met for the first time.

When I arrived at our first meeting, there was a man in a red polo shirt, sitting uncomfortably in the corner. Because I'm generally uncomfortable in social situations anyway, I could empathize. I didn't feel too comfortable myself. After a dinner full of agonizing small talk and some weird reader version of one-upmanship ("Oh, you absolutely HAVE to read so and so", "You haven't read so and so? His writing will change your LIFE", etc. etc.), we all sat around in a circle, and found out that Polo Shirt Man was the author. He lives in Portland, and his son goes to our church - thus, the connection. Sigh. I felt like I could no longer blast the literary deficiencies in the book and would have to be quite surfacey and positive. Heck, the guy at least gave writing a shot, which is more than I can say for myself.

He was quiet, but had a way of speaking such that you wanted to listen. He apparently had written this book as a gift for his children. His own childhood had been quite painful - he was raised by missionary parents in Papua New Guinea, and they were both so consumed with their respective ministries that he was neglected and basically raised by the tribal people to which his parents were ministering. Along with this came initiations into tribal rites which were terribly painful for him, emotionally (and he didn't go into what these entailed, and to be honest, I don't want to think about that), and the scars stayed with him for quite a while - and ended up playing a role in how he raised his own children. I received the impression that The Shack was a way to show his children how the love of the trinity far surpasses anything a father on earth can do. He gave them this book for Christmas, I believe, and that was that.

But then - after some strange connection (he knew someone who knew someone who knew someone), the piece ended up in the hands of a publisher and things took off from there. I'm pretty hazy on what happened next - but the important thing to me was that he never intended for the book to be made public or to be published. He wrote it for his kids.

This really changed the way I saw the book. Though I hear that it's now somewhat gone the Prayer of Jabez route (Prayer of Jabez tea set, anyone?), that was never the intent. It was just something that a dad put together for his family. A lot of people have experienced pain and need to know the different ways that God loves them. And to be honest, we all need to be a little more open in regards to our view of the trinity as well, so it's a win-win situation.

When I left that night, I felt the way you do when you've been with someone who has laid all of his or her emotions and inadequacies out there. You sort of feel honored to have been trusted with access to their pain. And there's something attractive about that, especially when the individual didn't necessarily set out to turn their emotional/spiritual hurts into a money-making gig. It made me reread the book with a measure of grace. Though I'm not sure how this is the case, it makes me happy that it debuted at number one on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list. I guess it makes me happy for the quiet awkward man in the corner.