The Shack

  “Mackenzie, I know that your heart is full of pain and anger and a lot of confusion. Together, you and I, we’ll get around to some of that while you’re here. But I also want you to know that there is more going on than you could imagine or understand, even if I told you. As much as you are able, rest in what trust you have in me, no matter how small, okay?”

  Mack had lowered his head and was looking at the floor. She knows, he thought. Small? His “little” must be barely to the right of none. Nodding agreement, he looked up and noticed again the scars on her wrists.

  “Papa?” Mack finally said in a way that felt very awkward, but he was trying.

  “Yes, honey?”

  Mack struggled for the words to tell her what was in his heart. “I’m so sorry that you, that Jesus, had to die.”

  She walked around the table and gave Mack another big hug. “I know you are, and thank you. But you need to know that we aren’t sorry at all. It was worth it. Isn’t that right, Son?”

  She turned to ask her question of Jesus, who had just entered the cabin.

  “Absolutely!” He paused and then looked at Mack. “And I would have done it even if it were only for you, but it wasn’t!” he said with an inviting grin.

  Mack excused himself and found the bathroom, where he washed his hands and his face and tried to collect himself.

  7

  GOD ON THE DOCK

  Let’s pray that the human race never escapes Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.

  —C. S. Lewis

  Mack stood in the bathroom, looking into the mirror while wiping his face dry with a towel. He was searching for some sign of insanity in those eyes staring back at him. Was this real? Of course not, it was impossible. But then… He reached out his hand and slowly touched the mirror. Maybe this was a hallucination being brought on by all his grief and despair. Maybe it was a dream, and he was asleep somewhere, maybe in the shack freezing to death? Maybe… Suddenly, a terrible crash broke into his reverie. It came from the direction of the kitchen, and Mack froze. For a moment there was dead silence, and then, unexpectedly, he heard uproarious laughter. Curious, he exited the bathroom and poked his head through the doorway of the kitchen.

  Mack was shocked at the scene in front of him. It appeared that Jesus had dropped a large bowl of some sort of batter or sauce on the floor, and it was everywhere. It must have landed close to Papa because the lower portion of her skirt and bare feet were covered in the gooey mess. They were laughing so hard that Mack didn’t think they were breathing. Sarayu said something about humans being clumsy, and all three started roaring again. Finally, Jesus brushed past Mack and returned a minute later with a large basin of water and towels. Sarayu had already started wiping the goop from the floor and cupboards, but Jesus went straight to Papa and, kneeling at her feet, began to wipe off the front of her clothes. He worked down to her feet and gently lifted one foot at a time, which he directed into the basin where he cleaned and massaged it.

  “Ooooh, that feels soooo good!” exclaimed Papa as she continued her tasks at the counter.

  As he leaned against the doorway watching, Mack was full of thoughts. So this was God in relationship? It was beautiful and so appealing. He knew that it didn’t matter whose fault it was—the mess from some bowl that had been broken, that a planned dish would not be shared. Obviously, what was truly important here was the love they had for one another and the fullness it brought them. He shook his head. How different this was from the way he sometimes treated the ones he loved!

  Supper was simple, but a feast nonetheless. Roast bird of some kind in an orangey/mangoey kind of sauce. Fresh vegetables spiced with who but God knew what, all fruity and gingery, tangy and peppery. Rice, the quality of which Mack had never before tasted, could have been a meal by itself. The only awkward part was at the very beginning when Mack, out of habit, bowed his head before he remembered where he was. He looked up to find the three of them all grinning at him. So, as nonchalantly as he could, he said, “Um, thank you all… Could I have a bit of that rice there?”

  “Sure. We were going to have this incredible Japanese sauce, but greasy fingers over there”—Papa nodded toward Jesus—“decided to see if it would bounce.”

  “C’mon, now,” Jesus responded in mock defense. “My hands were slippery. What can I say?”

  Papa winked at Mack as she passed him the rice. “You just can’t get good help around here.” Everyone laughed.

  Conversation seemed almost normal. Mack was asked about each of the children, except Missy, and he talked about their various struggles and triumphs. When he spoke of his concerns for Kate, the three nodded with concerned expressions but offered him no counsel or wisdom. He also answered questions about his friends, and Sarayu seemed most interested in asking about Nan. Finally, Mack blurted out something that had been bothering him throughout the discussion.

  “Now here I am telling you about my kids and my friends and about Nan, but you already know everything I am telling you, don’t you? You’re acting like it’s the first time you’ve heard it.”

  Sarayu reached across the table and took his hand. “Mackenzie, remember our conversation earlier about limitation?”

  “Our conversation?” He glanced over at Papa, who was nodding knowingly.

  “You can’t share with one and not share with us all,” Sarayu said and smiled. “Remember that choosing to stay on the ground is a choice to facilitate a relationship, to honor it. Mackenzie, you do this yourself. You don’t play a game or color a picture with a child to show your superiority. Rather, you choose to limit yourself so as to facilitate and honor that relationship. You will even lose a competition to accomplish love. It is not about winning and losing, but about love and respect.”

  “So when I am telling you about my children…?”

  “We have limited ourselves out of respect for you. We are not bringing to mind, as it were, our knowledge of your children. As we are listening to you, it is as if this is the first time we have known about them, and we take great delight in seeing them through your eyes.”

  “I like that,” reflected Mack, sitting back in his chair.

  Sarayu squeezed his hand and seemed to sit back. “I do too! Relationships are never about power, and one way to avoid the will to hold power over another is to choose to limit oneself—to serve. Humans often do this—in touching the infirm and sick, in serving the ones whose minds have left to wander, in relating to the poor, in loving the very old and the very young, or even in caring for the other who has assumed a position of power over them.”

  “Well spoken, Sarayu,” said Papa, her face beaming with pride. “I’ll take care of the dishes later. But first, I would like to have a time of devotion.”

  Mack had to suppress a snicker at the thought of God having devotions. Images of family devotions from his childhood came spilling into his mind, not exactly good memories. Often, it was a tedious and boring exercise in coming up with the right answers, or, rather, the same old answers to the same old Bible story questions, and then trying to stay awake during his father’s excruciatingly long prayers. And when his father had been drinking, family devotions devolved into a terrifying minefield, where any wrong answer or inadvertent glance could trigger an explosion. He half expected Jesus to pull out a huge old King James Bible.

  Instead, Jesus reached across the table and took Papa’s hands in his, scars now clearly visible on his wrists. Mack sat transfixed as he watched Jesus kiss his Father’s hands and then look deeply into his Father’s eyes and finally say, “Papa, I loved watching you today as you made yourself fully available to take Mack’s pain into yourself and then gave him space to choose his own timing. You honored him, and you honored me. To listen to you whisper love and calm into his heart was truly incredible. What a joy to watch! I love being your Son.”

  Although Mack felt as if he were intruding, no one else seemed concerned, and he really had no idea where he would have gone in any case. To be in the presence of such
love expressed seemed to dislodge an inner emotional logjam, and while he didn’t understand exactly what he felt—it was good. What was he witnessing? Something simple, warm, intimate, genuine; this was holy. Holiness had always been a cold and sterile concept to Mack, but this was neither. Concerned that any movement on his part might shatter the moment, he simply closed his eyes and folded his hands in front of him. Listening intently with his eyes shut, he heard Jesus move his chair. There was a pause before he spoke again.

  “Sarayu,” Jesus began softly and tenderly, “you wash, I’ll dry.”

  Mack’s eyes snapped open in time to see the two smiling broadly at each other, picking up the dishes, and disappearing into the kitchen. He sat for a few minutes, unsure about what to do. Papa had gone somewhere and now that the other two were busy with dishes… well, it was an easy decision. He picked up silverware and glasses and headed for the kitchen. As soon as he had put them down for Sarayu to wash, Jesus tossed him a dish towel and they both began drying.

  Sarayu began humming the same evocative tune he’d heard earlier with Papa, and Jesus and Mack simply listened as they worked. More than once the melody stirred Mack deep inside, knocking again at the door. To him it sounded Gaelic, and he could almost hear breath-pipes in accompaniment. But as difficult as it was for Mack to stay and allow his emotions to well up so powerfully, the melody absolutely captured him. If he could just keep listening to her, he would be thrilled to do dishes the rest of his life.

  Ten minutes or so later they were finished. Jesus kissed Sarayu on the cheek and she disappeared around the corner. He then turned and smiled at Mack. “Let’s go out on the dock and look at the stars.”

  “What about the others?” Mack asked.

  “I’m here,” replied Jesus. “I’m always here.”

  Mack nodded. This presence-of-God thing, although hard to grasp, seemed to be steadily penetrating past his mind and into his heart. He let it go at that.

  “C’mon,” said Jesus, interrupting Mack’s thoughts. “I know you enjoy looking at stars! Want to?” He sounded just like a child full of anticipation and expectancy.

  “Yeah, I think so,” answered Mack, realizing that the last time he had done that was on the ill-fated camping trip with the kids. Maybe it was time to take a few risks.

  He followed Jesus out the back door. In the waning moments of twilight, Mack could make out the rocky shore of the lake, not overgrown as he remembered, but beautifully kept and picture perfect. The nearby creek seemed to be humming some sort of musical tune. Protruding about fifty feet into the lake was a dock, and Mack could barely make out three canoes tied at intervals along its course. Night was falling quickly and the distant darkness was already thick with the sounds of crickets and bullfrogs. Jesus took his arm and led him up the path while his eyes adjusted, but already Mack was looking up into a moonless night at the wonder of the emerging stars.

  They made their way three-quarters of the way up the dock and lay down on their backs looking up. The elevation of this place seemed to magnify the heavens, and Mack reveled in seeing stars in such numbers and clarity. Jesus suggested that they close their eyes for a few minutes, allowing the last effects of dusk to disappear for the night. Mack complied, and when he finally opened his eyes, the sight was so powerful that he experienced vertigo for a few seconds. He almost felt as if he were falling up into space, the stars racing toward him as if to embrace him. He lifted his hands, imagining that he could reach out and pluck diamonds, one by one, off a velvet-black sky.

  “Wow!” he whispered.

  “Incredible!” whispered Jesus, his head near Mack’s in the darkness. “I never get tired of this.”

  “Even though you created it?” Mack asked.

  “I created it as the Word, before the Word became flesh. So even though I created this, I see it now as a human. And I must say, it is impressive!”

  “It certainly is.” Mack was not sure how to describe what he felt, but as they continued to lie in silence, gazing into the celestial display, watching and listening, he knew in his heart that this too was holy. As they both watched in awestruck wonder, a shooting star would occasionally blaze a brief trail across the night blackness, causing one or the other to exclaim, “Did you see that? Awesome!”

  After a particularly long silence, Mack spoke. “I feel more comfortable around you. You seem so different from the other two.”

  “How do you mean, different?” came his soft voice out of the darkness.

  “Well…” Mack paused as he thought about it. “More real, or tangible. I don’t know.” He struggled with the words and Jesus lay quietly, waiting. “It’s like I’ve always known you. But Papa isn’t at all what I expected from God, and Sarayu, she’s way out there.”

  Jesus chuckled in the dark. “Since I am human we have much in common to begin with.”

  “But I still don’t understand…”

  “I am the best way any human can relate to Papa or Sarayu. To see me is to see them. The love you sense from me is no different from how they love you. And believe me, Papa and Sarayu are just as real as I am, though, as you’ve seen, in far different ways.”

  “Speaking of Sarayu, is she the Holy Spirit?”

  “Yes. She is creativity; she is action; she is the breathing of life; she is much more. She is my Spirit.”

  “And her name, Sarayu?”

  “That is a simple name from one of our human languages. It means ‘Wind,’ ‘a common wind,’ actually. She loves that name.”

  “Hmm,” grunted Mack. “Nothing too common about her!”

  “True, that,” responded Jesus.

  “And the name Papa mentioned, Elo… El…”

  “Elousia,” the voice said reverently from the dark next to him. “That is a wonderful name. El is my name as Creator God, but ousia is ‘being’ or ‘that which is truly real,’ so the name means ‘the Creator God who is truly real and the ground of all being.’ Now that is also a beautiful name.”

  There was silence for a minute while Mack pondered what Jesus had said. “So then, where does that leave us?” He felt as if he were asking the question for the entire human race.

  “Right where you were always intended to be. In the very center of our love and our purpose.”

  Again a pause, then, “I suppose I can live with that.”

  Jesus chuckled. “I am glad to hear that,” he said, and they both laughed. Neither spoke for a time. Stillness had fallen like a blanket, and all Mack was really aware of was the sound of water lapping up against the dock. It was he who eventually broke the silence again.

  “Jesus?”

  “Yes, Mackenzie?”

  “I am surprised by one thing about you.”

  “Really? What?”

  “I guess I expected you to be more”—be careful here, Mack—“uh… well, humanly striking.”

  Jesus chuckled. “Humanly striking? You mean handsome.” Now he was laughing.

  “Well, I was trying to avoid that, but yes. Somehow I thought you’d be the ideal man, you know, athletic and overwhelmingly good-looking.”

  “It’s my nose, isn’t it?”

  Mack didn’t know what to say.

  Jesus laughed. “I am Jewish, you know. My grandfather on my mother’s side had a big nose. In fact, most of the men on my mom’s side had big noses.”

  “I just thought you’d be better-looking.”

  “By whose standards? Anyway, once you really get to know me, it won’t matter to you.”

  The words, though delivered kindly, stung. Stung what, exactly? Mack lay there a few seconds and realized that as much as he thought he knew Jesus, perhaps he didn’t… not really. Maybe what he knew was an icon, an ideal, an image through which he tried to grasp a sense of spirituality, but not a real person. “Why is that?” he finally asked. “You said if I really knew you it wouldn’t matter what you looked like.”

  “It is quite simple really. Being always transcends appearance—that which only seems to be. O
nce you begin to know the being behind the very pretty or very ugly face, as determined by your bias, the surface appearances fade away until they simply no longer matter. That is why Elousia is such a wonderful name. God, who is the ground of all being, dwells in, around, and through all things—ultimately emerging as the real—and any appearances that mask that reality will fall away.”

  Silence followed as Mack wrestled with what Jesus had said. He gave up after only a minute or two and decided to ask the riskier question.

  “You said I don’t really know you. It would be a lot easier if we could always talk like this.”

  “Admittedly, Mack, this is special. You were really stuck and we wanted to help you crawl out of your pain. But don’t think that just because I’m not visible, our relationship has to be less real. It will be different, but perhaps even more real.”

  “How is that?”

  “My purpose from the beginning was to live in you and you in me.”

  “Wait, wait. Wait a minute. How can that happen? If you’re still fully human, how can you be inside me?”

  “Astounding, isn’t it? It’s Papa’s miracle. It is the power of Sarayu, my Spirit, the Spirit of God who restores the union that was lost so long ago. Me? I choose to live moment by moment fully human. I am fully God, but I am human to the core. Like I said, it’s Papa’s miracle.”

  Mack was lying in the darkness, listening intently. “Aren’t you talking about a real indwelling, not just some positional, theological thing?”

  “Of course,” answered Jesus, his voice strong and sure. “It’s what everything is all about. The human, formed out of the physical material of creation, can once more be fully indwelt by spiritual life, my life. It requires that a very real dynamic and active union exists.”

  “That is almost unbelievable!” Mack exclaimed quietly. “I had no idea. I need to think more about this. But I might have a lot more questions.”

  “And we have your lifetime to sort through them.” Jesus chuckled. “But enough of that for now. Let’s get lost again in the starry night.”