43 pages • 1 hour read
The Shack
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Chapters 5-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”
Mack entertains the idea of going to the shack in response to the note’s invitation, thinking that it might in fact be a message from God, although he doesn’t tell Nan about it. He contacts his friend Willy to borrow a vehicle and then drives to the wilderness area where the shack stands, hiking the last stretch through snow and ice to reach it. It looks the same as he remembered it, with no sign of anyone else being there. Entering, Mack sees the bloody stain still on the floor and flies into a rage, shouting angry questions to God until his strength is gone. As he begins to walk away, the world around him suddenly transforms. Instead of snow and ice, his surroundings become full of flowers and plants and birdsong. A building still stands on the location of the shack, and the location itself is still the same, but the shack has changed into a beautiful log cabin amid flowering gardens.
Mack prepares to knock on the cabin door, but it flies open and a large African American woman wraps him in an embrace, shouting his name with delight. Two other characters soon enter the cabin: an Asian woman dressed as a gardener but with an ethereal quality, and a Middle Eastern man arrayed like a laborer. The African American woman introduces herself as “Elousia” but gives him another option as well: He could call her “Papa” as Nan does. The Middle Eastern man confirms his identity as Jesus, and the Asian woman gives her name as Sarayu. Mack doesn’t know what to make of this: “Was one of these people God? […] Since there were three of them, maybe this was a Trinity sort of thing” (87). He asks which one of them is God, and each one, speaking together, says that they are.
Chapter 6 Summary: “A Piece of π”
Jesus and Sarayu leave the cabin and Mack spends some time talking to Papa, trying to make sense of where he is. Papa is cooking in the cabin’s kitchen, listening to funk music while she works. When Mack asks her about the funk band, she responds with one of her characteristic expressions, saying that she is “especially fond of those boys” (91). Mack confesses that it is difficult for him to call her Papa, and they discuss Mack’s pain surrounding his own father. Papa offers to be the father Mack never had, but Mack lashes out and accuses her of failing to look after Missy. At this Papa tears up, saying, “I know you don’t understand this yet, but I am especially fond of Missy, and you too” (92). She tells Mack that he is there to have the wound between them healed.
The conversation shifts to the question of why God would choose to appear as a woman. Papa reminds Mack that God’s essence is neither male nor female—though both genders reflect aspects of divine nature—and says that she is appearing to him as a female to help him overcome some of his customary misconceptions. As they talk about God’s nature, Papa tells Mack that all three persons of the Trinity—Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit)—were crucified together at Jesus’s sacrificial death. This point is illustrated when Mack sees the crucifixion scars on Papa’s wrists. When the discussion then turns to the Trinity’s plurality, Papa explains it by emphasizing the importance of love. If God were without someone to love, even in eternity past when no other created thing existed, then interpersonal love would not be an essential element of the divine nature. The fact that the Trinity is both a unity and a plurality, existing as a union of love within itself, means that God’s love is essential to his being and that love and relationship are woven into the fabric of creation. This, Papa tells Mack, is what his weekend at the shack is all about—love and relationship.
Chapter 7 Summary: “God on the Dock”
The four main characters share an evening meal together in the cabin, and warm and gracious intimacy mark the interactions between Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu. After the meal, Jesus invites Mack to sit on the dock with him and look at the stars. Enjoying the beauty of creation together, Mack tells Jesus that he feels more comfortable with him than with the other two, which strikes Jesus as normal since he is relatable as a human while also being divine. Mack confesses that he thought Jesus would be more handsome, and Jesus laughs and takes it as a fair assessment.
They talk about the others, and Jesus confirms that Sarayu is indeed the Holy Spirit, with her name meaning “wind.” Papa, revealing himself as an African American woman, is using the name Elousia: a combination of the Hebrew word for “God” with the Greek word for “being.” As Jesus explains it, God is the ground of all being, with everything’s existence supported by God’s own nature. Human beings, as special representatives of material creation, have an ability to become united with God and thus become spiritually alive in a union made possible by Jesus: “The human, formed out of the physical material Creation, can once more be fully indwelt by spiritual life, my life. It requires that a very real dynamic and active union exists” (113).
Chapter 8 Summary: “A Breakfast of Champions”
Mack retires to his bedroom in the cabin and has a dream that ends with a reminder of Missy’s death. He wakes up with the weight of “the Great Sadness” hanging on his heart. He goes back out into the common area of the cabin, where Papa is cooking breakfast and listening to music. They talk about the musician, whom Papa is “especially fond of,” and Mack challenges her to think of anyone of whom she isn’t especially fond. “Nope, I haven’t been able to find any” (119), she replies. This prompts Mack to inquire about the common portrayal of God as wrathful, pouring out punishments on the disobedient and wicked. She pushes back against the stereotype, saying, “I am not who you think I am, Mackenzie. I don’t need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment […]. It’s not my purpose to punish it; it’s my joy to cure it” (119-20).
Jesus and Sarayu join them at the table, and Mack watches them converse as they eat breakfast together. He asks them about their relationships with each other since the way they interact contradicts what he expected to see; he thought there would be more of a hierarchical relationship with God the Father at the top. They reply that they are relate to each other in a loving “circle,” not a chain of command. They identify the human impulse to create authority structures as nothing more than a twisted attempt for some people to wield power over others: God created humans to exist in a circle of love that mirrors the divine relationship and can even enter into it. Mack objects that God could have acted in human history from a position of authority rather than through a mere invitation to love, preventing a great deal of evil and pain. He can’t imagine a conclusion of God’s plan for the world that would justify the amount of suffering that has happened. Papa answers that Mack has misunderstood the divine plan: “We’re not justifying it. We are redeeming it” (137).
Chapter 9 Summary: “A Long Time Ago, in a Garden Far, Far Away”
Having already had one-on-one conversations with Papa and Jesus, Mack begins the morning by following Sarayu to a garden plot near the cabin. Against his expectations of a neat and well-kept garden, Mack finds it to be wild and messy, and he tells Sarayu so. She takes this as a compliment, agreeing that it is a mess but noting that its patterns also form a fractal. She leads him to a particular spot, and they get to work clearing out a space where she plans to plant something the following day. By the end of the chapter, she reveals that this garden is a picture of Mack’s own life, illustrating the patterns of his soul.
While they work, Sarayu expresses her pleasure in the goodness of creation, which prompts Mack to ask why so much of creation seems to have gone bad. This leads to a reflection on humanity’s sin in the Garden of Eden, and Sarayu explains that as an act of love, God has given people the ability to choose for themselves. When they use that freedom to choose personal independence rather than a relationship of love, things begin to go wrong. In the Garden of Eden, it was the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that led to the first humans’ act of independence against God, and since then, humans have presumed to judge for themselves what is good and what is evil. This deepens the cycle, leading people further and further away from the possibility of living in love: “There are billions of you each determining what is good and what is evil. So when your good and evil clashes with your neighbor’s, fights and arguments ensue and even wars break out” (135). To fix this cycle, humans are called to relinquish their self-centered independent judgment and learn to trust in God’s wise and loving ways instead. This involves learning not to demand one’s rights but rather seeking the freedom of mutually submitting to others in trusting relationship.
Chapters 5-9 Analysis
With Chapters 5-9, The Shack enters the central part of its narrative: the depiction of Mack’s weekend at the cabin with the three members of the Trinity. These chapters, more than any others, rely on dialogue as the main storytelling feature. While Chapters 10-17 similarly center on dialogues, they also tell other stories about Mack’s experiences and thus incorporate more action. In this first set of encounters with God at the cabin, the story consists almost entirely of the characters’ conversations with each other.
As these dialogues with God progress, most of the major themes of the book make their appearance. The meaning of suffering is touched on again, though not in as much depth as later chapters will deal with it. The primary themes in this section are Trinitarian theology and the intertwined idea of love and relationship. Since Mack’s first impulse in his meetings is to try to make sense of what is happening and who the other characters are, Trinitarian theology looms large. It is central to most of Mack’s conversations with all three members of the Trinity, both individually and together. His dialogues with Papa go into the greatest depth on this point, and Papa articulates much of the traditional Christian position on Trinitarian theology while also adding a few twists, such as the revelation that she and Sarayu suffered torture and death on the cross along with Jesus.
The focus on Trinitarian theology leads naturally to an exploration of love and relationship. Papa’s dialogues teach that because God is a Trinity—a plurality existing in an inexpressibly intimate union—love and relationship are essential, fundamental elements of the divine nature. Further, since God’s nature is the basis of all creation’s existence (as Mack’s dialogue with Jesus suggests), this means that love and relationship are hardwired into the fabric of nature itself as an ideal toward which all creation is invited to ascend. The characteristic affection, respect, and mutual submission with which the members of the Trinity relate to each other illustrate what human relationships could be.
Several notable symbols and motifs also appear in Chapters 5-9. The shack continues to remain a symbol of Mack’s experience of pain and suffering, but with the Trinity taking up residence there, it is now transfigured into a vision of loveliness and peace. This points to one of the insights that The Shack attempts to convey to the reader: that it is precisely in the middle of pain and anguish that humans can most fully experience the healing grace of God. The symbol of gardens and the motif of fractals also appear in Mack’s dialogue with Sarayu. Sarayu directly identifies the garden in which they work as a symbol of Mack’s own life, and although its appearance initially surprises Mack, Sarayu tells him that the messiness is not chaos but a fractal pattern that is unfolding into something of extraordinary beauty. The idea of fractals thus comes to represent the counterintuitive nature of the way God works in the world, according to Christianity. Though the world may seem messy, chaotic, and meaningless, that doesn’t mean that God isn’t at work, and the end result may prove to be far more orderly and beautiful than what one might expect, as is the case with fractal patterns.
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