Read this book!

Read this book!

I don’t normally use my blogs to recommend books. In fact, I’ve never done so before. But I have just finished one that made such an impression on me that I decided this was an occasion to break the rule.

Over the years I have from time to time come across Philip Yancey’s books, and always found them helpful. The cover blurb of his latest one tells us that he has written twenty-five in all, with seventeen million in print and translations into fifty languages. Not bad, that!

It’s called Where the light fell. He describes it as a “memoir”, an autobiography, in effect. Now in his later years, he decided the time had come to survey his life and reflect on the events and circumstances which have shaped him. And, to summarise, I can only say that he has both a gripping story to tell and also a wonderful gift for telling it. He is a journalist by profession, not a pastor or teacher, and writes clear, fluent prose which makes for easy reading.

Easy, that is, in one way. In another way it is quite tough, for he is an American from the deep south, born shortly after the second world war, and his life has been dominated by what you can only call hyper-fundamentalism. In fact, speaking from a British perspective, this is the one drawback, for as you read you find yourself immersed in a brand of Christianity which you have probably heard about but never experienced at first hand, and some of the details of which beggar belief.

You could in fact describe it as a horror-story. Could Christian people really believe such things! Could Christian people really do such things! To both of which questions the staggering answer is, sadly, yes, they could; and yes, they did. (And, very likely, yes, they still do.)

Yancey’s father, a pastor, died in utterly tragic circumstances when he was a small child, and the book is the family story of Yancey himself, his widowed mother and his slightly older brother, including their spell as “white trailer-trash”.

His mother tipples over into a fanaticism bordering on the insane, his brilliantly gifted brother bounces around crazily between extreme faith, total rejection of faith and, you can’t help feeling, every possible madness in between. And in the middle of it all Yancey himself clings to an orthodox Christianity which enables him to write his books and to reflect on his family’s life, as in this one.

Just a few of his book-titles give a flavour of what you get from Yancey: Disappointment with God; The gift of pain (co-authored with the famous leprosy doctor Paul Brand); Prayer: Does it make any difference?; Where is God when it hurts?; A skeptic’s guide to faith.

You’ll gather from that that while he is not a scholar, he is very much a thinking Christian. He refuses to swallow party-lines or to dodge hard questions. And this is what makes his books so valuable. Let’s be honest, probably all of us, when we come across parts of the Bible which are hard to come to terms with, make a dive for the “easy” bits we might have learned in Sunday School. You can’t help wondering sometimes, indeed, if many congregations are fed Sunday by Sunday on a diet of shallow Christian platitudes which fail to feed the soul or stimulate the mind. If this is so, it’s the kind of thing Yancey kicks against.

Enough! I’ll leave it up to you decide if you feel he might be worth your time. Personally, though, I have no doubt!

Philip Yancey, Where the light fell, is published in the UK by Hodder and Stoughton.