Where the Light Fell: A Memoir
Philip Yancey (Convergent Books)
We’ve known for years Philip Yancey carries a well of sorrow. Books like Where is God When it Hurts? and Disappointment with God—among others—have made that clear. Now we know where the well is, and how deep.
In Where the Light Fell, Yancey opens the door wide into his heart and soul. Opening with the story of his father’s death and its outflow in his family’s life sets the hook.
Recounting his childhood, Yancey writes of concrete thinking, having more questions than answers, and being raised in a stridently conservative—if not fundamentalist—Christian home. His effortless switching between past and present tense creates the illusion he is living his childhood now. And maybe he is.
Yancey recounts the difficulty of growing up forever in the shadow of childhood tragedy that played a significant role in propelling his family into perpetual poverty. Growing up in and around Atlanta, Ga., in the 1960s, he also drank deep the narrative of the Lost Cause and the Curse of Ham. What he was taught—and believed—about the world and the people in it, particularly Black people, was brought up short by a jarring experience at the CDC during a summer fellowship in high school.
Those who also came of age during the 1960s will identify with the anxiety over the civil rights movement, Communism, sex and drugs. Those who came of age watching the TV show “The Wonder Years” will hear echoes of their parents, even if their parents didn’t share with them the same stories Yancey now does.
During those turbulent and formative years, Yancey and his brother experienced their own crises of faith while attending a Bible college. Their crises were a culmination of a lifetime of familial and religious traumas—what Yancey might term “toxicity”—each brother responding in his own and enduring way.
Trauma casts a long shadow, a very long shadow. The reader will look for where the light finally falls, perhaps not realizing it’s all around and always just a step away.
Where the Light Fell is expected to release in October 2021.
Eric Black, executive director/publisher/editor
Baptist Standard
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