Category: Theology and Reflections

The Way Back to Orthodoxy Is Through Beauty and Transcendence

Camaron G. W. SmithLeave a comment

If the first part was a diagnosis, this is the path home. If disenchantment thinned our faith, then beauty and transcendence are how God thickens it again. If the church drifted into quiet heresy by losing its wonder, then the way back to orthodoxy is through the restoration of awe.

We will not recover our depth through fear. We will not recover our life through better arguments. We will not recover our centre by defending the truth more loudly.

The world does not need louder Christians. It needs Christians who can see again.

The way back to orthodoxy is through beauty and transcendence. Not as decoration. Not as aesthetic sugar. But as revelation.

Because beauty does what argument alone cannot do.
Beauty wounds us with the presence of God. Beauty opens the heart where logic cannot enter. Beauty re-baptises the imagination and returns the world to its sacred density.

The early church knew this.
The mystics knew this.
The Celtic saints knew this.
The desert elders knew this.
Lewis and Tolkien knew this.
Dostoevsky reminds us that beauty will save the world.
Balthasar wrote millions of words insisting that the glory of God is the beauty of Christ.

And somewhere in our modern scramble for relevance, we forgot it.

Beauty Is Not Optional for Faith

Beauty is not a luxury. Beauty is a mode of truth. A lens. A form of perception through which the soul recognises the presence of God.

Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World argues that the world is meant to be a sacrament, a holy sign of divine life. Not a symbol, but a real participation in God.

Hans Balthasar, in his first volume of The Glory of the Lord, insists that beauty is the language in which God speaks creation into being. Beauty is not one of God’s hobbies. Beauty is what God is like.

Lewis, in The Weight of Glory, said that beauty wounds us because it awakens a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy. It whispers of another world, the real one, the one we ache toward.

Tolkien, in On Fairy Stories, said that beauty is “joy beyond the walls of the world,” the sudden rupture of grace in the mundane.

Beauty is the crack in the ceiling where transcendence shines through.

A faith without beauty becomes thin.
A church without beauty becomes functional.
A Christianity without beauty becomes a quiet heresy.

We were not meant to survive on abstract ideas.
We were meant to be pierced by splendour.

Transcendence Is Not Escape

Transcendence does not pull us out of the world. It returns us to the world with new eyes.

Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane said that transcendence gives the world depth. It does not remove us from reality but roots us more deeply in it. It breaks the illusion that matter is empty and reminds us that creation is a burning bush.

David Bentley Hart in The Experience of God says that transcendence is what gives the world its intelligibility, its weight, its mystery. Without transcendence, the world collapses into flatness, and faith collapses with it.

Transcendence is the awakening of the soul to the fact that the world is alive.

It is what the disciples felt when Christ broke the bread in Emmaus.
It is what Moses felt when the bush burned.
It is what Jacob felt when he woke and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.”

Transcendence is not the departure of God. It is the discovery that God was here the whole time.

Re-enchantment Begins With Attention

The problem is not that God left.
The problem is that we stopped paying attention.

Evelyn Underhill in Mysticism said that the spiritual life begins with “the art of seeing.” Not with exotic visions, but with simple awareness. The slow opening of the inner eye.

Attention is prayer.
Attention is reverence.
Attention is the beginning of worship.

Simone Weil called attention “the purest form of generosity.”
The Psalms call it “beholding.”
Jesus called it “eyes to see.”

To re-enchant faith is to learn to pay attention again.

To the shimmer of light on water.
To the quiet dignity of bread on a table.
To the holiness of a sigh.
To the presence that fills the room in stillness.

This is transcendence in the ordinary.
This is sacrament.
This is the recovery of the world.

Why Beauty Heals the Church

Beauty heals because beauty unifies. It takes fragmented hearts and pulls them toward a single point. It gathers our desires and raises them toward God.

Beauty also humbles us. It pulls us out of our frantic self importance. It dethrones our obsession with control. It interrupts our strategies and reminds us that we are dust and glory at once.

Beauty also awakens longing.
Longing is the doorway to God.

Lewis argued that longing is the signature of God written inside the soul. Zahnd puts it simply: “Beauty calls us home.”

And beauty heals because beauty is truthful. It reveals what is real in a way that ideas alone cannot. It shows us what goodness looks like, not just what goodness means.

A church that returns to beauty returns to God.

Sacrament Is the Framework of Re-Enchantment

If beauty is the spark, sacrament is the structure.

Schmemann argued that the world is meant to be received as communion. Boersma in Heavenly Participation expands this idea: creation is sacramental because it participates in God’s being.

This means:

Water is not just water.
Bread is not just bread.
Wine is not just wine.
The world is not just itself.

Everything is charged with God.

This was the worldview of the early Christians. They saw the world as a vast cathedral and believed that every created thing carried the trace of its Maker.

We lost this.
But we can recover it.

Re-enchantment is not the invention of something new.
It is the restoration of something ancient.

The world was enchanted long before we arrived.
We simply need to wake up to it.

Beauty Re-Baptises the Imagination

Re enchantment requires the baptism of the imagination.

Lewis said imagination is “the organ of meaning.”
Tolkien said imagination is how we perceive truth through story.
Hart says imagination is the doorway to the infinite.

The modern church mistrusted imagination.
It became suspicious of anything that felt too mysterious, too beautiful, too creative.

But imagination is not the enemy of orthodoxy. Imagination is how orthodoxy becomes visible.

Imagination lets doctrine breathe.
Imagination lets theology sing.
Imagination lets Scripture open like a world instead of a manual.

To re-enchant faith is to re baptise the imagination in wonder.

Transcendence Makes Orthodoxy Alive Again

Orthodoxy is not a set of correct answers.
Orthodoxy is the right way of seeing God.

And we cannot see God rightly without transcendence.

Without transcendence, doctrines become slogans.
Without transcendence, worship becomes noise.
Without transcendence, mission becomes marketing.

Transcendence is what keeps orthodoxy from becoming brittle.
Beauty is what keeps orthodoxy from becoming cold.

Together they return orthodoxy to its true nature:
a living vision of the living God.

What Re Enchantment Looks Like in Practice

Re enchantment is not a new program. It is a posture.

It looks like:

Lighting a candle before prayer.
Receiving the Eucharist slowly.
Walking in silence at dusk.
Reading Scripture as a world rather than a text.
Blessing your children with real hands and real words.
Singing without watching the clock.
Naming beauty as revelation.
Letting awe interrupt your certainty.
Letting mystery be mystery.
Letting God be God.

It is not complicated.
It is simply a return to attention, reverence, and wonder.

The Church Will Be Healed by Beauty

We have tried everything else.

We tried being relevant.
We tried being impressive.
We tried being loud.
We tried being clever.
We tried being strategic.
We tried being modern.

None of it saved us.
None of it brought back awe.
None of it made the world thick again.

Beauty will.
Transcendence will.
The recovery of sacrament will.
The return of mystery will.

Because the soul was made for wonder.
And a church that cannot wonder cannot be orthodox.

The way back to orthodoxy is through beauty and transcendence.

Without Beauty the Church Drifts Into Quiet Heresy

Camaron G. W. SmithLeave a comment


Orthodoxy remained. Enchantment died.

This is the tragedy of the Western church. We kept the truth of the faith, but somehow lost the world that made that truth electric. We preserved our creeds but let go of the awe that once made them tremble with life. We defended the doctrines but abandoned the imagination that once knew how to kneel before mystery.

We defend what we believe with admirable resolve. Yet the rooms we gather in often feel thin, as if something essential slipped out the side door while we were busy guarding the front.

Christians today live in a church that is theologically sound yet spiritually hollow. The faith we inherited still stands tall, but the world around us has gone flat. Many of us feel the dissonance deep in our bones.

Charles Taylor gave us the word in A Secular Age.
Disenchantment.
And he was right.

The World Used To Be Alive

For most of Christian history, believers assumed the world was alive with God. Creation was a saturated place, humming with divine presence. Early Christians did not hear the Psalms describing rivers clapping or mountains singing and think it was poetic exaggeration. They believed creation participated in praise.

Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane, describes this older imagination as a world structured by the sacred. People did not divide reality into spiritual versus natural. Everything was drenched in meaning.

Consider Augustine in Confessions, seeing God in every breath and heartbeat.
Think of Hildegard of Bingen in Scivias, watching creation erupt with the green fire of the Spirit.


Think of the Desert Fathers whose fragments in the Apophthegmata Patrum speak of a God found in silence, hunger, wind and sand.

Even Calvin, in the Institutes, called creation “the theatre of God’s glory.”

Somewhere along the way, we forgot this.

We did not lose God.
We lost the sense that God saturates reality.

The Age of the Flat World

Max Weber, in his lecture “Science as a Vocation,” spoke of the modern world as “disenchanted.” Everything became explainable. Predictable. Manageable. We stopped expecting the sacred to break in sideways.

Taylor expanded this diagnosis in A Secular Age, arguing that we now live inside an “immanent frame,” a mental world that assumes transcendence is distant. Even believers feel this pressure.

The Western church absorbed this frame quietly.

We still recite the creed on Sundays.
But we live Monday to Saturday as if God only operates inside our private prayer lives or church programs.

Orthodoxy remained.
But the enchanted world those doctrines were meant to inhabit collapsed into two dimensions.

The Loss of Awe

Evelyn Underhill saw the storm coming in Worship and later in Mysticism. She warned that the church was becoming “efficient but not deep,” organised but not alive, polished but not prayerful.

Look around. She was right.

We know how to run services. We know how to build teams. We know how to create streamlined worship. But awe – that tremble of spirit before the holy – has become rare.

Awe is not emotional excess.
Awe is what happens when a finite soul meets infinite presence.

When awe disappears, something essential dies.

The Concrete Consequence: A Hollow Faith

James K A Smith reminds us in Desiring the Kingdom and You Are What You Love that humans are shaped more by imagination and desire than by information. When the church becomes a place for ideas instead of encounters, we shrink souls without noticing.

David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite argues that Christians have become “tourists in a world that used to belong to them.” He meant that our faith still stands, but our world feels colourless.

Many Christians believe the right things yet feel strangely untouched by them. They trust the doctrine but feel little life.

This is not scepticism.
This is dis enchantment.

How We Lost the World

There was no single disaster. Just a slow erosion.

Rationalism – Descartes and his heirs made ideas the centre of the Christian life.


Fear of superstition – Protestants and Catholics both cleaned their spiritual houses a bit too vigorously.


Technique – Eugene Peterson warned about this in The Contemplative Pastor. We replaced mystery with methods.


Professionalisation – Ministry became a career rather than a calling.


Systems over stories – We read Scripture like a manual instead of the world of God.
Imagination’s collapse – We forgot that truth is often seen before it is understood.

Hans Boersma in Heavenly Participation describes the pre modern world as a sacramental tapestry in which every created thing pointed beyond itself. Modern Christianity tore that tapestry apart and kept only doctrinal threads.

An Examined Faith That Forgot To Look Up

Taylor says modern people live with “cross pressure.” We feel the pull of transcendence while living inside a worldview that keeps the sacred at arm’s length.

Many Christians carry this inner ache. Their minds know God exists. But their world no longer feels alive with God.

Faith becomes technically correct yet practically thin.

Orthodoxy remains intact.
Enchantment fades.

The Tragedy Beneath the Surface

The early church did not survive by orthodoxy alone. It survived because people encountered God. They saw visions. They experienced miracles. They felt the Spirit as rushing wind. They took bread expecting Christ to be present. Acts was not ancient folklore. It was the shape of reality.

We inherited their creed but not their world.

Hart says in The Experience of God that modern Christians have reduced the infinite mystery of God to something manageable. Something tame.

The tragedy is not that God stopped speaking.
The tragedy is that we lost the capacity to hear.

A Crisis of Perception, Not Theology

This is not a doctrinal crisis.
This is a perceptual crisis.

We have the truth.
We have forgotten how to see the truth.

Boersma insists that Christians need a return to “sacramental ontology,” a way of perceiving the world that reveals God in the ordinary. In other words, reality must become transparent to grace again.

Our imaginations must be baptised.

The Ache That Remains

Yet the story does not end in the ruins. Beneath the thinness of Western faith there is still an ache. A longing. A stubborn rumour of transcendence.

Taylor calls it “the nova effect” – the sense that more is possible.


Lewis called it “joy” in Surprised by Joy.


Tolkien spoke of “the far off gleam” in his essay On Fairy Stories.


Underhill simply said it is “life.”

People are not leaving the church because they want less mystery.
They are leaving because they want more.

More presence.
More beauty.
More depth.
More world.
More God.

Disenchantment may describe our condition, but it is not our destiny. Something deep in us remembers the fire. Something in us knows the sacred can return.

And that is where the next blog will take us.

Charlie Kirk Wasn’t a Christian Martyr

Camaron G. W. SmithLeave a comment

Probably a political one…

When news spread that Charlie Kirk had died, the internet lit up. Some people grieved, others rejoiced, and many quickly called him a martyr for the faith. Within hours his name was being spoken with reverence, as though he had fallen in defence of Christianity itself.

But as I watched the commentaries roll across my feed, something in me felt unsettled. It was not about politics or even about Charlie Kirk as a person. It was about the word people kept using. Martyr.

That word means something sacred. And when it is used to crown someone who lived and died for political ideals, something in the heart of our faith begins to thin out.

—

What a Christian Martyr Really Is

In the earliest days of the Church, a martyr, from the Greek word martys, was not someone who died for an idea. A martyr was a witness. Someone who refused to stop proclaiming that Jesus Christ is Lord, even when it cost them their life.

Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death because he would not renounce the gospel. His last words were not words of rage. They were words of forgiveness. “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

The early Christians understood that martyrdom was not about defending a system or a worldview. It was about bearing witness to a love that even death could not silence.

Tertullian once wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” He did not mean that violence or victory would build the kingdom. He meant that forgiveness and mercy would.

True martyrdom looks like Jesus. It is not about conquering. It is about giving. It is not about being right. It is about being faithful. When we call someone a Christian martyr, we are saying that their death revealed Christ’s love, that somehow in their dying, heaven’s light broke through the world’s darkness.

When Politics Demands What Religion Once Did

Modern politics is a jealous god. It borrows the language of faith such as devotion, sacrifice and loyalty, and twists them into tools for power.

And like all gods, it demands offerings. It demands martyrs.

When we drape the cross in the flag, we start to confuse the kingdom of God with the ambitions of nations. We start to name enemies where Christ has called us to name neighbours. We turn a symbol of love into a banner for war.

Charlie Kirk’s voice was bold. He stood for what he believed, and many saw that as courage. But faithfulness is not measured by volume or defiance. It is measured by love.

Jesus never told us to take up our rights and follow him. He said, “Take up your cross.”

The gospel does not spread through outrage or dominance. It moves quietly through mercy. The Church does not grow through victory. It grows through love that refuses to die.

A Political Martyr

If Charlie Kirk was a martyr, then he was a political one, a man who gave himself fully to a cause he believed in. There is something deeply human in that. We all long to stand for something bigger than ourselves.

But dying for a cause is not the same as dying for Christ.

To die for a cause is to defend an idea of what is good. To die for Christ is to surrender to the One who is good.

The difference might sound small, but it changes everything.

A political martyr dies fighting enemies. A Christian martyr dies loving them.

A political martyr defends power. A Christian martyr lays it down.

A political martyr hopes their death proves they were right. A Christian martyr hopes it proves that love is real.

When the language of politics takes over the Church, these differences fade. The gospel starts to sound like another campaign, another tribe trying to win. But the story of Jesus is not about winning. It is about dying and rising again. It is about the power of love that does not need to win to transform the world.

And that is what troubles me most. Not that Charlie Kirk died, but that so many Christians can no longer tell the difference between his death and Stephen’s.

The Hunger for Heroes

Maybe it is because we are desperate for heroes.

We scroll through chaos and want someone to believe in. Politicians turn into saviours. Preachers turn into politicians. And people crave clarity in a world that feels uncertain and divided.

It is easier to anoint a martyr for our side than to become a witness of Christ’s love.

But the call of Christ has never been about winning the culture war. It is about loving the world that crucifies us. It is about carrying the cross through the noise and trusting that resurrection still happens in small, hidden ways.

When we forget that, we turn the gospel into a slogan. We trade the mystery of grace for the certainty of outrage.

And maybe that is the deeper sorrow behind Charlie Kirk’s story. Not that one man lived or died in vain, but that so many have mistaken zeal for discipleship and anger for faithfulness.

A Better Witness

To say Charlie Kirk was not a Christian martyr is not to dishonour him. It is to remember what martyrdom truly means. It is to keep sacred what belongs to God and not give it to Caesar.

I grieve his death. I grieve the confusion that made it so easy to sanctify politics in the language of faith. I grieve that we have forgotten how to die without hating those who stand against us.

Perhaps his story can still lead us somewhere better, not toward more division but toward deeper reflection.

Because the world does not need more martyrs for movements. It needs witnesses to love.

It needs people who, when faced with darkness, choose forgiveness instead of fury. People who refuse to mistake power for holiness. People who, like the martyrs of old, live and die bearing the likeness of Christ.

The only martyrdom worth claiming is the one that looks like Jesus, the one that whispers mercy even as it bleeds.

If we can remember that, maybe we will stop crowning our politicians as saints and start learning again what holiness really looks like.

Why Christians Should Celebrate Halloween

Camaron G. W. SmithLeave a comment

Reclaiming the Sacred Night through Celtic Eyes

Christians often avoid Halloween. It is seen as dark or demonic, a night of ghosts and ghouls better left unspoken. Yet in our fear of the dark, we have forgotten something ancient and holy.

The Celts called this season Samhain, the turning of the year when the veil between worlds grew thin. They lit fires not to summon spirits but to honour the mystery of life and death, to remember that the light makes its home in the night.

To them, the end of the year was not a time to fear but to listen to the whisper of the wind, to the stories of ancestors, to the quiet truth that death and life are interwoven. When the Church arrived in Celtic lands, it did not erase Samhain. It baptised it, transforming its wisdom into the rhythm of All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day, a sacred trinity of remembrance.

The Christian Roots of the Holy Evening

Halloween literally means All Hallows Eve, the night before All Saints Day on the first of November. In the early centuries, Christians would gather to remember those who had gone before them, the saints, the faithful, the beloved dead.

The theology was not one of fear but of communion. As the Apostles Creed declares, we believe in the communion of saints. That means heaven and earth are not far apart. We are one body, the living and the dead held together in Christ.

The night before All Saints was a vigil, a time to pray, to light candles, to tell stories, to remember. The darkness was not a place of dread but a threshold. It was a space where the Church stood with the saints, trusting that even the grave is not the end.

Halloween was never meant to glorify death but to proclaim that death has lost its sting (1 Corinthians 15:55).

The Celtic Way of Embracing the Thin Places

In Celtic Christianity, the sacred was never locked away in temples or confined to daylight. It breathed in the sea mist, the glow of the fire, the cry of the wind. The Celts spoke of thin places, moments and landscapes where heaven and earth seem to meet. Samhain was one of these thin places, a hinge between seasons, a pause between harvest and winter, light and dark, life and death.

To the Celtic mind, darkness was not evil. It was part of the whole. It was where seeds slept, where transformation began. The monks of Iona and Lindisfarne often prayed at night, seeing in the stars the promise of a God who keeps watch when all else rests. Psalm 139:12 says, “Even the darkness is not dark to you.” The night is as bright as the day.

When we hide from the dark, we lose something essential, the capacity to see God in mystery. Halloween, seen through Celtic eyes, becomes a sacred reminder that faith is not certainty but courage in the unknown.

Reclaiming the Night

Modern Christianity often separates light from darkness as if they were enemies, yet the story of Christ shows otherwise. God is born into the darkness of a stable. He prays in the dark garden of Gethsemane. He descends into the shadow of death before rising in dawn’s light.

To celebrate Halloween as Christians is not to glorify darkness but to declare that Christ’s light dwells there too. The pumpkins and candles, the laughter and costumes, can become acts of holy defiance. Each candle lit in the hollow of a pumpkin is a proclamation of John 1:5, The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Children who dress as skeletons or ghosts are, in a strange way, acting out the gospel’s hope that death no longer has the final word. Laughter in the face of fear is resurrection courage.

To walk through the night, to look upon the symbols of mortality with wonder instead of terror, is to live out the truth of Romans 8:38-39, that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God.

Practising a Sacred Halloween

Reclaiming Halloween does not mean ignoring its shadows; it means redeeming them. It means grounding the night in ritual, memory, and joy.

Here are a few ways Christians might enter the evening as a holy practice:

• Light a candle for loved ones who have died. Speak their names aloud. Let memory become prayer.
• Tell stories of the saints, not just the famous ones but the everyday holy people whose faith shaped your own.
• Bless your home and street as children wander through, handing out lollies with warmth and laughter. Generosity itself is light.
• Walk under the night sky and pray, “Even here, You are with me.”
• Join the joy of the children. Remember that play is not frivolous. It is spiritual resilience. To laugh at death is to trust in resurrection.

When the Celts kept Samhain they shared food with the poor and offered hospitality to wandering souls. To reclaim that spirit is to see Halloween as an act of community, where fear gives way to welcome and strangers become friends.

The Holy in the Haunting

Halloween, at its best, is a kind of Celtic sacrament, a sign that all creation, even the dark, can be redeemed. It reminds us that we are creatures of dust and spirit, flesh and breath, life and loss.

The Church’s fear of Halloween is perhaps a symptom of something deeper, our discomfort with mortality. But the gospel calls us not to denial but to transformation. The tomb, after all, became the doorway to life.

To enter the night is to practise hope. It is to walk where fear once reigned and whisper, “Christ is here too.” It is to remember that resurrection does not erase death. It transfigures it.

So this Halloween, light your candles. Laugh with your neighbours. Honour the saints and your loved ones who rest in God. Bless the children as they run through the dusk with sugar and delight.

Let it be known again that the light makes its home in the night, that even here, amid shadow and laughter, God is near.

The Shack: A Reflection

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When William Paul Young wrote The Shack, he was not trying to explain why terrible things happen. He was writing his way through sorrow. Like Job, he sat among the ashes, surrounded by questions that would not rest. Out of that ache came a story. Not a sermon, but a parable about the God who meets us in our broken places.

The Silence of God

In the book of Job, the suffering man cries into the dark, “Oh, that I knew where I might find him.” Mackenzie, the father in The Shack, makes the same cry. He pleads for answers, for justice, for the God who seems to have turned away. And then, like Job, he receives not an explanation but an encounter.

The story reminds us that God does not stand outside pain, observing from a safe distance. God enters it. The cross is not a theory of evil but the place where God shares it. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395) once wrote, “That which He has not assumed He has not healed.” When Christ took on our humanity, our confusion, our fear, our grief, He turned suffering into the place where healing begins.

The Human Face of God

What startled many readers of The Shack was how ordinary God seemed. The Father, called Papa, is a warm woman who laughs and bakes bread. The Spirit moves like a soft wind, full of life. Jesus is earthy, playful, and scarred.

For some, this felt irreverent. For others, it was freeing. It reminded us that the mystery of God is larger than our imagination, and that God is not afraid of being close. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–202) once said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” The divine shows up not in grand displays of power but in the tenderness of relationship.

For me, that image of God as a woman was strangely comforting. I have carried my own wounds around the word “father,” the kind of ache that makes intimacy with God feel complicated. Meeting God first in a motherly form would be a gentler introduction for my heart, an invitation to trust again before I could rediscover what “Father” might really mean. And that is all right.

God is not confined to any one image or gender. Scripture speaks of God as a mother who comforts her child, as a father who runs to embrace his son, as wisdom dancing at creation, as spirit breathing over the waters. God contains them all and yet exceeds them all. When God meets us, it is always in the way that heals us best.

And perhaps that is what The Shack captures so beautifully. God does not always have to relate to us in perfect theological categories. The God of the novel might not look exactly like the Trinitarian formulations of church history, but that does not make the encounter less true. Sometimes what is doctrinally perfect is not what is pastorally healing. Sometimes what is fact is not yet what is good for us.

God meets us where we are, not where we have managed to arrive theologically.

These kitchen scenes of cooking, laughing, and washing dishes are not incidental. They show us that heaven is not far away, and that holiness is not fragile. God is at home in our kitchens and our conversations, in the small things that hold the world together. Bread broken in love is never just bread. It becomes the body of grace in every act of forgiveness.

The Dance of Relationship

The story shows the Trinity not as an idea to explain but as a living dance of love. Mack finds himself in a circle of laughter, humility, and delight. Father, Son, and Spirit moving together. There is no hierarchy, no fear, only mutual joy.

This is what divine life looks like, communion that never ends. Mack’s healing does not come through answers but through being drawn into relationship. He learns to trust again. He learns that forgiveness is not demanded of him but offered to him. The Father holds his pain without rushing him. The Spirit guides him into honesty. Jesus walks beside him in the dirt, showing him that redemption is as simple and sacred as friendship.

The Trinity is not explained here. It is experienced. The story whispers that God’s power is not the power to control but the power to love without limit.

The Mystery of Shared Suffering

When Mack asks why God allowed his daughter to die, God does not give a reason. God grieves with him. The most daring moment in the book is when we see God cry. Those tears are not weakness. They are the heart of compassion.

In Christ, God takes our pain into Himself, and in doing so makes it holy. The tears of God in The Shack reflect the tears of Christ at Lazarus’ tomb, tears that do not remove death but transform it.

The story shifts our question from Why does God allow suffering? to Where is God in my suffering? And the answer, again and again, is Here.

The Shacks We Carry

Each of us has a shack, a place in our hearts that we have boarded up, a room where grief or guilt still lives. We avoid it. We build our lives around it. But this story invites us to step inside again, not alone but with God.

When we dare to enter that place, we may find what Mack finds, that the very ground of our pain can become the ground of God’s presence. The shack becomes a temple. It becomes a place of communion.

Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296–373) once wrote, “God became what we are, that He might make us what He is.” In other words, God steps fully into our humanity so that our humanity can be gathered into divine love. God meets Mack not to undo what happened, but to show him that nothing, not even the deepest wound, can separate him from love. What changes is not the past but the way it is carried, from isolation to belonging, from despair to trust.

An Invitation

Perhaps The Shack is not a story to be solved but a space to inhabit. It does not offer tidy explanations. It opens a room for encounter. It asks whether we are willing to meet God, not the idea of God, but the living presence who cooks, who laughs, who cries, who stays.

So maybe the question for us is this.
Where is our own shack?
Where is that place we have locked away because it hurts too much to enter?
And what if God is already there, waiting by the fire, patient as bread rising in the oven, whispering, “You were never meant to carry this alone”?

The heart of the story is not about understanding suffering but about discovering love. It is not about solving God but trusting God. Faith is not built on answers. It is built on presence.

And maybe that is the quiet truth of The Shack: that God is nearer than we ever dared to believe, nearer than our pain, nearer than our fear, nearer than our own breath.