By Philip Yancey
I gave this book four out of five stars.
In his memoir, Philip Yancey—author of books like “What’s So Amazing About Grace,” which impacted my life years ago—takes stock of his upbringing. This memoir focuses on his relationships with his mother, brother, the churches and Bible Colleges of his younger years, and the ghost of his dead father. The story of falling in love with his wife is included, but further stories of their lives and their subsequent children, are mysteriously absent.
I truly appreciated Philip’s honesty about the racism he was taught and believed in as a younger man. I think it is extremely helpful for other white people to listen to him deconstruct racism, detailing specific examples of things he was taught and taking ownership in his agreement and complicity with racist ideas.
Philip doesn’t shy away from his own violence, mostly toward animals and implicit in his racist beliefs. He also doesn’t shy away from his perspective of his mother’s verbal and religious or spiritual abuse. This had a profoundly negative impact on his brother’s life, while there is a lot more redemption and grace in Philip’s own walk with God, faith and Christianity. There are elements of faith-deconstruction in Philip’s journey and because he share’s so much of his brother’s journey as well, there is a distinct contrast between grace and ungrace (as he calls it); between redemption and something that looks like a curse over his brother’s life.
As this memoir focuses more on Philip’s early years, and the family he was born into, I wanted Philip to state at the outset that his memoir was limited particular years and/or topics. Toward the end of the book, I felt like he fast-forwarded through the decades including few stories from adulthood, again mostly related to his brother and mother and to topics of spiritual formation and racism-regret. But I wanted him to say that his relationships with his wife and children were for other books, or to give a little explanation as to why he mostly left them out. I had to google whether or not he even had kids because there was zero mention of them. It is fine for him to say that they can write their own memoirs of being raised by him, or that this memoir was not about his relationships with the next generation. I simply found it jarring that he left out so many details of his adult life, without giving readers an explanation as to his focus and why those details were not relevant.
But apart from that, the memoir was enjoyable, especially his descriptions of the legalism of his Bible College. He and his brother both longed to decipher what is real and what is fake, and I think that question drives many of us. It is super interesting that it propelled Philip, his brother, and his mother, down three quite divergent paths and that Philip admits that his brother and mother did not see each other for decades and have not reconciled. It serves as a warning to religious parents. It demonstrates how God can reach in and change someone’s life in an instant, but not everyone receives this grace or interprets life through this spiritual lens. Some, like Philip’s brother, become atheists, and others, like his mother, extreme-legalists. This memoir contrasts religious trauma with a deeper spirituality, while also deconstructing racism.
I see this memoir as Philip Yancey’s earthquake. He is shaking off and deconstructing lies and misconceptions about God, to leave mostly redemptive, gracious, loving, healthy spirituality, in contrast to his mother and brother who seem to live in religious and atheistic extremes. Philip attempts to walk the line of redemptive-grace between those two extremes.