"Since we were hurt in relationship, we'll likely be healed in relationship." — William Paul Young

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Healed in relationship. Could that be sage advice for our embattled prime minister and his parliamentary colleagues on their early-winter break?

William Paul Young, author of The Shack (Courtesy Lorna Dueck)

It comes from a soothing book that Canadians are fast turning into a bestseller. The Shack is a first novel about failed expectations, fear and loss, truth, lies and God.

According to its author, William Paul Young, the shack is metaphorically "the house you build out of your own pain."

The book is enormously popular, having sat as number one on the New York Times bestseller list since June. It has been translated into 30 languages.

This book has nothing to do with politics per se. Rather it's a do-it-yourself way to manage your own therapy and figure out why you may be messed up about religion at the same time.

In the novel, God is a composite of two women and a Middle Eastern carpenter, a different sort of trinity than most would imagine.

A black woman named Papa takes the dominant role in this God trio. She's a great cook and cleaner. Birds feed out of her hand while she utters pithy sayings such as "You were created to be loved and for you to live as if you were unloved is a limitation."

Bottom line, this is a book that is about helping people understand God loves them.

The rendezvous

On first reading, I confess that I felt The Shack was poorly written and I had a hard time sticking with it until I felt it scratch through the surface of some of my own issues. But now I am hooked, as it seems are so many other readers.

From what I've heard, tough men cry like babies over this book, others are incorporating it into group readings and mothers are sending it to their adult children. It seems that almost everyone I know is intending to give it away this Christmas.

If you need evidence that God exists, I'd say being able to command the bestseller list with this book is something that points in that direction.

Its writing might not impress our literary sense — it is a first novel after all — but the story rings true.

Most of us can probably find something of ourselves in its pages and so it becomes, literally, a divine read. A read that reveals something about the relationship between God and ourselves.

At one point, Mac, the lead character becomes so angry with God that he agrees to meet him for a rendezvous to have things out.

God wants to see Mac at the scene of a crime, where Mac's youngest daughter had been killed. There Mac discovers his unusual trinity, the Holy Spirit is a gardener digging in the muck; Jesus is a carpenter building the coffin; and Papa God is the cook tending to Mac's weary body.

Who among of us can't relate to the idea of having our own dirt to dig in, to bury the grief we carry and find the strength we need to move on.

On a mission

On the review front, there have been many who have said the novel is theologically dangerous. But that skirting of the theologically correct can be seen as a deliberate strategy by an author who feels God is about relationships, not religion.

William Paul Young (he goes by Paul) was born in Grande Prairie, Alta. But he spent most of his first decade with missionary parents who were ministering to a remote tribe in Papua, New Guinea.

His childhood was marked by incidents of sexual abuse by members of the tribe and the Christian boarding school he attended, details that became tucked away in his personal "shack."

An abrupt departure from the mission led to his father becoming a pastor to a number of small churches in Western Canada By the time he left high school, Young had attended 13 different schools. More shack material.

As he grew up, the author worked in the oil fields, as a radio disc jockey, a janitor and inside salesman before going on to manage a small manufacturing company in Gresham, Oregon, where he settled down with his wife Kim and their six children.

At 38, he had a three-month affair with Kim's best friend, an incident that challenged his marriage and forced him to take stock of his life.

A great sadness

Much of this novel is about the intensity of the pain that Young brings to his subjects, a pain his main character Mac describes as "the great sadness."

"The intensity of the pain comes from a couple of different things," the author told me in an interview. He spent 11 years after the affair trying to repair himself and his marriage while life kept throwing hurdles his way.

"In about six months, my 18-year-old brother was killed; Kim's mom, at age 59, died unexpectedly, massive coronary; and my five-year-old niece was killed the day after her fifth birthday.

"My great sadness comes from just all the losses. The sense of not being connected to my own family relationships."

It is a great sadness, he argues, that can only be repaired by a pure and clear relationship with Papa the cleaner, cook and so much more.

Something about it just rings true.