THE SHACK, A FILM, MADE NEXT DOOR.

They are making the movie right here in lower mainland B.C., and I have been just metres away from some of the filming this week. This may be a good film, if it keeps to the script. John Fusco, best known for writing 1988's Young Guns, wrote its screenplay adaptation from the book by the same name by first-time author Paul Young which sold 22 million copies worldwide. Of course many in the evangelical world took issue with the 2007 best-selling book, The Shack, in the first place, castigating it and its Canadian author Paul Young for parodying God and the Trinity, perhaps even depreciating these entities.

SAM WORTHINGTON

I treated the read years ago as the novel that it was. You would throw out much of C.S. Lewis' fiction if you took the same reactionary stance against his material.  Young was not teaching theology, but telling a story, the account of a man's pain at the loss of a daughter as a result of a kidnapping and murder by a serial killer. Sam Worthington plays the lead role of Mackenzie "Mack" Allen Phillips who is plunged into a deep emotional abyss that embraces fury at God. Four years after the horror, he receives a letter from God called Papa. 

And of course this representation in the book set people off, because portrayed Papa as a woman, a black female who will be portrayed by Octavia Spencer, who has already won an Oscar for her role in the "The Help." Radha Mitchell is in the role of Phillips' wife and Amelie Eve is their missing daughter. I saw her in the canoe scene as it was being shot last night. The Shack and Papa's cabin tucked into the woods are all on site and the filming went on for the four days that we were close by holidaying in a cottage. Very fun.

Paul Young himself says that he is excited about the movie because he has been given the rare opportunity to invest his creative input into the filmmaking process. We will see how much his voice is heard.  Young calls the book a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain.” 

Will non-believers be confused, led astray from God’s true persona? Might viewers who never think about God, feel compelled to seek to know him outside the context of the novel? I will look forward to the movie. I won't fashion my theology, or my concept of God based upon its expressions for deity. I may however, learn to meditate more keenly on some aspects of the character of God as expressed by the three persons whom readers may discern as the Trinitarian God image. I may  be encouraged about the compassion of God for his human creatures when they suffer.