The Shack

by William Paul Young

  “It’s not?”

  “It is the human paradigm,” added Papa, having returned with more food. “It is like water to fish, so prevalent that it goes unseen and unquestioned. It is the matrix; a diabolical scheme in which you are hopelessly trapped even while completely unaware of its existence.”

  Jesus picked up the conversation. “As the crowning glory of creation, you were made in our image, unencumbered by structure and free to simply ‘be’ in relationship with me and one another. If you had truly learned to regard one another’s concerns as significant as your own, there would be no need for hierarchy.”

  Mack sat back in his chair, staggered by the implications of what he was hearing. “So are you telling me that whenever we humans protect ourselves with power…”

  “You are yielding to the matrix, not to us,” finished Jesus.

  “And now,” Sarayu interjected, “we have come full circle, back to one of my initial statements: you humans are so lost and damaged that to you it is almost incomprehensible that relationship could exist apart from hierarchy. So you think that God must relate inside a hierarchy as you do. But we do not.”

  “But how could we ever change that? People will just use us.”

  “They most likely will. But we’re not asking you to do it with others, Mack. We’re asking you to do it with us. That’s the only place it can begin. We won’t use you.”

  “Mack,” said Papa with an intensity that caused him to listen very carefully, “we want to share with you the love and joy and freedom and light that we already know within ourselves. We created you, the human, to be in face-to-face relationship with us, to join our circle of love. As difficult as it will be for you to understand, everything that has taken place is occurring exactly according to this purpose, without violating choice or will.”

  “How can you say that with all the pain in this world, all the wars and disasters that destroy thousands?” Mack’s voice quieted to a whisper. “And what is the value in a little girl being murdered by some twisted deviant?” There it was again, the question that lay burning a hole in his soul. “You may not cause those things, but you certainly don’t stop them.”

  “Mackenzie,” Papa answered tenderly, seemingly not offended in the least by his accusation, “there are millions of reasons to allow pain and hurt and suffering rather than to eradicate them, but most of those reasons can be understood only within each person’s story. I am not evil. You are the ones who embrace fear and pain and power and rights so readily in your relationships. But your choices are also not stronger than my purposes, and I will use every choice you make for the ultimate good and the most loving outcome.”

  “You see,” explained Sarayu, “broken humans center their lives around things that seem good to them but will neither fill them nor free them. They are addicted to power, or the illusion of security that power offers. When a disaster happens, those same people will turn against the false powers they trusted. In their disappointment, either they become softened toward me or they become bolder in their independence. If you could only see how all of this ends and what we will achieve without the violation of one human will—then you would understand. One day you will.”

  “But the cost!” Mack was staggered. “Look at the cost—all the pain, all the suffering, everything that is so terrible and evil.” He paused and looked down at the table. “And look what it has cost you. Is it worth it?”

  “Yes!” came the unanimous, joyful response.

  “But how can you say that?” Mack blurted. “It all sounds like the end justifies the means, that to get what you want you will go to any length, even if it costs the lives of billions of people.”

  “Mackenzie.” It was the voice of Papa again, especially gentle and tender. “You really don’t understand yet. You try to make sense of the world in which you live based on a very small and incomplete picture of reality. It is like looking at a parade through the tiny knothole of hurt, pain, self-centeredness, and power and believing you are on your own and insignificant. All of these thoughts contain powerful lies. You see pain and death as ultimate evils and God as the ultimate betrayer, or perhaps, at best, as fundamentally untrustworthy. You dictate the terms and judge my actions and find me guilty.

  “The real underlying flaw in your life, Mackenzie, is that you don’t think I am good. If you knew I was good and that everything—the means, the ends, and all the processes of individual lives—is all covered by my goodness, then while you might not always understand what I am doing, you would trust me. But you don’t.”

  “I don’t?” asked Mack, but it was not really a question. It was a statement of fact, and he knew it. The others seemed to know it too, and the table remained silent.

  Sarayu spoke. “Mackenzie, you cannot produce trust, just as you cannot ‘do’ humility. It either is or is not. Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved. Because you do not know that I love you, you cannot trust me.”

  Again there was silence, and finally Mack looked up at Papa and spoke. “I don’t know how to change that.”

  “You can’t, not alone. But together we will watch that change take place. For now I just want you to be with me and discover that our relationship is not about performance or your having to please me. I’m not a bully, not some self-centered demanding little deity insisting on my own way. I am good, and I desire only what is best for you. You cannot find that through guilt or condemnation or coercion, only through a relationship of love. And I do love you.”

  Sarayu stood up from the table and looked directly at Mack. “Mackenzie,” she offered, “if you care to, I would like you to come and help me in the garden. There are things I need to do there before tomorrow’s celebration. We can continue relevant elements of this conversation there. Please?”

  “Sure,” responded Mack and excused himself from the table. “One last comment,” he added, turning back. “I just can’t imagine any final outcome that would justify all this.”

  “Mackenzie.” Papa rose out of her chair and walked around the table to give him a big squeeze. “We’re not justifying it. We are redeeming it.”

  9

  A LONG TIME AGO, IN A GARDEN FAR, FAR AWAY

  Even should we find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly nor stay in it forever.

  —Henry Van Dyke

  Mack followed Sarayu as best he could out the back door and down the walkway past the row of firs. To walk behind such a being was like tracking a sunbeam. Light seemed to radiate through her and then reflect her presence in multiple places at once. Her nature was rather ethereal, full of dynamic shades and hues of color and motion. No wonder so many people are a little unnerved at relating to her, Mack thought. She obviously is not a being who is predictable.

  Mack concentrated instead on staying to the walkway. As he rounded the trees, he saw for the first time a magnificent garden and orchard somehow contained within a plot of land hardly larger than an acre. For whatever reason, Mack had expected a perfectly manicured and ordered English garden. This was not that!

  It was chaos in color. His eyes tried unsuccessfully to find some order in this blatant disregard for certainty. Dazzling sprays of flowers were blasted through patches of randomly planted vegetables and herbs, vegetation the likes of which Mack had never seen. It was confusing, stunning, and incredibly beautiful.

  “From above it’s a fractal,” Sarayu said over her shoulder with an air of pleasure.

  “A what?” asked Mack absentmindedly, his mind still trying to grapple with and control the pandemonium of sight and the movements of hues and shades. Every step he took changed whatever patterns he for an instant thought he had seen, and nothing was like it had been.

  “A fractal… something considered simple and orderly that is actually composed of repeated patterns no matter how magnified. A fractal is almost infinitely complex. I love fractals, so I put them everywhere.”

  “Looks like a mess to me,” muttered Mack under his breat
h.

  Sarayu stopped and turned to Mack, her face glorious. “Mack! Thank you! What a wonderful compliment!” She looked around at the garden. “That is exactly what this is—a mess. But”—she looked back at Mack and beamed—“it’s still a fractal too.”

  Sarayu walked straight to a certain herb plant, plucked some heads off it, and turned to Mack.

  “Here,” she said, her voice sounding more like music than anything else. “Papa wasn’t kidding at breakfast. You’d better chew on these greens for a few minutes. It will counteract the natural ‘movement’ of the ones you overindulged in earlier, if you know what I mean.”

  Mack chuckled as he accepted and carefully began to chew. “Yeah, but those greens tasted so good!” His stomach had begun to roll a little, and being kept off balance by the verdant wildness he had stepped into was not helping. The flavor of the herb was not distasteful: a hint of mint and some other spices he had probably smelled before but couldn’t identify. As they walked, the growling in his stomach slowly began to subside, and he relaxed what he hadn’t realized he had been clenching.

  Without speaking a word, he tried to follow Sarayu from place to place within the garden but found himself easily distracted by the blends of colors: currant and vermillion reds, tangerine and chartreuse divided by platinum and fuchsia, as well as innumerable shades of greens and browns. It was all wonderfully bewildering and intoxicating.

  Sarayu seemed to be intently focused on a particular task. But like her name, she wafted about like a playful eddying wind, and he never quite knew which way she was blowing. He found it rather difficult to keep up with her. It reminded him of trying to follow Nan in a mall.

  She moved through the garden snipping off various flowers and herbs and handing them to Mack to carry. The makeshift bouquet grew quite large, a pungent mass of perfume. The mixtures of aromatic spices were unlike anything he had ever smelled, and they were so strong he could almost taste them.

  They deposited the final bouquet inside the door of a small garden shop that Mack had not noticed before, buried as it was in a thicket of wild growth including vines and what Mack thought were weeds.

  “One task done,” Sarayu announced, “and one to go.” She handed Mack a shovel, rake, scythe, and pair of gloves and floated out and down a particularly overgrown path that seemed to go in the general direction of the far end of the garden. Along the way, she would occasionally slow to touch this plant or that flower, all the while humming the haunting tune that Mack had been captivated by the evening before. He followed obediently, carrying the tools he had been given and trying to keep her in sight while wondering at his surroundings.

  When she stopped, Mack almost ran into her, distracted as he was looking around. Somehow she had changed and was now dressed in work clothes: jeans with wild designs, a work shirt, and gloves. They were in an area that could have been an orchard, but not really. Regardless, the place where they stood was an open spot surrounded on three sides by peach and cherry trees, and in the middle was a cascade of purple and yellow flowered bushes that almost took his breath away.

  “Mackenzie.” She pointed directly at the incredible purple and yellow patch. “I would like your help clearing this entire plot of ground. There is something very special that I want to plant here tomorrow, and we need to get it ready.” She looked at Mack and reached for the scythe.

  “You can’t be serious! This is so gorgeous and in such a secluded spot.”

  But Sarayu didn’t seem to notice. Without further explanation, she turned and began destroying the artistic display of flowers. She cut cleanly, seemingly without any effort.

  Mack shrugged, donned his gloves, and began raking into piles the havoc she was wreaking. He struggled to keep up. It might not be a strain for her, but for him it was labor. Twenty minutes later the plants were all cut off at the roots, and the plot looked like a wound in the garden. Mack’s forearms were etched with cut marks from the branches he had piled in one spot. He was out of breath and sweating, glad to be finished. Sarayu stood over the plot, examining their handiwork.

  “Isn’t this exhilarating?” she asked.

  “I’ve been exhilarated in better ways,” Mack retorted sarcastically.

  “Oh, Mackenzie, if you only knew. It’s not the work, but the purpose that makes it special. And,” she said, smiling at him, “it’s the only kind I do.”

  Mack leaned on his rake and looked around the garden and then at the red welts on his arms. “Sarayu, I know you are the Creator, but did you make the poisonous plants, stinging nettles, and mosquitoes too?”

  “Mackenzie,” responded Sarayu, seeming to move in tandem with the breezes, “a created being can only take what already exists and from it fashion something different.”

  “So, you are saying that you…”

  “… created everything that actually exists, including what you consider the bad stuff,” Sarayu finished for him. “But when I created it, it was only good, because that is just the way I am.” She seemed to almost billow into a curtsy before resuming her task.

  “But,” Mack continued, not satisfied, “then why has so much of the ‘good’ gone ‘bad’?”

  Now Sarayu paused before answering. “You humans, so little in your own eyes. You are truly blind to your own place in the creation. Having chosen the ravaged path of independence, you don’t even comprehend that you are dragging the entire creation along with you.” She shook her head and the wind sighed through the trees nearby. “So very sad, but it won’t be this way forever.”

  They enjoyed a few moments of silence as Mack looked back toward the various plants that he could see from where they were standing. “So, are there plants in this garden that are poisonous?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes!” exclaimed Sarayu. “They are some of my favorites. Some are even dangerous to the touch, like this one.” She reached for a nearby bush and snapped off something that looked like a dead stick with only a few tiny leaves budding from the stem. She handed it to Mack, who raised both hands to avoid touching it.

  Sarayu laughed. “I am here, Mack. There are times when it is safe to touch, and times when precautions must be taken. That is the wonder and adventure of exploration, a piece of what you call science—to discern and discover what we have hidden for you to find.”

  “So why did you hide it?” Mack inquired.

  “Why do children love to hide and seek? Ask any person who has a passion to explore and discover and create. The choice to hide so many wonders from you is an act of love that is a gift inside the process of life.”

  Mack gingerly reached out and took the poisonous twig. “If you had not told me this was safe to touch, would it have poisoned me?”

  “Of course! But if I direct you to touch, that is different. For any created being, autonomy is lunacy. Freedom involves trust and obedience inside a relationship of love. So, if you are not hearing my voice, it would be wise to take the time to understand the nature of the plant.”

  “So why create poisonous plants at all?” Mack queried, handing back the twig.

  “Your question presumes that poison is bad, that such creations have no purpose. Many of these so-called bad plants, like this one, contain incredible properties for healing or are necessary for some of the most magnificent wonders when combined with something else. Humans have a great capacity for declaring something good or evil, without truly knowing.”

  Obviously the short break, which had been for Mack’s sake, was over and Sarayu thrust a hand shovel at Mack, picking up the rake. “To prepare this ground, we must dig up the roots of all the wonderful growth that was here. It is hard work, but well worth it. If the roots are not here, then they cannot do what comes naturally and harm the seed we will plant.”

  “Okay,” Mack grunted as they both got down on their knees alongside the freshly cleared plot. Sarayu was somehow able to reach deep under the ground and find the ends of the roots, bringing them effortlessly to the surface. She left the shorter ones for Mack, who us
ed the hand shovel to dig under and pull them up. They then shook the dirt from the roots and threw them onto one of the piles that Mack had earlier raked together.

  “I’ll burn those later,” she said.

  “You were talking earlier about humans declaring good and evil without knowledge?” Mack asked, shaking another root free from its dirt.

  “Yes. I was specifically talking about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

  “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil?” asked Mack.

  “Exactly!” she stated, seeming to almost expand and contract for emphasis while she worked. “And now, Mackenzie, you are beginning to see why eating the deadly fruit of that tree was so devastating to your race.”

  “I’ve never given it much thought, really,” said Mack, intrigued by the direction their chat was taking. “So was there really an actual garden? I mean, Eden and all that?”

  “Of course. I told you I have a thing for gardens.”

  “That’s going to bother some people. There are lots of people who think it was only a myth.”

  “Well, their mistake isn’t fatal. Rumors of glory are often hidden inside what many consider myths and tales.”

  “Oh, I’ve got some friends who are not going to like this,” Mack observed as he wrestled with a particularly stubborn root.

  “No matter. I myself am very fond of them.”

  “I’m so surprised,” Mack said a little sarcastically, then smiled in her direction. “Okay, then.” He drove his shovel into the dirt, grabbing the root above it with his hand. “So tell me about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”