Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

  “I did the best I could,” Mother claims, and the more I learn about her past, the more I believe her. Surely, though, something else lay at the heart of all that followed.

  Like every mother, she must have held us naked against herself, counting our fingers and toes, awed by what her own body had produced nine months after an act of love. She must have smiled with joy as we took our first wobbly steps and pronounced our first words.

  In our teenage years, our steps and our words propelled us away from her, in ways she could not comprehend and furiously sought to prevent. The sons who had shown such promise in childhood now slouched in and out of her life, barely speaking. How terrifying it must be for a mother to release her children to the unknown. How distressing to experience the wonder of bringing new persons into the world, only to rue what they become.

  As teenagers we preferred MAD magazine to Israel My Glory. We longed to see the movies and hear the music our classmates talked about. We wanted a real education, not simply more Bible. But she knew how Satan worked—as the angel of light as well as the roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. Satan tempts by degrees: a cigarette before heroin, Elvis Presley before the Beatles, Othello before pornographic movies. She had constructed a monument of faith made of cards perilously stacked atop one another, and her sons, her own sons, were tugging at the bottom cards.

  Corruptio optimi pessima goes an old Latin saying: “The corruption of the best is the worst.” What begins as love may, in fact, corrode into something akin to its opposite. An Afghan mother, out of devotion to her religion and country, straps a suicide vest onto her ten-year-old daughter. Or a young widow in Atlanta assumes the role of God: deciding, first, what’s best for a man in an iron lung and, then, for his two sons left behind.

  The mystery of my mother circles back to the scene she described to us as children: her prayer of consecration as she lay stretched across the damp soil of our father’s grave. Burdened by grief and betrayal, Mother staked her future and even her faith on Marshall and me. She made an offering as solemn as Hannah’s of Samuel—or, better, as Abraham’s of Isaac. As our lives took their own courses, her sacred offering vanished like smoke.

  I turn again to my least favorite of biblical stories, Hannah relinquishing her son Samuel to the priest Eli. Late at night, while lying down in the house of the Lord, three times the boy Samuel hears his name called out, “Samuel!” Each time he runs to Eli, who says, “I did not call; go back and lie down.” Finally, the wise old priest realizes it is the Lord who is calling the boy.

  In a flash I see that scene in an entirely new light. Neither Eli nor Samuel’s mother commissions the boy; God issues the call. All our lives Marshall and I have lived under the weight of a mother’s vow, one that was beyond her prerogative to invoke.

  Marshall made his own choices, many of which proved self-destructive. Was he a tormented genius? Was he really schizophrenic? I do not know, and since his stroke in 2009 those questions have become moot. To this day he fights against a mother with whom he has no contact and against a God whose existence he denies. He attends what he calls an “atheist church,” a Sunday assembly of humanists who expend much energy opposing a God they don’t believe in. On my last visit, he had a copy of The God Delusion on his coffee table, along with a ticket to attend a lecture by its author, Richard Dawkins.

  The wounds of faith embed like permanent tattoos. “Do you think he will ever change?” friends ask me, and I have to answer no. It is never too late for grace and forgiveness—unless a person determines it is.

  * * *

  —

  We live day by day, scene by scene, as if working on a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box to guide us. Only over time does a meaningful pattern emerge. In this memoir I have written a sort of prequel to my other books. In retrospect, it seems clear to me that my two life themes, which surface in all my books, are suffering and grace.

  I explore the topic of pain in my writing because many who suffer receive more confusion than comfort, especially from the church. Early on I learned that what we believe has lasting, sometimes fatal, consequences. The people who prayed for my father, and became convinced that he would be healed, did so with stalwart faith and the best of intentions—and were tragically wrong.

  My brother, Marshall, dealt with suffering by way of amputation: dropping out of college, abandoning his musical ambitions, forsaking our family, divorcing two women and severing relations with others. In part because of his example, I have sought instead to stitch together all the strands, good and bad, healthy and unhealthy.

  The New Testament presents suffering as a bad thing—Jesus, after all, devoted himself to acts of healing—yet one that can be redeemed. We have hope that on this broken planet pain can be somehow useful, even redemptive.

  I’ve even learned to find gratitude for those years under extreme fundamentalism. I emerged with a deep sense that the choices we make profoundly matter, that life need not be just one thing after another but rather can become a kind of destiny. I gained a love for music and language, especially the language of the Bible. I learned self-discipline and avoided most reckless behavior. Nothing, in the end, was wasted.

  Grace is my second theme, for I know the power of its opposite. Ungrace fuels the dark energy between my brother and mother: a wounded, vengeful spirit on the one side arrayed against a righteous judgment on the other. What power has kept them from speaking for half a century? The same force of stubborn pride that so often divides families, neighbors, politicians, races, and nations.

  In the churches of my youth, we sang about God’s grace, and yet I seldom felt it. I saw God as a stern taskmaster, eager to condemn and punish. I have come to know instead a God of love and beauty who longs for our wholeness. I assumed that surrender to God would involve a kind of shrinking—avoiding temptation, grimly focusing on the “spiritual” things while I prepared for the afterlife. On the contrary, God’s good world presented itself as a gift to enjoy with grace-healed eyes.

  My faith was put to a test in 2007 when the Ford Explorer I was driving slid off an icy Colorado road and tumbled over and over, five times in all, down a hillside. I staggered around in the snow in shock, until a passing car called 911.

  An ambulance carried me to a small-town hospital, where the doctor tried to discern from CT scans whether one of the bone fragments in my broken neck had nicked a major artery. “We have a jet standing by if needed to airlift you to Denver,” he said. “But, truthfully, if the carotid artery has been pierced, you won’t make it to Denver. You should call the people you love and tell them goodbye, just in case.”

  For seven hours I lay strapped to a bodyboard staring at harsh fluorescent lights—the same view, it suddenly occurs to me, that my father had from an iron lung and that Marshall had for months after his stroke. I used those hours to review my life, and on that day I made a firm commitment, should I survive, to write a memoir.

  I had always expected that, in the face of death, old fears would come surging back. An upbringing under a wrathful God does not easily fade away. Instead, as I lay there facing death several hundred miles from home, I experienced an unexpected serenity. I had an overwhelming sense of trust, for I now knew a God of compassion and mercy.

  Lying helpless and strapped down, I would have felt utterly and inconsolably alone—except for the strong, sure sense that I had not made the long, winding journey unaccompanied. I walked out of the hospital late that February evening, wearing a neck brace and grateful to God for another chance at life.

  As a boy wandering in the woods, a teenager constructing a psychic survival shell, a lovesick college student running from the Hound of Heaven—in all those places I felt what T. S. Eliot called “a tremour of bliss, a wink of heaven, a whisper.” I came to love God out of gratitude, not fear.

  Above all else, grace is a gift, one I cannot stop writing about until my st
ory ends.

  For Janet, naturally

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  My writing career began fifty years ago, and I have been contemplating this book ever since. I had read fine memoirs about growing up Orthodox Jewish, or Jehovah’s Witness, or Irish Catholic, but none that fully captured the peculiar subculture of my own Southern fundamentalist upbringing. Yet I hesitated to delve into my past, knowing that doing so would open old wounds and inevitably cause others pain.

  I have lived through KKK cross burnings, the civil rights movement, the Billy Graham era, the Jesus People movement, Jimmy Carter’s “Year of the Evangelical,” a lurch into politics led by Jerry Falwell, and the more recent anomaly of evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump. Throughout, I’ve noticed that the general media—magazines, newspapers, movies—seem tone-deaf in their portrayal of religion, often presenting more caricature than reality.

  Immersed in an extreme form of faith in my youth, I had the sense of being in on something that outsiders could not possibly comprehend. Over the years I have encountered some of the worst that the church has to offer and some of the best. Looking back, I wanted to understand myself, as well as the environment that helped form me. The time had come to attempt to make sense of the confusion of life in the only way I know how—by writing.

  A memoir is a kind of verbal selfie, with one figure in the foreground, reflecting that person’s singular point of view. I have relied on letters, diaries, and interviews with relatives and others from my past, but this interpretation of events is mine alone—the point of memoir, after all. “Memory is a complicated thing,” says Barbara Kingsolver, “a relative to truth, but not its twin.”

  Versions of some of these anecdotes appear in the two dozen other books I have written, often in a disguised form. In this book I have sought to give an unvarnished account of what actually happened, although for privacy’s sake I have changed names and details in a few instances.

  I began by writing down everything I could remember about my early life. In order to trim that sprawling volume, I relied heavily on other readers for advice. I have unending gratitude for my literary agent, Kathryn Helmers, and my superb editor at Convergent Books, Derek Reed, who painstakingly guided me through multiple drafts as the book took shape. Other colleagues and friends—John Sloan, Carolyn Briggs, Tim Stafford, Elisa Stanford, Laura Canby, David Graham, Ellyn Lanz, and David Bannon—plowed through the 240,000 words of an early draft before I winnowed it down to 100,000. Harold Fickett, David Kopp, Lee Phillips, Mickey Maudlin, Charles Moore, Jon Abercrombie, Evan and Elisa Morgan, Pam Montgomery, and Scott Bolinder contributed further editorial insight for the slimmed-down version. I am blessed to have such talented and generous readers—as well as an outstanding publishing team at Penguin Random House.

  Two assistants, Melissa Nicholson and Joannie Degnan Barth, spent hundreds of hours helping me bring some order to stacks of notes, books, and database entries, as well as adding their own editorial expertise. And my wife, Janet, supported me sacrificially yet cheerfully throughout the long process. She plays a starring role in this memoir as well as in my life; fittingly, I ended the project the year we celebrated fifty years of marriage.

  Thank you, one and all.

  ALSO BY PHILIP YANCEY

  Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church

  Finding God in Unexpected Places

  • • •

  The Bible Jesus Read

  Church: Why Bother?

  Disappointment with God

  Fearfully and Wonderfully: The Marvel of Bearing God’s Image (with Dr. Paul Brand)

  The Gift of Pain (with Dr. Paul Brand)

  Grace Notes: Daily Readings with a Fellow Pilgrim

  I Was Just Wondering

  The Jesus I Never Knew

  Meet the Bible (with Brenda Quinn)

  Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference?

  The Question That Never Goes Away

  Reaching for the Invisible God

  A Skeptic’s Guide to Faith

  The Student Bible (with Tim Stafford)

  Vanishing Grace: Bringing Good News to a Deeply Divided World

  What Good Is God?

  What’s So Amazing About Grace?

  Where Is God When It Hurts?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Philip Yancey wrestles in print with God, with the church, and with fellow believers. In the process he has authored more than two dozen books, including the bestsellers The Jesus I Never Knew, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, and Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church. Yancey’s books have garnered thirteen Gold Medallion Book Awards from Christian publishers and booksellers. He currently has more than seventeen million books in print and has been published in over fifty languages worldwide. Yancey worked as a journalist and freelance author in Chicago for some twenty years, editing the youth magazine Campus Life while also writing for a wide variety of publications, including Reader’s Digest, The Atlantic, National Wildlife, and Christianity Today. In 1992, he and his wife, Janet, moved to the foothills of Colorado, where they live now.