Suffering and grace

“I truly believe this is the one book I was put on earth to write. So many of the strands from my childhood – racial hostility, political division, culture wars – have resurfaced in modern form. Looking back points me forward.”

These words on the flyleaf of Philip Yancey’s memoir, Where the Light Fell, caught my attention as I opened the book. Yancey has written many influential and important books. How could he make such a bold statement about this one? 

After reading his book, I agree with Yancey about its racial, social, cultural and political relevance. To me, that alone makes it worth reading. But even more, I think that many readers will find Yancey’s memoir personally relevant. 

Within the first few pages, Yancey reveals a secret from his past that he did not learn about until he was in college. When Yancey was just a baby, his father, Marshall, died from polio after spending time in an “iron lung.” He makes it clear that he grew up knowing these details about his father’s death. He then describes his great shock at finding out, as a young adult, that Marshall died after he and Yancey’s mother decided to remove him from the iron lung, against the advice of doctors. The couple believed that Marshall did not need this medical assistance because God would heal him, so that the two of them could then serve God as missionaries in Africa. God did not, in fact, heal Marshall.

Yancey tells how his mother – in her grief, and perhaps in an attempt to make sense of her husband’s death – vows to give Philip and his older brother Marshall to God, to be missionaries in Africa. He believes that his mother did this as a kind of atonement. “My brother and I are the atonement to compensate for a fatal error in belief,” he writes. “No wonder our mother has such strange notions of parenting, and such fierce resistance to letting us go. We alone can justify our father’s death.” His mother’s vow dogged and shaped the young lives of Yancey and his brother, proving a confusing and burdensome weight for both of them.

Where the Light Fell is divided into five sections, each containing several chapters. Part I, “The Family Plot,” details the impact of his mother’s vow on Yancey’s life. In Part II, “Boyhood,” Yancey reflects on his younger years from the perspective of being a child, sharing some of the confusing messages he internalized about God, family, church and life in the American South. Part III, “Roots,” shows a boy who grew up poor and racist, amid family and religious dysfunction, facing doubts, questions and fear. Part IV, “Disorder,” is about Yancey’s adolescence, including experiences of increasing shame, intrapersonal conflict and confusion over beliefs and his own identity. He tries a self-improvement regime, then numbness and self-control, then rebellion. 

Part V is titled “Graced.” Most striking in this section is Yancey’s description of a pivotal moment during a defiant prayer. He has an epiphany in which he sees himself as a tramp and Jesus as the Good Samaritan; he realizes his own arrogance when he sees himself spitting in the face of Jesus, who is tending his wounds. This moment of clarity, of realizing his own sinfulness and Jesus’s steadfast love, changes his life. Of the experience, he writes, “In the end, my resurrection of belief had little to do with logic or effort and everything to do with the unfathomable mystery of God… Like Paul, like Job, I cannot begin to answer for God. I can only accept the free gift of grace with open hands.” 

All along, Yancey’s life has been shaped by fraught relationships with his mother and with his older brother Marshall, and also by relational conflict between the latter two. Throughout growing-up years filled with both family and religious dysfunction, Marshall and Philip each ask a question first formulated by Marshall: “How do you know what’s fake and what’s real?” The brothers take very different paths in response to that question. For Yancey, it has ultimately led to a life of wrestling to distinguish and articulate what is fake and what is real, especially when it comes to faith. 

“What’s fake and what’s real?” It’s a question that all of us can benefit from asking about a lot of things as we pursue the truth. We ought to ask it about ourselves, in pursuit of wholeness and forgiveness. In Yancey’s words, “Guilt denied never goes away”; if we are to be set free from guilt and shame, we need to see, acknowledge and repent of our sins and sinful patterns. We should also seek a clear-eyed view of the truth about ourselves for the sake of those around us. Yancey’s mother, who believed that she had attained a sinless state, and who maintained a saintly reputation in public, wounded her boys deeply with her erratic moods and vindictive anger. We, too, hurt those we love when we are unwilling to face our own sin.    

Near the end of his memoir, Yancey writes, “A nephew once sent me a quote that gives me perspective on the church: ‘An idea cannot be responsible for those who claim to believe in it.’” Even when we who follow Christ get things very wrong, God’s intention for the church remains. Yancey adds, “I have spent my adult life sorting through the gospel message that I heard from those who claim to believe in it, searching for the ‘idea,’ the life-giving Essence itself.” 

In his writing, Yancey has returned over and over to the themes of suffering and grace. He continues to wrestle with these themes in new ways, especially as he navigates a recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. His memoir offers a window into why these themes have been so important to him throughout his life. He reveals the many ways that we, both unintentionally and otherwise, can twist and distort the gospel, often resulting in suffering. He also reminds us how God’s grace – the “‘idea, the life-giving Essence itself” – remains.