Lee
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Philip
She said, "If you go to this school, I will pray every day for the rest of your life that you'll be in a terrible accident."
Lee
That's Philip Yancey, long time author and journalist, recalling a moment when his brother wanted to attend a college which was, by his mother's standards, too liberal. So, she cursed him.
Philip
I said, "Well, you prayed this prayer, do you really want your own son dead?" And she basically said, "You can't mess with a God like that."
Lee
Today, Philip Yancey discusses his memoir, Where the Light Fell, which explores the pain and bizarre moralisms of his fundamentalist Georgia upbringing, and describes how beauty and love eventually led him to a new understanding of life and faith.
Philip
A writer really only has one gift, and that's the gift of his or [00:01:00] her own life.
Lee
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Many years ago, my wife and I visited a therapist who was helping us understand some of the travails of a family member who was in the early days of rehab and recovery from a debilitating addiction.
After teaching us some of the basics, she turned directly to me. She knew that I had recently completed seminary and was now doing a PhD in moral theology. She looked me in the eye, intimidatingly so, really, and said, "I have something to say to you. You need to know that bad theology messes up people's lives."
It was a pivotal moment I have not forgotten. It not only served as a cautionary tale about the ways one might damage other people's lives by the way one uses language of, language about, God or faith.
It also gave me language to see some of the [00:02:00] ways my own encounters with so-called bad theology had sharply and negatively impacted my own life. It taught me to be on guard regarding the ways bad theology can do immense harm. And all that made me especially moved by reading Philip Yancey's Where the Light Fell.
Yancey is a writer who has more than 17 million books in print, and his memoir, written late in life, poignantly narrates the way his own Georgia fundamentalist upbringing did serious harm to his own life and the life of his brother. And how beauty and love helped awaken him to other possibilities for life and faith.
Here's our interview.
Philip Yancey is the author of more than two dozen books, which have garnered 13 Gold Medallion Book Awards. He currently has more than 17 million books in print, being published in more than 50 languages worldwide. Philip worked as a journalist and freelance author in Chicago for 20 years, writing for a wide variety [00:03:00] of publications including Reader's Digest, The Atlantic, National Wildlife, and Christianity Today.
Currently, he and his wife Janet live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. And today, we're getting to sit together here in Nashville, and we're discussing Philip's recent memoir, Where the Light Fell.
Welcome, Philip.
Philip
Thank you very much, Lee.
Lee
It's a delight to have you here with us today.
Philip
Lee
Your new memoir, I truly found it beautiful and very moving. And, for at least one large part, because I relate to a lot of kind of where you've come from and some of the experiences that you had. But it's just so beautifully done, and so well done, and I'm thankful.
Philip
Well, I waited a long time to write this memoir.
I've done nothing but write books for the last 40 years or so. But I haven't really told my own story, just little snippets of it here and there. In part, because I wanted to protect family members. Probably that's the main reason. But at a certain point, I decided I've, I've got to do it. I've got to get it down.
And, um, [00:04:00] I'm glad I did. It was, it was a great experience, just kind of putting my own life together. That's one thing we writers don't often get to do. But it felt like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the face to show me where I was going to end up.
Lee
So I also... you, you said there that you had waited for a while before writing this, because you wanted to protect some people. And you also acknowledged near the end of the book that the president of the Bible college which you attended as an undergrad, kind of pressed you in these recent years, asking why you'd kind of written in a way that he appeared to find disloyal, and that you were kind of exposing these strict fundamentalisms and some of the bizarre moralisms of your school experience.
And at the same time, you also talk about how your mother has felt hurt by your writing, and that you're quite open about the pain of your childhood experience. But as we'll explore today, clearly you're not doing a hatchet job in the book, because you try, you try to be very gracious in very difficult stories that you share.
But how do you think about then balancing all of [00:05:00] that and doing that kind of work?
Philip
That's why I waited so long. I took a lot of notes and I had a lot of plans.
Actually, Lee, it wasn't until I faced, uh, death. I was in a rollover accident. My Ford Explorer turned over and over five different times as I was rolling down a cliff. I was belted in, and I ended up with a broken neck.
And that day, after they did the CT scan, the doctor came in and said, "Well, we have a jet standing by to fly you to Denver. We're concerned, because it's a, what we call a comminuted fracture. It has a lot of little pieces. And if one of them has punctured your carotid artery, just to be honest with you, you're not going to make it to Denver. So you better call the people you love and tell them goodbye."
Well, there's a wake up call.
So, I'm strapped down, and, uh, think through my life. If I do die today, what will I regret not having done? And [00:06:00] the one thing on that agenda was write this memoir.
Because a writer really only has one gift, and that's the gift of his or her own life. Good, bad. I tell some of the painful parts. But I look back on it, and the very process of putting it together seemed therapeutic, seemed healthy, because it made a literary whole, I guess it's-- W-H-O-L-E. It worked together. I could see how even the bad things were useful to me, because they sent me on a search.
If I didn't like something growing up, then I was free to explore it. How can I correct it? It's one thing to say, oh, the church is full of hypocrites. And the church I grew up in was full of hypocrites. It's another thing to say, well, then what should it have looked like? What should I look like?
I feel blessed that I've been able to spend my career thrashing through my own questions of faith and my own puzzles of [00:07:00] faith and making a living while doing that. That's a great blessing.
Lee
Yeah. Yeah.
So the big frame of your memoir is, first, your father's death, and that you discover in your twenties, I guess you were, that there had been a secret, a lie, really, about your father's death. And you even say that you began to see him as perhaps a, quote, "a sort of holy fool," end quote.
Tell us about that.
Philip
Yes, I was one year old when my father died, and so I have no conscious memory of him at all. I just have other people's memories, and they painted him as this giant of faith. He was not raised in a particularly religious background, but he went into the Navy in World War II, and was actually sailing on the way to Pearl Harbor when the war ended, when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And he had a rather dramatic conversion, I think, trying to get God to get him out of the Navy. That [00:08:00] didn't work. But he didn't have to go to war, so that was good. And he came back, and was a truly converted person. He decided, I want to be a missionary to Africa. And he had met my, the person who became my mother in the meantime.
They got married, and as potential missionaries do, went around and got a, several thousand people to agree to pay for them-- pray for them, and pay for them, donate money to support them on the mission field.
And just before they went, a pandemic was raging in the United States. In this case, it was a pandemic of polio.
Mostly, polio affected children three to five years of age. My father, however, was 23, and it was a bit of an anomaly that a person that age would get the kind of polio he did.
In one day, he was completely paralyzed, and lived for the next several months in an iron lung at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.
It was a terrible [00:09:00] existence. He couldn't move. They had no televisions. He couldn't read a book. He just lay there all day and looked at the ceiling. And finally, he and a group of people around him decided, this can't possibly be God's will. The guy wants to be a missionary, for goodness' sake. And, uh, maybe we ought to pray that God would heal him.
So they did. They started praying, and against all medical advice, removed him from the iron lung, and, uh, less than two weeks later, he died.
The secret that was kept from me was not that he died, obviously I knew I didn't have a father. He died because people who claimed to speak for God actually did not.
These were people who cared for him, who loved him, but they took on a prerogative they didn't have the right to take on. And that became the first of a number of issues that were a stumbling block to my faith that I had to work [00:10:00] through. Because I realized that this church, which always claimed to be right, was clearly wrong in some other ways.
Lee
So then, uh, perhaps just inside that frame, the kind of next largest frame, I suppose, for the whole of the book, is a vow that your mother made, which she reveals to you around the Ramaica table as a boy.
Philip
Yes. She went back to an old story from the Old Testament, of Hannah, who was infertile and begged God, please, I just want one child, one son, and if you give me one, then I'll devote him to you. And so, she got pregnant, she had a son named Samuel, and she devoted him to God. And that's what my mother did.
Lee
So the, the vow that she makes, or the giving of you and your brother over to God, describe a little bit more for how that seems to [00:11:00] operate.
First, specifically, she-- what, she makes a vow that you, you and your brother must--
Philip
Go to Africa and replace them as missionaries. Very specific, yeah.
Lee
A very explicit kind of living the life that she didn't get to live through her sons.
Philip
Lee
And that this then becomes an expectation for you and your brother as you go.
Philip
I think behind that was her lack of trust in God being able to take complaint and anger, you know?
I think a lot of people are afraid to express disappointment with God, anger at God. And they really shouldn't be, we shouldn't be, because there's a lot of that in the Bible. God gives us the words to use, words of lament, words of complaint. The Psalms, Job, Jeremiah, Lamentations. LAMENTations - Lament. It's there.
And I wish my mother had felt free to just have a wrestling match with God and say, I got an unfair draw in life. I was going to serve you, and then look at this.
She was not [00:12:00] ready for life on her own, raising two sons. She couldn't drive a car, had never written a check, and was living now in the South, even though she grew up in Philadelphia. So she had a lot to overcome. And she had to get that, that stress, that anger, that feeling of unfairness out somewhere.
If you can't express it to God, what do you do? Well, she tended to take it out on, on her sons.
My mother was a good woman. She was a Bible teacher, had a sterling reputation in the community, but there was a secret life at home that only my brother and I knew. And a lot of the growing up stories reflect that, that just difficult circumstances of a woman who was unprepared for the life she had to carve out, and the ways that she coped, some of them admirable and some of them not admirable.
Lee
And then, how do you, how do you think of how that vow, how that expectation, how this being given to [00:13:00] God, begins to operate for you, in your early years, psychologically?
Philip
We felt that we had no choice in our lives.
I mean, part of it was a thrill of being chosen by God, you know? But my brother, for example, was an incredibly talented natural musician. Played the piano. He had perfect pitch, virtually perfect musical memory, so he could hear something on the radio, and a month later sit down and play it. It was just an amazing gift.
And as he wanted to follow that calling, what he felt as a calling, as far as it could go, of course, that's not being a missionary in Africa. That doesn't count. So that's wrong. That's evil. And I didn't know, I just watched them quarrel and fight over that. And my brother and I went different directions.
He went the prodigal son story who never returned, who just wanted to get away as much as possible from our church, from our home, from any life like the one we grew up in. [00:14:00]
I went on a different direction, so I eventually did become a Christian, thanks to the grace of God, and have spent my life writing about that, writing about my questions of faith, but nothing that I've done ever registered as valid with my mother. She didn't read my books, just kind of scoffed at them.
And uh, we both felt like failures. We both felt like there's nothing that we could do to get her approval.
And ours happened to be a religious issue. I've read of others. Well, Chaim Potok writes about, in My Name is Asher Lev, where, you know, one son decides, I want to be an artist, not a rabbi, and the father never speaks to him again. And it was a little bit like that in our family, where if we took any choice other than fulfilling my mother's vow, then, uh, we were cursed rather than honored.
Lee
You have a number [00:15:00] of quotes at the beginning, inscriptions at the beginning of your chapters, that are just outstanding. And the book is worth just reading-- [both laugh]
But, uh, on this note, one that you have from James Fowler: "There's a terrible kind of cruelty, no matter how well intended, in demanding the denial of self when there is no selfhood to deny."
And it strikes me that, in the context you were in, and I think the context that a lot of young people perhaps find themselves in, in a Christian household or Christian raising, where the very call of Christianity and the words of Christ are this kind of denial of self.
And yet, here you're pointing to the fact that, uh, if that's not framed quite carefully, then it's actually quite cruel. So expound on that a bit for us, as you see that.
Philip
I would have [00:16:00] to say... it's an important principle from Jesus. In fact, the statement he makes more than any other, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it goes something like this - that we don't find life by acquiring more and more, we find life by giving it away. And in the process of giving it away, you actually discover it. And it took me a long time to appreciate that, until I saw it worked out in some people who have impressed me. People of great skill and ability who expend it on behalf of the poor.
So I think that's deeply true, but only if there's a personal choice in the matter. I didn't have the self to give it away, you know. I wasn't allowed the freedom. And I grew up with the image of God as a stern taskmaster trying to keep me from having fun, and getting me to do things that I don't want to do.
And I don't think that's... I don't think that's the way it's supposed to be. I believe God wants us to flourish, and God wants our, [00:17:00] our work, our meaningful work, to reflect our calling, who we are, what gifts we have.
In my case, I eventually decided, it's not being a missionary in Africa. I don't think I'd be a very good missionary at all. It's sitting in a basement office struggling with words all day. You know, it's a different kind of service, but it is a kind of service, and it's one that I feel equipped for.
But when other people start playing God, whether it's a parent or a pastor or, or just any other people, if you start playing God in another's life, then you're treading dangerously on ground you shouldn't really be treading on.
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor, and our conversation with Philip Yancey.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
You can get [00:18:00] show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes, and a full transcript.
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Coming up, more from Philip Yancy as he describes how his experiences of goodness and truth and beauty were at odds with the teaching he was told to accept.
You've already pointed to this, but in your... I think the language you use is, "strict fundamentalist church raising, upbringing," that... at one point you say, quote, "My earliest memories all involve fear," both around your [00:19:00] household, but also with regard to church. And then you also say, later in the book, that you have come to feel as if one of the things that you could do in your writing is to help people who, who can't seemingly possibly understand what that church world is like, to try to help them understand it.
For those who don't understand this kind of sense of constantly being in fear, or constantly being afraid of going to hell, or the sorts of fear and shame, what are some anecdotes, stories, that kind of stand out for you in your experience that kind of would help people see what this experience was like?
Philip
I was completely saturated in church growing up.
For instance, in high school years, we lived in a trailer, not a very large trailer, 8x48 feet. And there were three of us in there, including a piano that my brother played. And, uh, the bedroom we had required bunk beds. You couldn't get two beds in there. And it was located on church property. It was [00:20:00] a church that had bought an old pony farm and converted a barn into the sanctuary.
And, um, it was a fundamentalist church, proudly. We thought Southern Baptists were liberals. You know, we were Independent Baptists, Independent Fundamental Baptists! And the same 100 people, 100 people or so, would show up each Sunday morning.
And so many of the sermons focused on hell and hellfire, and I, I recall in the book that this one day, when suddenly a deacon came running in and said, "There's a fire, there's a fire," and we all went roaring out, and sure enough, the Sunday school building, which is also a converted barn, was burning down. And the fire trucks came, and it was all very exciting. And we were standing out there about 45 minutes in the hot sun, and then we all filed back inside, and I thought, well, it was-- church is over.
Oh, no. The pastor got up and and gave a sermon about hellfires being seven times hotter than that fire [00:21:00] we just experienced. And, uh... and these are the same people every week, you know? And we would take turns going forward and rededicating our lives or whatever we needed to do to end the service. And, uh, it does get to you after a while.
And I, I reflect now, because I don't live under that fear in the way I did back then. And, uh, the one positive I took away is that the decisions and the choices we make in this life do matter. They matter in an ultimate degree.
And I wouldn't express them in terms of the, if you don't please God today, he's going to smash you. That's the image of God that I had. I later found, no, God is actually a God of love and grace and mercy and forgiveness and all these other things. And I, I had a very distorted image of God. But a lot of your listeners who are listening right now have some version of that fear based religion. And it's, it's just not... it's not a healthy thing for a child to grow up [00:22:00] just immersed in that fear, if I do something wrong, I'm going to pay for it.
My memoir is titled, Where the Light Fell, and that is actually taken from a quote by St. Augustine, who said, "I couldn't look at the sun directly. When I tried to do so, I got scorched," you know, it burns your eyes to do that. And that's how I felt. I couldn't look at God directly because I had this image of God as this fearsome, angry God type character, being, and it's hard to love someone like that.
What broke through to me finally were non religious things. I had been burned by most of the religious things. But just the beauties of nature, classical music, and romantic love were the things that softened me and [00:23:00] prepared me for just an understanding and a reception of grace.
Lee
So, can we go back to some questions about your mother, and the household dynamic?
You do draw this picture in which your mother in public is seen, respected as a pious Christian servant who's doing a lot of good in the church, in the community, but at home is quite something different. And she claims, you say, that she hasn't sinned in 12 years?
Philip
She did, yes. And she probably would have expanded that to 30 or 40 years in time.
But when I was a teenager, we would get into arguments, and she would say, "Well, that can't be true, because I haven't sinned in 12, 13 years." And that ends the argument, right? I mean, how do you argue with a perfect person?
Lee
For whatever reason, I don't know why, but, um, my wife picked up the book before I had started reading it, and she just flipped through, and she handed me the book [00:24:00] and she said, "Read this page."
And, uh, it was a story about you learning to ride a bike. And that you had, uh, wanted your mother to take the training wheels off the bike. And you had tried once, didn't work, you asked her to put it back on. You tried again, got the training wheels put on, didn't work, you asked her to take them off. And then a third time you ask her to put them on, and that time she said, "Don't ask me to take them off again."
Philip
Lee
And you go out and you can't learn how to ride the bike. And so you screw up the courage to ask her to take them off. And would you tell us kind of the rest of the story from that point?
Philip
Right. She said, "I'll teach you to ride a bike." So she went over and grabbed a branch off of a bush and started pulling the leaves off of it. And I knew what was coming.
And we lived on a dirt road in Ellenwood, Georgia. And she got behind me and said, "Pedal that bike." And I remember, you know, I'm crying. I'm what, [00:25:00] four years old, five years old maybe, with snot coming out of my nose, tears going down my face. And she's behind me just hitting me with a switch, hitting me with a switch.
And years later, I screwed up the courage to say, "You know, Mother, it's taken me a long time to appreciate bike riding. Do you remember that scene?" I said, "That really, that really hurt."
And she said, "Well, you learned how to ride a bike, didn't you?" as if that settled it.
You know, I think of the... just kind of an unusual scene for a mother. But that, that shows she was mother and father both, and she had no experience in being either one, and she's working it out. And that, just going after me with a switch, getting out that anger.
I think the anger wasn't really about putting on the training wheels one more time. The anger was about, this is not right. I didn't deserve this. And I'm going to take it out on my [00:26:00] boys, who have messed up my life. And maybe also God who has messed up my life.
Lee
Your brother, you've already alluded to your brother Marshall, that he kind of plays a key role in your story. And part of that, that you narrate, is that the relationship between he and your mother grows increasingly hostile. And then that has a, this kind of impact upon you of increasingly distancing yourself or drawing into yourself or isolating some.
Would you draw, kind of describe how that kind of unfolds?
Philip
Sure. It came to a head in my brother's life when he decided to go to Wheaton College. They had a conservatory of music and Wheaton is a very respected school, with kind of the evangelical label, at least it did at the time. Billy Graham attended there.
But my mother, coming out of the group she represented, saw it as a liberal place. And when he first proposed going to Wheaton, she said, "I'd rather you go to [00:27:00] Harvard. They don't even believe in God. At Wheaton, they claim to, but not our God." You know, not our kind of God. And then he--
Lee
And for those who are unaware, we should, we should note that Wheaton, certainly at the time, was seen as quite conservative in the larger American--
Philip
Well, that's true. Yeah, right.
Lee
But they're so liberal that she doesn't want them to--
Philip
That's right.
So, he finally got accepted at Wheaton, and then there came this, uh, hinge in his life that determined his future from then on, I suppose, where she put a curse on him.
She said, "If you go to this school, I will pray, every day for the rest of your life, that you'll be in a terrible accident, and either die, or better yet, be paralyzed so that you have to lie there and look at the ceiling and realize what a terrible thing you've done, rebelling against God's will."
And... it was like poison gas in the room, Lee. I remember it so clearly.
My brother just stalked out and slammed the door to, to his bedroom. But she... [00:28:00] she did put a curse on him.
Interestingly, he has a different memory of that scene. I talked about memory being unreliable. I'm quite sure that I remember it correctly. He remembers it differently. He remembers her saying, "I will pray every day for the rest of your life that you'll lose your mind," because that's what happened. And I think he's kind of backfilled her prophecy.
His very last semester, okay, he's a senior in college, one semester left, at a respected school, conservatory of music... and he drops out, and becomes one of Atlanta's original hippies. This is back in 1968, '69. And, uh, in a sense, fries his brain on LSD.
Hippies gathered in Piedmont Park in those days, and, and dropped acid. And that's what he did. And then eventually moved to California, went through every kind of addiction that you can think of, had no [00:29:00] contact with our mother in over 50 years, until, actually, I turned in the manuscript on the memoir and then I got them on the phone for the first time.
So, I saw the choices he made. He broke that curse, in a sense, by saying, I'll do whatever I want. And he did whatever he wanted. But these were self destructive choices. He should be on the concert stage playing the piano. Instead, he ended up tuning pianos, playing the same note... over and over and over.
And, uh, that was a lesson to me. Don't go that route. Find another route. Find something that's, that's a healthier way to grapple with some of the wounds of childhood.
Lee
At one point, you narrate how Marshall says to you that he feels as if he can never have a better life, because of this curse that your mother has placed on him.
And you say, as I recollect, something to him in terms of [00:30:00] saying, "Well, if you really believe that's what's happening to you, let me ask her if she will remove the curse."
And then you go and ask her?
Philip
Yeah, I do. I said to my brother, "You're my brother. If you really believe that, there's only one person who can remove the curse, and that's our mother. So, next time I go to Atlanta, then I'll ask her to do that."
He just laughed and said, "Yeah, good luck."
It was Christmas, and we went, and I waited until after Christmas Day itself. We were staying in a motel and just visiting daily and spending time with her, my wife and I.
So finally, I got my mother alone, and we sat down, and I said, "Mother, Marshall has changed a lot. He's made a lot of progress. He's made some mistakes, but he knows he's made some mistakes, and he's actually doing better now than he ever has." and I told her about this conversation.
But I was not prepared for her response. She got this, uh, rigid, I would say evil, look in her eye. And [00:31:00] she said, she said, "The way he went against God, I could never forget something like that."
And as we talked, I realized, I said, "Well, you prayed this prayer. Do you really want him dead? Do you want your own son dead? Would you pray for that?"
And she basically said, uh, "You can't mess with a God like that." She didn't really answer my question, but it hung in the air, as it has our entire lives.
And not until her deathbed, really. She died in 2023, in May. She was 99 years old, had turned 99 the week before.
And I finally did get the two of them together, as I mentioned, on the telephone a few times before then. And then he called, and just said, "I wanted to tell you goodbye." And she died that night.
Well, the hospice people had told me, "She's hanging on to something. We don't know what it is. But sometimes if there's a family [00:32:00] thing, if you can let her reconcile that in one way or another, then she will let go of life." And she did.
My brother is a tragic character. People ask me, how did the memoir affect him? And the phrase he uses, one I appreciate, he said, "It validated my existence."
He admits, "Yeah, I made some bad choices, probably wasn't the best trajectory of my life... but when you wrote it up, you validated it, so I think people can understand maybe why I became the person I was."
And I think that's what, that's what I hope memoirs do, they do trigger responses in the reader where you, you apply your own situation, you put yourself in theirs, and it teaches you about your own.
Lee
Coming right up, after a short break - how Philip came to understand his mother's bitterness [00:33:00] and anger, and how beauty and love brought him to a new vision of life and faith.
You point to the ways in which, in working on the book, or even earlier in your life, you do begin to get glimpses of the ways in which you can make some sense of your mother's harshness or her lack of grace in the-- on her own childhood experience. Any episodes point out that would kind of help frame some of that?
Philip
Yes. I have been many times to the three story, or two story, I guess, brownstone where my mother grew up. It only has two bedrooms. There's one kind of closet that they made into a sort of bedroom, but in that two bedroom house, they raised six children. And the boys [00:34:00] were big strapping football players. I have no idea how they did it.
I mean, our trailer was luxurious compared to those circumstances. And the-- my grandmother, my mother's mother resented all these children. You know, birth control wasn't really on the map back then in the 1920s and '30s, and children would just appear. They went through the Depression, they went through the war, and life was tough. It was really hard.
And at one point my mother came in and apologized for something. She claims that she would get a whipping regularly, just out of her mother's anger. And she would say, "I didn't do anything."
And, and her mother would say, "Well, I'm sure you did, but I don't know what it is. And maybe you don't know, but I'm sure you did," and just go ahead and whip her anyway. And at one point she apologized for something she had done wrong. And her mother said, "You can't possibly be sorry. If you were sorry, you wouldn't have done it in the first place."
You know, [00:35:00] catch-22. There's just no way to please this woman. So you're going to get beat regardless, whether you did something or didn't do something.
And, um, being in that environment, my own looked pretty soft in comparison. And you can understand why she became the person she did. She had no role model. She had no love, experience of love, until my father came along. And they, they truly did have kind of a fairy tale romance. And then, within a few years, he was taken away, as she saw it. Killed, and left her with a miserable life of her own.
Lee
So, when you go to college, you are originally... to use the phrase you used earlier in our interview today, you still have kind of your faith in abeyance.
Philip
Lee
But you began to get a glimpse, even though you're quite frustrated with some of the constraints or the moralisms or the silly rules of the Bible college where you're in school, you [00:36:00] began to get a glimpse of a bigger world, a larger world out there, that you're interested in?
Philip
Yes, several things happened. As I mentioned earlier, I gradually softened. Not so much to faith, but just to life in general, by romantic love, by music, by nature. My solace was always taking walks in the woods and exploring animals and insects and plants and, and all of that.
And then I had a dramatic conversion experience. And I... all these years, I've waited to give details of that, because as soon as you say, 'this is what conversion is like,' somebody will say, 'well, I never had anything like that,' and that's true. Uh, we don't. We have, we have different experiences with God.
Some people don't wrestle. I did wrestle, and I did need something that seemed to come from outside, something I didn't manipulate all by myself. And so, God did visit me, and my life changed from that moment on.
Lee
In [00:37:00] talking about your college experience, you have a conversation with your brother Marshall, and you two are discussing trying to sort out what's fake and what's real.
And when I got to that passage, it struck me that that seemed like, in many ways, one of the threads that kind of runs perhaps through the whole of your book, is that you're trying to sort out what about it's true, what about it's a lie? What's real, what's fake? What's, um... inauthentic happiness, what's a deep, real joy?
But commentary on that?
Philip
You're right.
A thread not only in the book, but the thread of my entire life and my career. As I mentioned, pretty early on I realized, you can't trust what people say about their faith. You can't trust when people say, 'it's God's will that your father will be healed,' because he wasn't healed, he died. The church had lied to me. The church had misrepresented God.
[00:38:00] And so, my whole life as a writer has been in sorting through, picking up the things I was taught, picking up the Bible, and sorting through, what of this is authentic, what of this is worth preserving, and what should be discarded?
I don't want to be like one of those hypocrites. I wanted to find out what is authentic.
Like, I write a book on prayer. A lot of prayers don't get answered. Some books on prayer tell you that all your prayers get answered. Well, they don't. Not in the way you want. So how do you come to terms with that? And piece by piece, in my books, What's So Amazing About Grace?, The Jesus I Never Knew, I review those things from childhood and decide what should be preserved and what should not.
Lee
One of the things that you point to in grappling with the inauthentic and authentic, is that while you're in the midst of this very intense church environment, they're not pointing to [00:39:00] things like Vietnam, race riots, cops beating hippies. The church isn't talking about that.
Philip
Lee
This seems to be certainly one of the things that you, you're gonna go on and try to say, if I'm gonna have any sort of authentic faith, I've got to somehow make sense of the reality of the world.
How did that come to be, that you felt as if, if I'm going to believe this stuff, then it has to encounter, it has to intersect the realities of the world?
Philip
The Bible college I attended, like many of them, not all, was located outside of town, kind of on a, on a, compound with a lot of land around it.
And we were like a bubble. So, occasionally we would go to, say, a hospital or a prison and, and try to convert to people or preach the Sunday sermon or something like that.
But we were really living in our own hermetically sealed world, with its own rules, very [00:40:00] strict rules, and we would only hear about things going on in the rest of the world. And then I would go home on Christmas vacation, and this is the 1960s, and you see girls In miniskirts, braless. You would see protesters holding up signs of babies being napalmed in Vietnam, and pictures of Richard Nixon, you know, "liar, liar."
And it was culture shock. And I realized, you know, we're sitting in this Bible college, discussing issues that were being debated in, in the fourth century AD, and there are some major things going on in the world right now. Injustice and poverty and, and civilization and communism and war. And we're not studying anything that seems to relate to these issues. If faith is worth anything at all, it's got to have some sort of relevance to what's going on in the rest of the world. And my faith at [00:41:00] that time did not.
Lee
As you then began to take a different route, and get glimpses of the power of words, and find a path forward for your life, and have this sort of religious experience, how would you describe the contours of the grace or the contours of the mercy, the contours of the beauty and goodness that you were drawn towards?
Philip
There's this statement that G. K. Chesterton used to use, I'm not sure he really came up with it, but he repeated it. He said, "The worst moment for an atheist is when he has a deep sense of gratitude and has no one to thank."
And, and that's what first got my attention about God, because I grew up with God, the image of God, as a stern taskmaster, as a bully.[00:42:00]
And through things like music, the beauties of nature, and romantic love especially, I was aware this world It's a pretty nice place. It's got some great things in it. And I... if you believe God is Creator, God must be somehow responsible for that. And this doesn't measure up to the image of God that I came away with.
Just as you see a great work of art in a museum, you'd like to know something about the artist or the photographer who made this. I guess that's how I felt. I'd like to know that God.
And I started, in this college, studying the life of Jesus, and he was a very different character than the Sunday school image I had, and someone I wanted to learn from and emulate.
Lee
So, would you frame, then, the experience of writing your memoir as, in some ways, coming to know yourself anew, or what did this experience mean for you? [00:43:00]
Philip
People who've read it will sometimes ask me, "Was that painful, was that confusing?" When I would know that I'm going to be writing a difficult passage this week, my wife would say, "Are you okay? Are you okay?" And actually, it proved very therapeutic.
What writers do is provide meaning and order to either ideas or stories, or their own lives, in my case, through words. That's what we do. We sort it out, and we try to come up with some sort of what was really going on, and, in a sense, tame, tame the wild animals of our lives, that we haven't encountered yet. And it felt like that.
It felt like, uh, discovery in part. You know, I, I mentioned this period in high school when I was going through the search for pain as it were, and I got a chance to-- what was really [00:44:00] going on there? I didn't go to a psychiatrist, probably should have, but we didn't have money for that kind of thing. But what was, who was I trying to impress? Or why was I trying to teach-- why was I hurting myself?
So I got the chance to stare at those things and to try to come up with some sort of coherent narrative that resulted in who I am now. What a great opportunity.
In fact, you know, I'm a journalist. Everybody has a story. Probably everybody has a story worth at least a short book, you know? And a writer gets a chance to, to do that, to just look at each piece, interview other people, try to come up with a, with a coherent narrative of life. Of how it unfolds, from which other people can learn.
Lee
Are there other things that you might wish [00:45:00] for anyone listening that relates to these sorts of, especially some of the kind of difficult or painful experiences that you've shared... are there things, in addition to perhaps trying to find some sort of way to frame their experience narratively through journaling or writing, other things you'd wish for them?
Philip
Hmm. Well, I'll tell you what resulted in my work.
A few years ago, I was invited to speak at the University of Virginia. And they said, we, we have to have this brochure published, and it's two years from now, so just make up a generic title that would apply to anything. I said, "Okay, uh... how about 'two themes that haunt me?'"
"Oh, that's great. That's great." So I wrote that down.
And then, as time came around, you know, two years later, they said, uh, "What themes are you going to be talking about?" Oh, good point. Got to come up with some themes here. And I said, "Seems obvious to me: suffering and grace."
Suffering and grace. And those are, to [00:46:00] me, two of the biggest questions we humans will face.
Why, if there is a good God, why do so many bad things happen? And then, grace... we live in a society in which we're all judged by our behavior, our income, our race, you know, so many ways. What school we went to, what kind of car we drive. And as Jesus' stories show, he just turns everything upside down and your worth is not determined by your income, by your race, by these other things.
It's the Sermon on the Mount, just turns it all upside down, you know? Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who are suffering, blessed are-- it's an un American message. But it's a message that people who are suffering really need and crave. Just the sense that God cares, that there will be a reversal. As Martin Luther King used to say, uh, how long, oh Lord, but the arm of the universe, the moral arc of the universe is bent toward justice.
And that's a hard thing to believe in an unjust world, [00:47:00] but that's what we're asked to believe and to give us hope to endure this world.
Lee
I've been talking to Philip Yancey, author of more than two dozen books, 17 million in print, and today we've been discussing his recent memoir, Where the Light Fell.
Thank you, Philip.
Philip
It was my pleasure. Thank you, Lee.
Lee
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Philip Yancey, discussing his memoir Where the Light Fell.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.
And the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.[00:48:00]
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studios.