Yancey's own story about grace

I read Philip Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace? during a three-week stint I spent in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The question mark at the end of the sentence may well make the question itself rhetorical because with the publication of that book Yancey's reputation as a writer, already handsomely established, became even more set in stone, in rock, the rock of ages. He was and is, as a writer, someone who with trusted honesty has more than his share of trouble believing in grace, as most of us do. 

It's free, a gift. Meticulous lives don't earn it because it's given away. Seriously. "Human beings love free things," an old pastor used to say, "except salvation--salvation is something all of us really want to earn." 

I read Amazing first, then Kathleen Norris's Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, a one/two punch that may sound as if I was on some kind of grace kick, which I wasn't. In a way, you might say, those two books were my morning prayers, wonderful devotional literature. I picked up Yancey's book because I had spent some considerable time with him in a small Christian writers group, the Chrysostom Society, where I'd heard Yancey read from the manuscript before it was published. I knew I'd like it.

Norris's Amazing Grace I came to after reading Dakota, her book about the plains, a book that, like no other I knew, measured and described the region and its people with a forthright honesty--and grace--that's almost shocking because it felt to me so true to life. 

What's not so amazing was that I loved both books. In fact, the two of them tag-teamed me into submission on a manuscript I was working over--a novel titled Romey's Place. There I was in a tiny little student apartment in Amsterdam, Holland, looking out a window at suburban neighborhood when I told myself I had the ending of that novel all wrong, completely wrong, because the story I was inventing, creating, was in actuality a story about grace. 

I've never been big on "The Lord told me to write this." But it's impossible not to believe in epiphanies, and that day I had a healthy one, life-changing in a limited way. I have no doubt that I understood grace before reading those books, but the those two books battered me into accepting, once again, the truly amazing character of grace. I went home dutified, I'd say--I was going to rewrite the whole blame thing once more. And I did.

The times I'd spent in Yancey's company gave me an outline of his biography. I knew he was raised in the South, that for some time he'd bought the racist line of so many white evangelicals, who, even as I was taught, considered the African race as descendants of Ham, the son of Noah determined by God Almighty to be servant/slaves. Isn't that what the Bible says? Somehow, "the theory of Ham" made slavery--or at least prejudice-- biblical, which is why Huck said he'd rather go to hell than give up Jim.

The burden Phillip Yancey needed lifted from his soul was hefty because he'd grown up in a church that publicly and powerfully determined, as a body, it would never have African American members, a decision documented by cartoonish biblical footnotes. 

What I didn't know was that he grew up in fatherless home, that his mother had taken her husband, Phillip's father, out of the iron lung he'd been in, a victim of the polio epidemic of mid-20th century. She released him from the horrific bondage of the iron lung by determining that it was her lack of faith that kept him there. She believed she and her prayer warriors could pray him back to health.

Didn't happen. Thus, Philip Yancey grew up without a father and with that mother, who became a world-class Sunday School teacher, but a demonically abusive parent. His mother was a victim of the kind of faith-madness somewhat familiar to most of us who've grown up steeped in evangelical culture, where men and women can somehow be both grotesquely pious and insufferably abusive. 

Like Tara Westover's Educated, Yancey's story is so full of abuse that it's painful. His mother, a renowned Bible school teacher who spent her summers in Bible camps, tortured her sons--not physically, but emotionally and, yes, spiritually. On the memoir shelf, Where the Light Fell fits quite snugly beside Tara Westover's Educated and Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, stories of similarly grinding and grotesque abuse. 

I couldn't help thinking that Westover's Educated wasn't finished, that she wrote the book before she'd adequately "processed" the horrors her father had made of her childhood. Vance was more interested in delineating the roots of the Trump phenomenon. But Yancey's Where the Light Fell is different. It's disarmingly honest about his inability to assess his mother's place in his life, not because he doesn't have the goods on her--he does!!--but because he somehow, some way, still loves her, not as a human being, but as his mother. 

And that's grace, although I'm quite sure Philip wouldn't like me saying it in just that way.

I remember him saying once, years ago, that he somehow wished he could write something other than what he seemed predestined to do, books that bash the evangelicals from whom he'd descended and, ironically, who became his most devoted readers. 

Maybe Where the Light Fell is Philip Yancey's best book because it's his story, his personal story, a story that tries not to let the abuse grab all the headlines. The honesty of his wounded soul allows him the freedom to tell the story, but the grace he's learned in a lifetime of trying to understand it's "amazing" character won't let him leave his mother behind. He won't write her off, even though, in essence, that's what she did to her husband, his father, when she took him out of the iron lung. And what she did to her boys.

Yancey shakes his head at his assessment of his mother's influence and wishes on the final pages that he could do something more Kum-by-ya. He describes what she has done in unflinching honesty, yet refuses forsake her. 

No question mark here because that's what's so amazing about grace.