By Lloyd Mackey

THE SHACK is a runaway bestseller, with a unique connection to a Victoria pastor.

Author William Paul Young and rector Harold Munn have a very special reason to be helping Munn’s congregants understand The Shack – which Young released in 2008, to great popular acclaim.

Munn was born in 1947, in Victoria’s Royal Jubilee Hospital. Young’s mother, Bernice, was a nurse-in-training at the hospital, and was present at Munn’s birth.

He only weighed one pound, and was expected to die momentarily. This was his mother’s sixth pregnancy; the rest had ended in miscarriages.

For whatever reason, the baby did not die – and Bernice was left to care for little Harold, awaiting the inevitable.

But the inevitable did not come. Harold gained strength, left the hospital in two years, grew to manhood and became an Anglican clergyman, like his father – who had been a rector in Victoria and, later, a bishop in northern B. C. Harold Munn has been rector of the historic Church of St. John the Divine, at Quadra, near Pandora, for the past 12 years.

After completing nurse’s training, Bernice married Henry Young.

The couple went to Irian Jaya, in southeast Asia, where Paul was born. The Youngs were Christian and Missionary Alliance missionaries.

Years later, after Young had written The Shack, the now-Anglican minister that the then-student nurse had cradled and kept warm in 1947 had a most interesting and moving follow-up encounter.

Bernice Young was having trouble accepting the imagery of The Shack, particularly the casting of God the Father, in the Trinity, as a genial and blunt-talking black woman.

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She learned that Munn had read and been deeply moved by the book, and was encouraging his parishioners and others to read it.

Author Young told BCCN that Munn “wrote an email to my mother, describing how the imagery was important – and pointing out that God is not a shepherd nor a rock nor a mother hen” – but that these images, too, are important.

So the baby Bernice had kept alive became the mentor who helped her to understand the significance and deeply spiritual meaning of her son’s book – which has now sold 17 million copies, and been published in 36 languages.

On August 21, Paul Young will be leading two workshops at St. John the Divine. He hopes, as part of the process, to tell his mother’s story. And Harold Munn will have him as the guest preacher in the St. John pulpit the next day.

Young’s sessions are being billed as ‘Divine Intervention,’ according to Catherine MacKenzie, the parish administrator at St. John. It is, she notes, a play on words – both with respect to the church’s name, and the subject matter of the novel.

According to the publisher’s promotional material, The Shack “is a suspenseful, imaginative and to some, controversial account of a man who suffers a devastating personal family tragedy – and, in his despair, encounters supernatural manifestations of the three persons of the Trinity in a shack. God the Father appears as a large African American woman, Jesus Christ as a Middle-Eastern carpenter, and the Holy Spirit as an Asian woman.”

The Shack has made a big impact on many people. It has also been endorsed by respected Christian figures such as Eugene Peterson – author of The Message, and professor emeritus of spiritual theology at Vancouver’s Regent College.

He writes: “When the imagination of a writer and the passion of a theologian cross-fertilize, the result is a novel on the order of The Shack. This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his. It’s that good!”

August 2010