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in all states and situations. Hello

0:41

friends, you're listening to No Small

0:43

Endeavor. I'm Lee Seacamp. You're listening

0:46

to our unabridged interview with the

0:48

author, Philip Yancey. Philip

0:50

Yancey has something like 17 million

0:52

books in print, a beloved author,

0:54

and his tales of in his

0:57

most recent memoir or what were

0:59

the focus of our conversation taped

1:01

there in Nashville this past year.

1:04

A moving and beautiful conversation as so

1:06

many of our conversations are with our

1:09

guests. This one I found

1:11

especially interesting because one, Yancey was

1:13

raised in the South like me and he

1:15

was also raised in a pretty strict fundamentalist

1:17

upbringing which has some similarities to my own.

1:21

And I was remembering as I say

1:23

in the edited piece for this for

1:25

broadcast that years ago when my wife

1:27

and I were talking to a therapist

1:30

about a family member who was

1:32

going into rehab and she

1:34

was talking to us about what the family could

1:36

expect with this family member. I was

1:38

very young at the time. This was long before we had

1:40

kids and she knew that I had gone

1:42

to seminary and she knew that the time I was

1:44

working on a PhD in theology and she looked at

1:46

me after schooling us on some of these

1:48

things and looked me in the eye and she said, I have something to

1:51

say to you. She said bad

1:53

theology messes up people's lives and

1:55

it was one of those pivotal moments

1:57

that I've long remembered and tried

2:00

to pay a lot of attention to and

2:03

realizing the ways in which we talk about God

2:05

and the ways we talk about faith can

2:08

have a profound impact and can certainly

2:10

have a strongly deleterious

2:12

impact upon others. And

2:15

Yancey's storytelling makes this so

2:17

clear and so plain and

2:20

distressingly so. But even out of all

2:22

of that the ways in which he

2:25

found things like beauty and

2:27

love opening him up to new possibilities

2:29

to think about the meaning of

2:31

the word or the person or

2:34

the reality of God or faith, it

2:37

yields a beautiful and redemptive story. Enjoy.

2:39

Here's Philip Yancey. Philip Yancey is the

2:41

author of more than two dozen books

2:44

which have garnered 13 gold

2:46

medallion book awards. He currently has more

2:48

than 17 million books

2:50

in print being published in more

2:52

than 50 languages worldwide. Philip

2:55

worked as a journalist and freelance author in

2:57

Chicago for 20 years writing for

2:59

a wide variety of publications including

3:01

Reader's Digest, The Atlantic, National

3:04

Wildlife and Christianity Today. Currently

3:06

he and his wife Janet live in the foothills of

3:09

the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. And

3:11

today we're getting to sit together here in

3:13

Nashville and we're discussing Philip's recent memoir

3:15

Where the Light Fell. Welcome Philip. Thank you

3:17

very much Lee. It's a delight

3:19

to have you here with us today. Thank you. Your

3:22

new memoir is, I truly

3:25

found it beautiful and very moving

3:27

and for

3:31

at least one large part because

3:33

I relate to a lot of

3:36

kind of where you come from and some of the experiences

3:38

that you had but it's just

3:40

so beautifully done and so well done. Well

3:43

I waited a long time to write this memoir. I

3:47

as you say have written, been,

3:49

I've done nothing but write books for the last

3:51

40 years or so but I haven't

3:53

really told my own story just little snippets of it

3:55

here and there in part

3:57

because I wanted to protect family members. probably

4:01

that's the main reason. But

4:03

at a certain point I decided I've

4:05

got to do it. I've got to get it down. And

4:09

I'm glad I did. It was a

4:11

great experience just kind of putting

4:13

my own life together. That's one thing writers

4:16

often get to do. But it

4:19

felt like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without

4:21

a picture on the face to show me

4:23

where I was going to end up. Well,

4:25

you say on the last, I think it's the last page of

4:27

the book in your author's note, you say memory is a complicated

4:29

thing. And so I would imagine

4:32

that putting a memoir together like this is a

4:34

complicated thing. It

4:36

is. And I

4:38

remember a case where

4:41

Frank McCourt wrote

4:43

a wonderful memoir about

4:45

growing up in a

4:48

very Catholic poverty stricken

4:50

home in Limerick, Ireland. And

4:53

then they interviewed his brother and

4:55

said, did Frank interview you

4:57

before he wrote

4:59

his book? No. So what

5:01

do you think? He said, well, he got some

5:03

things right and some things he got wrong. So

5:05

they told that to Frank McCourt

5:08

and Frank said, well, then he should write

5:10

his own memoir. And he

5:12

did. And that became a bestseller too. But

5:14

memoir is complicated. I did interview my

5:16

mother, my brother, and my uncle and

5:19

everybody else I could think of. But

5:23

you can't trust anybody's memory perfectly for

5:25

sure. Yeah. So I also,

5:27

you said there that you had waited for

5:30

a while before writing this because you wanted to

5:33

protect some people. And you also

5:35

acknowledged near the end of the

5:37

book that the president

5:39

of the Bible college, which you attended as an

5:41

undergrad, kind of pressed you in

5:44

these recent years, asking why

5:46

you had kind of written in a way that

5:49

he appeared to find disloyal in

5:51

that you were kind of exposing these trick fundamentalisms

5:53

and some of the bizarre moralisms of your school

5:55

experience. And at the same time, you also talked

5:57

about how your mother has felt hurt by that.

6:00

you're writing and that you're quite open

6:02

about the pain of your childhood experience. But

6:05

as we'll explore today, clearly you're not doing a hatchet

6:08

chop in the book because you

6:10

try to be

6:13

very gracious in very difficult stories that you share.

6:15

But how do you think about then balancing all

6:17

of that and doing that kind of work? That's

6:19

why I waited so long. I

6:21

took a lot of notes and I had a lot of plans.

6:25

Actually Lee, it wasn't until I faced death.

6:29

I was in a rollover accident. My

6:32

floor to explore turned over

6:35

and over five different times as I was rolling

6:37

down a cliff. I was belted in and I

6:39

ended up with a broken neck. And

6:42

that day after they did the CAT scan, the

6:44

doctor came in and said, oh, we have a

6:49

jet standing by to fly you to Denver. We're

6:52

concerned because it's what we call

6:54

a common-nuded fracture. It has a

6:56

lot of little pieces. And if

6:58

one of them has punctured your

7:00

carotid artery, just to be honest with you, you're not

7:02

going to make it to Denver. So you

7:05

better call the people you love and tell them goodbye. Well,

7:07

there's a wake-up call. So

7:11

I'm strapped down and think

7:13

through my life, if

7:15

I do die today, what

7:17

will I regret not having done? And

7:20

the one thing on that agenda was write

7:23

this memoir. A

7:26

writer really only has one gift, and

7:28

that's the gift of his or her

7:30

own life. Good,

7:34

bad, I

7:36

tell some of the painful parts. But

7:38

I look back on it and the very process

7:40

of putting it together seemed

7:42

therapeutic, seemed healthy because it

7:45

made a

7:48

literary hole, I guess, with W-H-O-L-E.

7:51

It worked together. And see how even

7:54

the bad things were useful to me

7:57

because they sent me on a search.

8:00

church, if I didn't like something

8:02

growing up, then I was free to

8:04

explore it. How can I correct it? It's

8:07

one thing to say, oh, the church is full

8:09

of hypocrites, and the

8:11

church I grew up in was full of hypocrites. It's

8:14

another thing to say, well, then what should it have looked

8:16

like? What should I look like? And

8:19

I feel blessed, actually, that would be the right word. I

8:21

feel blessed that I've been able to spend

8:24

my career thrashing

8:26

through my own questions of faith

8:28

and my own puzzles of faith

8:31

and making a

8:33

living while doing that. That's

8:36

a great blessing. Yeah. So

8:38

the big frame of your memoir

8:41

is first your father's death

8:43

and that you discover in

8:46

your early 20s, I guess

8:48

you were, that there had been a secret, a

8:50

lie, really, about your father's death. And

8:53

you even say that you began to see

8:55

him as perhaps a quote,

8:57

a sort of holy fool, in particular. Tell

9:00

us about that. Yes,

9:02

I was one year old when my father died,

9:04

and so I have no conscious memory of him

9:06

at all. I just have other

9:08

people's memories, and they painted him as

9:10

this giant of faith. He

9:13

was not raised in a particularly religious

9:15

background, but he went into the Navy

9:17

in World War II and was actually

9:19

sailing on the way to Pearl Harbor

9:21

when the war ended, when

9:24

the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima

9:26

and Nagasaki. And

9:31

he had a rather dramatic conversion, I think,

9:33

trying to get God to get him out

9:35

of the Navy. That didn't work, but

9:38

he didn't have to go to war, so that

9:40

was good. And he came back and was a

9:42

truly converted person. He decided, I want to be

9:44

a missionary to Africa. And he had met the

9:47

person who became my mother in the meantime. They

9:50

got married, and as potential

9:53

missionaries do, went around and got several

9:55

thousand people to agree to pray for

9:57

them, and pay for them. donate

10:01

money to support them on the went.

10:07

A pandemic was raging in the

10:09

United States. In this case, it

10:11

was a pandemic of polio. Mostly

10:14

polio affected children three to five years of

10:16

age. My father,

10:18

however, was 23, and it

10:21

was a bit of an anomaly that a person that

10:23

age would get the kind of polio he did. In

10:27

one day, he was completely paralyzed and

10:29

lived for the next several months in

10:32

an iron lung at Grady Memorial

10:35

Hospital in Atlanta. It was

10:37

a terrible existence. He couldn't move. They

10:40

had no televisions. He couldn't read a book. He

10:42

just lay there all day and looked at the

10:44

ceiling. And finally,

10:47

he and a group of people

10:49

around him decided this can't possibly

10:51

be God's will. The

10:53

guy wants to be a missionary

10:56

for goodness sake. And maybe maybe

10:58

we ought to pray that God would heal him. So

11:01

they did. They started praying and against

11:03

all medical advice removed

11:05

him from the iron lung. And

11:10

less than two weeks later, he died. The secret

11:12

that was kept from me was not that he

11:14

died. Obviously, I know it didn't have a father,

11:16

but that he died because

11:19

people who claim to speak for God

11:21

actually did not. These

11:24

were people who cared for him, who loved him, but they

11:27

took on a prerogative they didn't have the right to take

11:29

on. And that became the first

11:32

of a number of

11:35

issues that were

11:39

a stumbling block to my faith that I had to

11:41

work through, because I realized

11:43

that this church, which always claimed to

11:46

be right, was clearly wrong in some

11:48

other ways. So

11:50

then, I guess,

11:53

perhaps Just inside that frame,

11:55

the kind of next largest frame, I suppose,

11:57

for the whole of the book. He.

12:00

Is he a vow that your mother made

12:02

with She reveals to you them for like

12:04

a table. As a boy

12:07

yes she went back to a

12:09

on an old story from the

12:11

old testament of Santa who was

12:13

infertile and and begged God please

12:15

had just once once child one

12:17

son and if you give me

12:19

one than of. The vote

12:21

him to you And so she got

12:23

for a man's head It son named

12:26

Sammy on seen devoted him to God.

12:29

And. That's.

12:32

What my mother did I think a

12:35

sign that was. Her

12:37

lack of trust in God being

12:39

able to take complaint and anger

12:41

himself. As a big a lot

12:44

of people are afraid to express

12:46

disappointment with God. Anger God and

12:49

they really shouldn't be. We should

12:51

be because is one other than

12:53

the Bible. I'm and God gives

12:56

us the words to use. words

12:58

of lament, words of complaint: The

13:00

Psalms Job Ah, Jeremiah Lamentations Love

13:03

Lamb Men's Taste and lament It's

13:05

fair and I wish. My mother

13:07

had self free to just have a

13:09

wrestling match with God and say that

13:11

I got a fair I got an

13:14

unfair draw in life I was gonna

13:16

serve you and then look at this

13:18

she was already for life on her

13:20

own racing two sons skyn drive car

13:22

she didn't had never and nut sack.

13:25

And. Was living now in the

13:27

south even though she grew up in

13:29

Philadelphia so she had a lot overcome

13:32

and. She had to get it.

13:34

At stress that anger that. Feeling

13:38

of unfairness out somewhere if

13:40

you can't. Express to God

13:42

would he do was he tended to

13:44

take it out on on her son's

13:47

My mother was a good woman, seat

13:49

was a bible teaser, had as sterling

13:51

reputation in the community, but there was

13:53

a secret life that homes and only

13:55

my brother and I knew and a

13:58

lot of the growing up stories. Reflect

14:00

that. They're

14:03

just difficult circumstances of a. Set.

14:06

Of circumstances of a woman who was

14:08

unprepared for the life she had to

14:10

carve out and the ways the she

14:13

coped. Some of them admirable in some

14:15

of them not at romance. So.

14:17

The the vow that she makes or the

14:20

giving of you. Are you in

14:22

your brother? over to God? I'm.

14:26

Just cuddle a bit more for of how

14:28

that seems to operate. First. Specifically

14:30

see what She makes? A vow that you

14:32

you. Soon. You know, yeah, forgot

14:34

and replace them as Missionary Access A

14:37

very specific editor of a very explicit

14:39

dunno Living the Life is hitting it

14:41

to live through our son's now. I'm

14:43

and Addison becomes an expectation for

14:45

you and your brother as you

14:47

go. I'm. And then

14:50

had a you edu think of

14:52

how that thou how that expectation

14:54

how this been given to god

14:56

begins to operate for you in

14:58

your early years psychologically. We

15:03

felt that we had no choice in

15:06

our lives. Mm part of it was.

15:09

Was. Kind of a. Thrill. Of

15:11

being chosen by God says

15:13

ah but. My

15:16

brother, for example, was an

15:18

incredibly talented natural musicians and

15:20

play the piano have perfect

15:22

tits. I'm an absolute pig's

15:24

head. Personally perfect

15:26

musical memory. so good he or something

15:29

on the radio and a month later

15:31

sit down and players and was just

15:33

amazing gift and as he wanted to.

15:36

Follow. That calling what he found his

15:38

calling as as far as a could

15:40

go across as I being a missionary

15:42

in Africa well as and counts as

15:44

wrong as evil and. I

15:47

didn't know I did, I just

15:49

watched them coral and and fight

15:51

over that and my brother nine

15:53

when different directions he went. out

15:56

cap of the prodigal son story who never

15:58

return who just wanted to get away as

16:01

much as possible from our church, from our

16:03

home, from any life like the

16:05

one we grew up in. I

16:08

went on a different direction, so I eventually

16:10

did become a Christian thanks to the grace

16:12

of God and have spent

16:14

my life writing about that,

16:17

writing about my questions of faith,

16:20

but nothing that I've done ever

16:23

registered is valid with my mother.

16:25

She didn't read my books, just

16:27

kind of scoffed at them. We

16:35

both felt like failures. We both felt like

16:37

there's nothing that we could do to

16:40

get her approval. And

16:42

ours happened to be a religious

16:46

issue. I've read of

16:48

others, well, Chaim Plataq writes about, and

16:52

my name is Asher Lev, where one son

16:55

decides I'm an artist, I want to be an

16:57

artist, not a rabbi, and the father never speaks

16:59

to him again. And it was a little bit

17:01

like that in our family, where if

17:04

we took any choice other than

17:06

fulfilling my

17:09

mother's vow, then we

17:12

were cursed rather than honored.

17:20

You have a number of quotes at the

17:22

beginning, inscriptions at the beginning of your chapters

17:24

that are just outstanding.

17:29

The book is worth just reading. But

17:34

on this note, one that you have from James

17:37

Fowler, there is a

17:40

terrible kind of cruelty, no

17:42

matter how well intended, in demanding

17:44

the denial of self when

17:46

there is no selfhood to deny.

17:50

And it strikes me that

17:54

in the context you were in, and I think the

17:56

context that a lot of young people perhaps find themselves

17:59

in, in... in a Christian

18:01

household or Christian raising where the

18:04

very call of Christianity

18:08

and the words of Christ are

18:11

this kind of denial of self. And

18:13

yet here you're pointing to the fact that if

18:16

that's not framed quite carefully,

18:18

then it's actually quite cruel.

18:22

So expound on that a bit for us, don't you

18:24

see that? I

18:26

would have to say that

18:30

it's an important principle

18:33

from Jesus. In fact, the statement he makes

18:35

more than any other, and I'm paraphrasing here,

18:37

but it goes something like this, that

18:40

we don't find life by acquiring more and

18:42

more. We find life by giving it away.

18:44

And in the process of giving it away,

18:46

you actually discover it. And

18:49

it took me a long time to

18:51

appreciate that until I

18:53

saw it worked out in some people who

18:55

have impressed me. People of great

18:58

skill and ability who expended

19:01

on behalf of the poor or on

19:03

behalf of a doctor I

19:05

worked with for 10 years, a leprosy

19:07

doctor, people in the lowest social rung

19:10

anywhere in the world, people with

19:12

leprosy in the lower castes in India. So

19:15

I think that's deeply true, but only

19:18

if there's a personal choice in the matter. I

19:22

didn't have the self to give it away.

19:24

I wasn't allowed the freedom. And

19:27

I grew

19:29

up with the image of God as

19:31

a stern taskmaster trying to keep me

19:33

from having fun and

19:35

getting me to do things that I don't want to do.

19:38

And I

19:40

don't think that's the way it's supposed

19:42

to be. I believe

19:44

God wants us to flourish and God wants

19:47

our work, our meaningful work to

19:49

reflect our calling, who we are,

19:51

what gifts we have. In my

19:53

case, I eventually decided it's not being a missionary

19:56

in Africa. I don't think I'd be a very

19:58

good missionary at all. it's

20:00

sitting in a basement office struggling with words all day.

20:02

It's a different kind of service, but it is a

20:04

kind of service and it's one that I feel equipped

20:08

for. But when other

20:10

people start playing

20:15

God, whether it's a

20:17

parent or a pastor or just

20:19

any other people, if you start playing

20:21

God in another's life, then

20:24

you're treading dangerously

20:26

on ground

20:29

you shouldn't really be treading on. You've

20:32

already pointed to this, but in

20:36

your, I think

20:40

the language you use is strict

20:43

fundamentalist church raising upbringing. That

20:46

at one

20:49

point you say, quote, my earliest memories

20:51

all involve fear, both around your

20:54

household, but also with regard to church. And

20:58

then you also say later in the book, and

21:00

this again may be in your author's note, that you

21:03

have come to feel as if one

21:06

of the things that you could do in your writing is

21:08

to help people who can't seemingly

21:11

possibly understand what that church world is like,

21:13

to try to help them understand it. And

21:16

so for those who don't understand this kind

21:18

of sense of constantly being in fear or

21:20

constantly being afraid of going to hell or

21:24

the sorts of fear and shame, what

21:26

are some anecdotes,

21:28

stories that kind of stand out for

21:30

you and your experience that kind of

21:32

would help people see what this experience

21:35

was like for you? I

21:39

was completely saturated in

21:42

church growing up. For instance, in

21:44

high school years we lived in

21:46

a trailer, not a very

21:48

large trailer, eight by 48 feet. And there

21:50

were three of us in there, including a

21:52

piano that my brother played. And the

21:55

bedroom we had required bunk beds.

21:58

You couldn't get two beds in there. not

22:01

even close. And

22:03

it was located on church property. It

22:06

was a church that had bought an old

22:08

pony farm and

22:10

converted a barn into the sanctuary.

22:13

And it

22:18

was a fundamentalist church proudly.

22:22

We thought Southern Baptists were liberals. We

22:25

were independent Baptists, independent fundamental

22:27

Baptists. And

22:30

the same 100 people, 100 people

22:32

or so, would show up each Sunday morning. And

22:35

so many of the sermons

22:38

focused on hell and hellfire.

22:40

And I recall

22:42

in the book that this

22:45

one day when suddenly a deacon came running

22:47

in and said, there's a fire, there's a

22:49

fire. And we all went roaring

22:52

out. And sure enough, the Sunday School

22:54

Building, which was also a converted barn,

22:57

was burning down. And the

22:59

fire trucks came and it was all very exciting. And

23:01

we were standing up there about

23:03

45 minutes in the hot sun. And then we

23:05

all filed back inside. And I thought, well, this

23:07

church is over. Oh, no. The

23:10

pastor got up and gave a

23:12

sermon about hellfires being seven times hotter

23:14

than that fire we just experienced. And

23:19

these are the same people every week. And

23:21

we would take turns going forward and rededicating

23:23

our lives or whatever we need to

23:26

do to end the service. And it

23:32

does get to you after a while. And I

23:34

reflect now because I don't live under that

23:37

fear in the way I did back then.

23:39

And the one positive I took away is

23:41

that the decisions and

23:43

the choices we make in this life do

23:45

matter. They

23:47

matter in an ultimate

23:49

degree. And I wouldn't express them

23:51

in terms of the, you know, if you don't

23:54

please God today, He's going to smash you. That's

23:56

the image of God that I had. And I

23:58

later found out God is like... actually a God

24:00

of love and grace and mercy and forgiveness and

24:03

all these other things. And I

24:05

had a very distorted image of God, but

24:07

a lot

24:09

of your listeners who are listening right now

24:14

have some version of that fear-based

24:17

religion. And it's

24:19

just not a healthy thing for a child

24:22

to grow up, just

24:25

immersed in that fear, if I do something

24:27

wrong, I'm gonna pay for it. My

24:34

memoir is titled, Where the Light

24:36

Fell. And

24:38

that is actually taken from

24:41

a quote by Saint Augustine, who said, I

24:43

couldn't look at the sun directly. When

24:46

I tried to do so, I got

24:48

scorched, it burns your eyes to do

24:50

that. And that's how I felt, I

24:52

couldn't look at God directly because I had this image

24:54

of God as this fearsome, sinners

24:57

in the hand of an angry God

24:59

type character, being.

25:03

And it's hard to love someone like that. And

25:07

what broke through to me finally were

25:10

non-religious things. I had been burned by

25:12

most of the religious things, but just

25:14

the beauties of nature, classical

25:16

music and romantic love were the things

25:19

that softened me and

25:21

prepared me for just an understanding

25:23

and a reception of grace. The

25:30

being raised in the South and in the

25:32

era in which you were raised in

25:34

the South and in this sort of church context, you

25:38

say, quote, as a true son of the

25:40

South, I am born and bred a racist.

25:43

And then you point to the ways in which

25:48

this old Southern

25:50

teaching, I don't know if it's Southern or

25:53

more across the United States and conservative

25:56

fundamentalist Christianity, the story

25:58

of the curse of Ham that kind of legit. animated

26:01

racist understandings, but

26:03

our ways that the church context

26:06

supported and or cultivated

26:09

racism in you. Well,

26:12

I remember clearly a scene

26:14

at summer camp I attended as

26:16

a young person, so I'm maybe

26:19

a sophomore in high school, and

26:22

this evangelist came and

26:24

he described the Curse of Ham theory, which

26:27

is this abominable theory. And I'm encouraged, Lee,

26:29

that when I mention that, most people look

26:31

kind of puzzled. They've never heard of it

26:33

before, which is great. But

26:36

it's this distortion of a

26:39

strange event that is reported in

26:42

Genesis 9, where Noah's

26:45

son do something unseemly,

26:47

doesn't spell out what they did, but

26:50

he's naked and drunk, and

26:52

suddenly happens there, and

26:54

Noah wakes up, figures out what has

26:57

happened, and curses his

26:59

grandson, Canaan. Canaan's

27:02

father is Ham, and Ham,

27:04

according to some accounts in Hebrew,

27:06

means burnt black. And

27:08

he curses Ham and says, you will serve

27:10

in the tents. It will actually, he curses

27:13

Canaan, not Ham, curses

27:15

the grandson and says, you will serve in

27:17

the tents of your brothers, including the

27:21

Semite, Shem. And

27:24

over the years, first

27:26

Jewish and then Muslim

27:28

and finally Christian theologians

27:31

applied that to justify slavery.

27:35

And that was still being taught in the churches

27:37

I grew up in. This

27:41

evangelist at my summer camp came by and

27:44

demonstrated it. He said, you'll never

27:47

find a, I'll

27:49

say black man or African American, that's not

27:51

the word he used. You

27:53

will never find one Who's the

27:55

CEO of a company or a physician

27:58

or something like that. Make

28:00

such good waiters. You ever seen them?

28:02

how they can walk through a crowd

28:04

carrying a stray full of this? Isn't

28:06

that Still a drop, you know? And

28:08

and in a way to solve modern

28:10

were kids we don't know. He's teaching

28:13

us from the bible, right? Well, no

28:15

wrong and. The to the

28:17

next year I have one a fellowship or

28:19

was it was then called The Communicable Disease

28:21

and for know the Center for Disease Control

28:24

and Prevention. And I

28:26

had studied this resume of the

28:28

person's going be reporting to who

28:31

is a i think you've as

28:33

aggressive of Yale this. Renowned

28:35

Biochemist and I walked into his office

28:37

and almost drops of papers I was

28:39

carrying because he was. he was black

28:41

man, he was African American and I

28:44

realized the terse lied to me again

28:46

nearly lie to me about my father.

28:48

it's god's will is gonna be healed.

28:50

They lied to me about race. Maybe

28:52

they lied to me about Jesus. Maybe

28:54

they lied to me about the bible

28:56

and it really set me will first

28:58

to create a period of. Couple

29:01

years where I just put all faith

29:03

in abeyance just like I can look

29:05

at this and on allegedly right now

29:07

and then. Finally. It

29:09

gave me a career. Okay, instead

29:11

of dismissing everything you are times.

29:14

For. Nurture that once tried to figure out on

29:16

her husband high school bag of them with the

29:18

bible doesn't is there were desert each year and

29:20

and as hell I've. Lived

29:23

from the more than fifty years just

29:25

looking at pieces. a phase one by

29:27

one. What? Said. I keep. Would.

29:30

Is capable Who? Who had said

29:32

I'd get past as a human

29:34

interpretation that a can swallow. So.

29:39

Can we go buy some questions about your your mother

29:42

in the household and him? So.

29:45

You you do draw this picture in which

29:47

your your mother in public is have. Seen

29:51

respected as a as a pious christian

29:53

serve and is doing a lot of

29:55

good in the church, in the community.

29:58

but it homes quite something different And

30:01

even claims you say that she

30:03

claims you say that she hasn't sinned in 12 years. She

30:07

did. Yes. And she probably would have

30:09

expanded that to 30 or 40 years

30:11

in time. But when I was a

30:13

teenager, we would get into arguments and

30:15

she would say, well,

30:17

that can't be true because I haven't sinned in 12, 13 years. And

30:21

that ends the argument, right? I mean, how do

30:23

you argue with a perfect person? Um,

30:28

I think the, um, for

30:32

whatever reason, I don't know why, but, um, my

30:34

wife picked up the book before

30:37

I had started reading it and she would have just

30:39

flipped through. And, uh,

30:41

she handed me the book and she said, read this

30:43

page. And, uh, it

30:45

was a story about you learning to

30:48

ride a bike and

30:50

that you had, uh, wanted

30:53

your mother to take the training wheels off the

30:55

bike. And you had tried once,

30:57

didn't work, you asked her to put a mic on. You

30:59

tried again, uh, got

31:02

the training wheels put on, didn't work, asked her to

31:04

take them off. And then a third time

31:06

you asked her to put them on. And that time she said, don't

31:08

ask me to take them off again. And,

31:11

um, and you go out and you can't learn

31:13

how to ride the bike. And so

31:16

you screw up the courage to ask her

31:18

to take them off. And

31:20

would you tell us kind of the rest of the

31:22

story from that point? Right. She said, I'll teach you

31:24

to ride a bike. So she went over and grabbed

31:26

a branch off

31:29

of a bush and started pulling

31:31

the leaves off of it. And I knew

31:34

what was coming and we lived on a

31:36

dirt road in Ellandwood, Georgia. And she got

31:38

behind me and said, uh, pedal that bike.

31:41

And I remember, you know,

31:43

I'm crying. I'm four years old, five years

31:46

old, maybe with snot coming out

31:48

of my nose, tears going down my face.

31:50

And she's behind me just hitting me with

31:52

a switch, hitting me with a switch. And

31:57

she's right. I did learn to ride a bike to get

31:59

away from that. pain. And

32:01

years later, I screwed

32:06

up the courage to say, you know, mother,

32:08

it's taken me a long time to appreciate

32:11

bike riding. Do you remember that scene? I

32:13

said, that really hurt. And she

32:17

said, well, you learned how to ride

32:19

a bike, didn't you? I said, that

32:21

settled it. And you know, I

32:23

think of the just

32:25

kind of an unusual scene for a mother, but

32:27

that shows she

32:30

was mother and father both. And

32:32

she had no experience in being either

32:34

one. And she's working it out. And

32:36

that just going after me with a

32:39

switch, getting out that anger, I think

32:41

the anger wasn't really about putting

32:45

on the training wheels one more time.

32:47

The anger was about, this is not

32:49

right. I didn't deserve this. And I'm

32:51

going to take it out on my

32:54

boys who have messed up my life. And

32:57

maybe also God who has messed up my

32:59

life. You

33:07

say, quote, sometime during my elementary school

33:09

years, the truth hits me

33:11

that we are poor. That's why I've had

33:13

to change school so often. And

33:16

you go on to say that you realize that

33:19

you're seen as trailer trash. And

33:21

as you noted earlier, you live on this

33:24

trailer on church property. And

33:27

that even that as well

33:29

gets framed, that

33:32

sort of poverty gets framed due to

33:34

your mother's commitments who says, I'm serving

33:36

the Lord. That means we must make

33:38

sacrifices. But talk

33:40

to us a little bit about how this coming to

33:42

awareness of your poverty and how that

33:45

worked in you as a young boy. I

33:50

guess the most obvious proof of that

33:52

is every day when friends

33:54

of mine would reach in their pocket and pull

33:56

out the quarter that their parents gave them and

33:59

twenty-five. I since would buy you

34:01

school lunch in those days. And

34:03

I had a paper

34:05

sack that was reused until it had

34:08

stains of grease all over it and

34:12

it was falling apart. And inside there

34:14

were sandwiches like butter

34:16

and mayonnaise sandwiches or

34:18

baloney sandwiches that was

34:20

the classic kind. And

34:24

we'd be made fun of in those

34:26

days. They didn't have subsidies for school

34:28

lunches. The

34:32

kids around us would make

34:34

fun of the lunches. They'd

34:36

call it train rack and things

34:38

like that instead of sloppy

34:40

joes. And my brother

34:42

and I were saying, man, we'd love to have sloppy

34:45

joes today. That would be so great. It'd be better

34:47

when we get it home. And

34:49

so I wore

34:52

my brother's hand-me-down clothes, which never

34:54

quite fit, you know, and

34:56

a growth spurt. They would be up my

34:59

leg instead of down and be made fun

35:01

of. And we knew that kind

35:03

of poverty. And I remember watching, in those

35:05

days, there was a TV show called Queen for a

35:07

Day. And these different

35:09

contestants would stand up and give these sob

35:11

stories about how terrible their life was. A

35:15

woman with a disabled child, whatever. And

35:18

again and again, I watch that show and say, huh,

35:21

our life is worse than that. We're worse

35:23

off than they are. Mother, you should apply

35:25

for that show. And of course,

35:27

she didn't appreciate that at all. But it's

35:31

a different kind of poverty than would be experienced

35:33

now in downtown cities.

35:35

We lived out in

35:38

the country. We had playmates.

35:40

We had a dog. We had

35:43

woods to explore. You know, we can go

35:45

around with our heads down feeling we're

35:48

losers. We just were aware

35:50

we don't have money. Your

35:56

brother, you've already alluded to your brother Marshall that

35:58

he kind of plays a key role in

36:00

your story. And

36:03

part of that that you narrate

36:06

is that he grows increasingly,

36:10

that the relationship between he

36:12

and your mother grows increasingly hostile.

36:15

And then that has a this kind of

36:17

impact upon you of increasingly distancing yourself or

36:19

kind of drawing into yourself or isolating some.

36:22

Would you draw to kind of describe how

36:24

that kind of unfolds? Sure, it came to

36:28

head in my brother's life

36:30

when he decided to go to Wheaton

36:32

College. They had a conservatory of music

36:34

and Wheaton is a very respected school

36:36

with kind of the evangelical label, at

36:39

least it did at the time. Billy

36:42

Graham attended there. But my

36:44

mother coming out of the group she represented

36:48

saw it as a liberal place. And when he

36:50

first proposed going to Wheaton she said, I'd rather

36:52

you go to Harvard. They don't even believe in

36:54

God. At Wheaton they claim to, but not our

36:56

God. Not our kind of God. And

37:00

for those who are unaware we should we should note

37:02

that Wheaton certainly at the time

37:04

was seen as quite conservative in the larger

37:06

American thing. Well that's true, yeah. But they're

37:08

so liberal that she doesn't want them to.

37:10

That's right. So he finally

37:12

got accepted at Wheaton and then

37:15

there came this hinge

37:18

in his life that determined his future from

37:20

then on I suppose where

37:22

she put a curse on him. She said, if

37:24

you go to the school I

37:27

will pray every day for the rest of your

37:29

life that you'll be in a terrible accident and

37:32

either die or better

37:34

yet be paralyzed so that

37:36

you have to lie there and look at

37:38

the ceiling and realize what a terrible thing

37:41

you've done rebelling against God's will. And

37:44

it was like poison gas in the

37:47

room. I remember so clearly

37:49

my brother just stalked out and

37:51

slammed the door to his bedroom.

37:54

But she

37:57

did put a curse on him. Interestingly

37:59

he has a different memory of that

38:01

scene. I talked about memory being unreliable.

38:04

I'm quite sure that

38:06

I remember it correctly. He remembers

38:08

it differently. He remembers

38:10

her saying, I

38:13

will pray every day for the rest of your life that you'll

38:15

lose your mind, because that's

38:17

what happened. I think he's kind

38:20

of backfilled her prophecy. His

38:23

very last semester, okay, he's a senior

38:25

in college, one semester left at

38:28

a respected school, conservatory music,

38:31

and he drops out and becomes one

38:33

of Atlanta's original hippies. This is back

38:36

in 1968-69 and in a

38:40

sense, fries his brain on LSD.

38:43

He's gathered in Piedmont Park in

38:46

those days and dropped

38:48

acid, and that's what he did, and then

38:50

eventually moved to California. He went

38:53

through every kind of addiction that

38:55

you can think of, had

38:58

no contact with our mother in over

39:01

50 years until actually I turned

39:03

in the manuscript on the memoir and then I

39:05

got them on the phone for the first time.

39:08

So I saw

39:11

the choices he made. He broke that

39:13

curse in a sense by saying, I'll

39:16

do whatever I want, and he did

39:18

whatever he wanted, but these were self-destructive

39:20

choices. He should be on

39:22

the concert stage playing the piano. Instead,

39:25

he ended up tuning pianos, playing the same

39:27

note over

39:30

and over and over.

39:32

That was a lesson to me. Don't go

39:34

that route. Find another route. Find

39:36

something that's a healthier way

39:38

to grapple with some

39:41

of the wounds of childhood. He

39:46

at one point asks

39:49

you, or maybe it was

39:51

that you suggest to him, let

39:54

me back up and restart that question. At

39:58

one point, you narrate how

40:02

Marshall says to you that he

40:05

feels as if he can never have

40:07

a better life because of this curse

40:09

that your mother has placed on him.

40:13

And you say, as

40:15

I recollect, something to him in

40:17

terms of saying, well, if you really

40:19

believe that's what's happening to you, let me

40:21

ask her if she will remove the curse.

40:25

And then you go and ask her? Yeah, I do. Yeah,

40:28

I do. I said to my brother,

40:30

you're my brother. If you really

40:32

believe that, there's only one person who can remove the

40:34

curse, and that's our mother. So

40:36

next time I go to Atlanta, then I'll ask her

40:39

to do that. He just laughed and said, yeah, good

40:41

luck. It was Christmas, and we

40:43

went and I waited till after

40:45

Christmas Day itself. We were

40:48

staying in a motel and just visiting daily and spending

40:50

time with her, my wife and I. So

40:52

finally, I got my mother alone. Janet went for

40:55

a walk, and

40:57

we sat down and I said, mother, Marshall

41:00

has changed a lot. He's made a lot of

41:03

progress. He's made some mistakes, but he knows he's

41:05

made some mistakes, and he's actually doing

41:07

better now than he ever has. And

41:10

I told her about this conversation, and I said,

41:12

Marshall, what could

41:14

help you? And he said, nothing can help

41:16

me as long as I'm under her curse.

41:18

And I said, only you can

41:21

remove that. And I

41:23

thought through different options. She might say, oh, well,

41:25

we all say things in the heat of the

41:27

moment that we later

41:29

regret. But I was

41:32

not prepared for her response. She got this rigid,

41:35

I would say evil

41:38

look in her eye, and

41:40

she said, the way he went against

41:43

God, I could never forget something like

41:45

that. And as

41:47

we talked, I realized, I

41:50

said, well, you prayed this prayer. Do

41:53

you really want him dead? Do you want your

41:55

own son dead? Would you pray for that? And

41:58

she basically said, You

42:00

can't mess with a god like that. She

42:03

didn't really answer my question, but it's hung

42:06

in the air as it has our

42:08

entire lives. And

42:11

not until her deathbed,

42:13

really, she

42:16

died in 2023 in May. She

42:19

was 99 years old, had turned 99

42:21

the week before. And

42:24

I finally did get the two of

42:26

them together, as I mentioned on the cell

42:28

phone a few times before then, and then he

42:30

called and just said, I want to tell

42:32

you goodbye. And

42:34

she died that night. It

42:36

was as if, well, the hospice people had told

42:38

me, she's hanging on to something. We don't know

42:40

what it is, but sometimes if there's a family

42:42

thing, if you can let her reconcile

42:45

it in one way or another, then she will

42:47

let go of life. And she did. My

42:51

brother is a tragic character.

42:57

People asked me how did the memoir affect him?

42:59

And the phrase he uses when I appreciate it,

43:01

he said, it validated

43:03

my existence. He

43:06

admits, yeah, I made some bad choices.

43:08

Probably wasn't the best trajectory

43:10

of my life. But

43:13

when you wrote it up, you validated it. So

43:15

I think people can understand maybe

43:17

why I became the person I was. And

43:21

I think that's what I hope

43:23

memoirs do. They

43:25

do trigger responses in the reader where

43:28

you apply your own situation, you put

43:30

yourself in theirs, and it teaches you

43:32

about your own. You

43:37

point to the ways

43:40

in which in working on the book,

43:43

or even earlier in your life, you

43:45

do begin to get glimpses of the

43:47

ways in which you

43:49

can make some sense of your

43:52

mother's harshness or her lack of grace in

43:55

her own childhood experience.

44:01

Any episodes point out that would kind

44:03

of help frame some of that? Yes.

44:09

I have been many times to

44:11

the three story,

44:14

or two story, I guess, Brownstone,

44:16

where my mother grew up. It

44:19

only has two bedrooms. There's one kind of closet

44:21

that they made into a sort

44:23

of bedroom. But in that

44:25

two bedroom house, they raised six children.

44:28

And the men, three boys, three girls,

44:31

and the boys were big, strapping football

44:33

players. I have no idea how they

44:35

did it. I mean, our

44:37

trailer was luxurious compared to those circumstances.

44:41

And my

44:43

grandmother, my mother's mother, resented

44:47

all these children. Birth control

44:49

wasn't really on the

44:51

map back then in the 1920s and 30s. And

44:56

children would just appear. They went

44:59

through the Depression. They went through the

45:01

war. And life was tough.

45:03

It was really hard. And

45:06

at one point, my mother came in

45:08

and apologized for something. She claims

45:11

that she would get a whipping regularly,

45:15

just out of her mother's anger.

45:17

And she would say, I didn't do anything. And her

45:19

mother would say, well, I'm sure you did. I don't

45:21

know what it is. Maybe you don't know, but I'm

45:23

sure you did. And just go ahead and whip her

45:25

anyway. And at one point,

45:27

she apologized for something she had done wrong.

45:30

And her mother said, you can't possibly be

45:32

sorry. If you were sorry, you

45:34

wouldn't have done it in the first place. Catch

45:37

22, there's just no way to please this woman.

45:40

So you're going to get beaten regardless

45:42

whether you did something or didn't do something. And

45:47

being in that environment, my

45:51

own looked pretty soft in comparison. And

45:55

you can understand why she became the person she

45:57

did. She had no role models. experience

46:01

of love until

46:05

my father came along and they

46:08

truly did have kind of a fairy

46:10

tale romance. They

46:12

truly did have kind of a fairy tale

46:14

romance and then

46:17

within a few years he was taken away

46:19

as she saw it, killed

46:22

and left her with a miserable

46:24

life of her own. So

46:27

when you go to college, you

46:32

are originally still

46:35

have to use the phrase you used earlier in

46:37

our interview today, you still have kind of your

46:39

faith in advance, but

46:43

you begin to get a glimpse even though

46:45

you're quite frustrated with some of the constraints

46:47

or the moralisms or the silly

46:49

rules of the Bible college where you're in

46:51

school, you

46:53

begin to get a glimpse of a bigger

46:55

world, a larger world out there that you're

46:57

interested in. Yes,

47:00

several things happen. I was not

47:04

in a healthy place myself. I didn't like

47:06

the idea of being at a Bible college.

47:08

I'd look around me and snobbish and look

47:10

in these kind of happy face Christians and

47:14

I took delight in sitting out

47:17

in public or in chapel

47:19

even reading books like Why

47:21

I'm Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell and

47:24

books like that, The Secular City by Harvey

47:26

Cox in those days. And

47:29

you know, I'm just kind of a jerk

47:32

and I don't care about being a jerk.

47:36

And as I mentioned earlier, I

47:39

gradually grew softer, softened,

47:42

not so much to faith, but just

47:44

to life in general by romantic

47:47

love, by music, by

47:49

nature. My solace was always taking

47:51

walks in the woods and exploring

47:54

animals and insects and plants and all

47:57

of that. And

47:59

then I had a... dramatic conversion experience.

48:01

And all these

48:03

years, I've waited to give

48:05

you details of that because as soon as you

48:07

say, this is what conversion is like, somebody says,

48:09

well, I never had anything like that. And that's

48:12

true. We don't. We

48:14

have different experiences with God. Some

48:17

people don't wrestle. I did wrestle. And

48:20

I did need something that seemed to

48:22

come from outside, something I didn't manipulate

48:25

all by myself. And so

48:27

God did visit me, and my

48:30

life changed from that moment on. And

48:32

not because I was seeking it, frankly.

48:34

My brother was much

48:36

more, at that point, was much more

48:39

seeking of God and claimed he'd never

48:41

found God. And I was trying to

48:43

get away from God and then

48:45

was kind of interrupted by

48:50

what I see as a visitation from God. When

48:55

talking about your college

48:57

experience, you have a conversation with

48:59

your brother Marshall and

49:01

you two are discussing, trying to

49:04

sort out what's fake and what's

49:06

real. And when

49:09

I got to that passage, it struck me that that

49:11

seemed like in many ways, one

49:14

of the threads that kind of runs perhaps for the

49:16

whole of your book is that you're

49:18

trying to sort out in what way,

49:22

whatever this sort of

49:24

religious tradition is, what

49:26

about it's true? What about it's a lie? What's

49:29

real? What's fake? What's

49:33

inauthentic happiness? What's

49:36

a deep, real joy? But

49:40

commentary on that? You're

49:42

right. A thread done not only

49:44

in the book, but the thread of my entire

49:46

life and my career. As I

49:50

mentioned, pretty early on,

49:52

I realized you can't trust

49:54

what people say about their faith. You can't

49:56

trust when people say it's God's will that

49:59

your father will be healed because he wasn't

50:01

healed. He died. You can't trust

50:03

that people of color were

50:05

cursed by God because you find out that

50:07

that's wrong. An African-American

50:10

was elected president of the United

50:12

States. The

50:15

church had lied to me. The church

50:17

had misrepresented God. That was probably the

50:19

worst thing they did. They misrepresented who

50:21

God was. And so my whole

50:26

life as a writer has been in

50:29

sorting through picking up the things I

50:31

was caught, picking up the Bible, and

50:33

sorting through what of this

50:36

is authentic, what of this is worth

50:39

preserving, and what should be discarded.

50:44

When you grow up in a church environment,

50:46

you learn behaviors that get you strokes. You

50:48

stand up, give a testimony, you stand up

50:50

and pray. People

50:54

think that's so great when an eight-year-old stands up

50:56

in church in prayer. So isn't that cute? And

51:00

after a while, you say, oh, that's how

51:02

you get points. That's how you get strokes.

51:04

And my mother

51:06

was in charge of a lot of

51:08

these camps in the summer. And some weeks I would

51:10

decide, hmm, I'm going to be a good Christian, try

51:13

to win the camper of the week award. And I

51:15

would do it. And the next week,

51:17

they'd want to kick me out. But my mother was in

51:19

charge of the camp so they could work and they'd send

51:21

me. And it

51:23

was a learned behavior. It's like putting on

51:25

a new jacket, putting on a uniform. And

51:29

people think you're the

51:32

person in the uniform, actually, it's just the uniform

51:34

they're looking at. And

51:36

that caused me to spend

51:39

the rest of my life. I don't want to be like

51:41

one of those hypocrites. I wanted to find

51:43

out what is authentic. Like

51:45

I write a book on prayer. A lot of prayers

51:47

don't get answered. Some

51:49

books on prayer tell you that all your prayers get answered.

51:51

Well, they don't, not in the way you want. So

51:54

how do you come to terms with that? And

51:56

piece by piece, in

51:59

my books, what's amazing? out grace, that Jesus,

52:01

I never knew. I review those things from

52:03

childhood and decide which

52:05

should be preserved and which should not. One

52:09

of the things that you point to in

52:12

grappling with the inauthentic and

52:14

authentic is that while

52:17

you're in the midst of this

52:19

very intense church environment, they're

52:22

not pointing to things like

52:24

Vietnam, race riots, cops beating

52:26

hippies. The church isn't talking

52:28

about that. But

52:30

this seems to be certainly one

52:33

of the things that you're gonna go on

52:35

and try to say, if I'm gonna have

52:37

any sort of authentic faith, I've got to

52:39

somehow make sense of the

52:41

reality of the world. How

52:46

did that come to be in you

52:49

that you

52:52

felt as if I'm gonna believe this stuff,

52:54

then it has to encounter, it has to

52:57

intersect the realities of the world? The

53:01

Bible College, I attended, like many of

53:03

them, not all, was located

53:05

outside of town, kind of on a compound

53:09

with a lot of land around it. We

53:12

were like a bubble. So occasionally

53:14

we would go to say a hospital

53:17

or prison and try

53:19

to convert to people or preach the Sunday sermon

53:21

or something like that. But we

53:23

were really living in our own hermetically sealed

53:27

world with its own rules, very strict

53:29

rules. And we would only

53:31

hear about things going on in the rest of

53:33

the world. And then I

53:35

would go home on Christmas vacation.

53:38

And this is the 1960s and you see girls

53:40

in mini skirts,

53:44

braless. You

53:47

would see protesters holding

53:51

up signs of babies being

53:53

napalmed in Vietnam and pictures

53:55

of Richard Nixon, you know,

53:57

liar, liar. And

54:01

it was

54:03

culture shock. And

54:06

I realized, we're sitting in this

54:08

Bible college discussing issues

54:11

that were being debated in the fourth

54:13

century, AT. And

54:16

there are some major things going on in

54:18

the world right now, justice and poverty and

54:21

civilization and communism and war. And

54:26

we're not studying anything that

54:28

seems to relate to these issues. If

54:33

faith is worth anything

54:36

at all, it's gotta have some sort of relevance to

54:38

what's going on in the rest of the world. And

54:40

my faith at that time did not. When

54:44

you think about the fact that your

54:46

life takes one trajectory and Marshall's

54:49

takes such a different, your

54:51

brother Marshall's life takes such a different

54:53

trajectory, what account do you give

54:57

for that? Some

55:06

of it is birth order. He was first

55:09

and he responded to

55:11

my mother's, I

55:16

don't know what word to use, either

55:19

strange child rearing, someone would say mental

55:21

imbalance, I'm not a judge

55:23

there, but he responded to my mother's

55:26

control by fighting it at every

55:30

opportunity. And when you're 12,

55:32

13 years old, you're gonna lose those battles,

55:34

adults win, they have more power. And

55:37

they set the rules. And so there

55:39

was a constant clash going on. And I

55:41

realized that's not the way to

55:45

get out, to

55:47

survive, the way to survive for me was

55:49

by being deceitful, frankly, by

55:52

being a hypocrite, by acting one way and

55:54

then doing what I wanted kind

55:57

of off screen. Neither

56:01

one is healthy. I have

56:03

a passage in

56:10

there about if I were going through the same

56:12

circumstances today, I would probably be into self-harming. You

56:17

know, how these kids cut themselves. Because pain is something

56:19

I worked with a lot. I

56:25

just approved that I could do it without giving in

56:27

to the pain. And I

56:30

look back now and say, boy, that's weird. That's

56:32

sick. It was

56:34

a survival mechanism. And

56:38

I have compassion for kids, especially

56:40

right now. My goodness,

56:42

you see the stats on

56:44

depression and confusion and all that come

56:46

out of social media. I'm sure I'm

56:49

glad there wasn't a Facebook

56:51

when I was going through some of that

56:53

stuff 50 years ago. Yeah.

56:57

As you then begin

56:59

to take a different route and

57:04

get glimpses of

57:06

the power of words and find

57:09

a path forward for your life and

57:13

have this sort of religious experience, how

57:16

would you describe maybe the contours

57:21

of the grace or the contours

57:23

of the mercy,

57:25

the contours of the

57:27

beauty and goodness that you were drawn

57:30

towards? There's

57:35

this statement that G.K. Chesterton

57:38

used to use. I'm not sure he

57:40

really came up with

57:42

it, but he repeated it. He said, the

57:44

worst moment for an atheist is

57:47

when he has a deep sense of gratitude and

57:49

has no one to think. And

57:52

that's what first got my

57:54

attention about God because I grew up

57:57

with God, the image of God

57:59

as a stern t-shirt. Taskmaster as

58:01

a bully, somebody who

58:04

is going to crush my brother if he

58:06

goes to Wheaton College, you know, that kind

58:08

of God. And

58:11

through things like music, the

58:13

beauties of nature, and romantic

58:15

love especially, I was

58:18

aware this world is

58:20

a pretty nice place. It's got some great things in it.

58:24

If you believe God is a creator, God

58:26

must be somehow responsible for that. And

58:28

this doesn't measure up to the image of God that

58:31

I came away with. Just

58:34

as you see a great work of art in

58:36

a museum, you'd like to know something about the

58:38

artist or the photographer who made this. I

58:42

guess that's how I felt. I'd like to know that God. And

58:45

then, you know, we're told in the Bible

58:47

that God gave us a face, that Jesus

58:49

actually is the Son

58:51

of God who came to show us what God is like and what

58:54

we should be like. And

58:56

I started in this college, Bible

58:58

college, studying the life of Jesus,

59:01

and he was a very different character than the

59:03

Sunday school image I had and

59:05

someone I wanted to learn from and emulate. So

59:11

would you frame then the

59:13

experience of writing your

59:16

memoir as in

59:19

some ways coming to know yourself

59:21

anew, or what did this experience

59:23

mean for you? People

59:27

who have read it will sometimes

59:30

ask me, was that painful? Is

59:32

that confusing? When I

59:34

would know

59:36

that I'm going to be writing a difficult

59:39

passage this week, my

59:41

wife would say, are you okay? Are you okay? And

59:45

actually, it proved

59:47

very therapeutic. What

59:50

writers do is provide

59:53

meaning in

59:56

order to

59:58

either ideas or stories. or their

1:00:00

own lives in my case, through

1:00:03

words. That's what we do. We sort it out

1:00:05

and we try to come up with some sort

1:00:07

of what was really going on and

1:00:10

in a sense tame

1:00:13

the wild animals of our

1:00:17

lives that we haven't encountered yet.

1:00:19

And it felt like that. It

1:00:21

felt like discovery

1:00:23

in part. I

1:00:27

mentioned this period in high school when I was

1:00:29

going through the search for pain as

1:00:31

it were. And I

1:00:33

got a chance to, what was really going on there? I

1:00:37

didn't go to a psychiatrist, probably should have, but we didn't

1:00:39

have money for that kind of thing. But

1:00:42

who was I trying to impress?

1:00:45

Or why was I

1:00:47

hurting myself? So I got

1:00:49

the chance to stare at those things and to try

1:00:51

to come up with some sort of coherent

1:00:54

narrative that

1:00:58

resulted in who I

1:01:00

am now. What a great

1:01:02

opportunity. In fact, I'm

1:01:04

a journalist. Everybody has a

1:01:06

story. Probably

1:01:09

everybody has a story worth at

1:01:13

least a short

1:01:15

book. And

1:01:19

a writer gets a chance to do

1:01:21

that, to just look at each piece, interview

1:01:24

other people, try to come up with a coherent

1:01:29

narrative of life, of

1:01:32

how it unfolds from which other

1:01:35

people can learn. Are

1:01:38

there other things that you might wish

1:01:40

for anyone listening

1:01:43

that relates to

1:01:45

these sorts of, especially

1:01:47

some of the kind of difficult or

1:01:49

painful experiences that you've shared? Are there

1:01:51

things in addition to perhaps

1:01:53

trying to find some sort of way

1:01:56

to frame their experience narrative through journaling

1:01:58

or writing? Other things you'd wish for? them. Hmm.

1:02:03

Well, I'll tell you what resulted in

1:02:05

my work. A few years

1:02:07

ago, I was invited to speak at

1:02:09

the University of Virginia. And

1:02:11

I've always hesitated to give

1:02:13

a title in a talk when

1:02:16

it's long in advance, because I don't know

1:02:18

if I'm going to care about that when the time comes

1:02:20

around. So they said, we

1:02:22

have to have this brochure published, and it's two years

1:02:24

from now. So just make up a generic title that

1:02:26

would apply to anything. Okay. How

1:02:29

about two themes that haunt me? Oh,

1:02:31

that's great. That's great. So they wrote

1:02:33

that down. And then as time

1:02:35

came around, you know, two years later, they

1:02:38

said, what themes are you

1:02:40

going to be talking about? Oh, good point. Gotta

1:02:42

come up with some themes here. And

1:02:44

I thought that through and I was working

1:02:47

on the memoir. And I said, Hmm, seems

1:02:49

obvious to me, suffering and grace, suffering

1:02:51

and grace. My first book was a book

1:02:54

called Where is God When It Hurts, then

1:02:56

came Disappointment with God. The question that never

1:02:58

goes away, all about pain, the gift of

1:03:00

pain I wrote. And

1:03:02

then grace, What's Amazing About Grace is the book

1:03:05

I wrote that has sold the most. Discovering

1:03:08

grace out of a legalistic,

1:03:11

rigid background, that beautiful tone

1:03:13

of amazing grace. And

1:03:18

so those became the themes of my

1:03:22

life and my writing. And frankly, I

1:03:24

never had thought about that until I

1:03:26

had to come up with the title

1:03:29

for this talk. And my

1:03:31

wife says, what you've done is write a

1:03:33

prequel. And that's true. It's

1:03:36

not an essay like book, like

1:03:38

most of my other books. It's

1:03:41

a narrative. It's a story. It's my

1:03:43

story, a memoir. But it

1:03:46

explains why I keep circling around

1:03:48

and coming back to some of

1:03:50

these same issues, mostly centered

1:03:53

on suffering and grace.

1:03:55

And those are to me, two of

1:03:57

the biggest questions we

1:03:59

humans will face? If there is a

1:04:01

good God, why do so many bad things

1:04:03

happen? And

1:04:07

then grace. We live

1:04:09

in a society in which we're all judged by

1:04:11

our behavior, our income, our

1:04:13

race, you know, so many ways. What

1:04:16

school we went to, what kind

1:04:18

of car we drive. And as

1:04:20

Jesus' stories show, he

1:04:23

just turns everything upside down. And your worth

1:04:25

is not determined by your income, by your

1:04:27

race, by these other things. The

1:04:30

Sermon on the Mount just turns it all upside down. You

1:04:32

know, blessed are the poor, blessed are those who are

1:04:35

suffering, blessed are... It's

1:04:37

an un-American message. But

1:04:40

it's a message that people who are suffering

1:04:42

really need and crave. Just

1:04:45

the sense that God cares, that

1:04:47

there will be a reversal, as Martin Luther

1:04:49

King used to say, how

1:04:52

long, oh Lord, but the arm

1:04:54

of the universe, the moral arc of the

1:04:56

universe is bent toward justice. And

1:04:59

that's a hard thing to believe in

1:05:01

an unjust world. But that's what

1:05:03

we're asked to believe, and to give us hope to

1:05:06

endure this world. I've

1:05:09

been talking to Philip Yancey, author of more than

1:05:11

two dozen books, 17 million

1:05:13

in print. And today we've

1:05:15

been discussing his recent memoir, Where the

1:05:18

Light Fell. Thank you, Philip. It

1:05:20

was my pleasure. Thank you, Lee. Hey

1:05:22

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