Where the Light Fell
By Philip Yancy
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
In the “Author’s Note” at the end of this 300-page book, popular Christian writer Philip Yancy confesses that his friends and editors “plowed through 240,000 words of an early draft before I winnowed it down to 100,000.” What he obviously cut out was anything about his life after his marriage about the age of 22—or 50 years ago! What his proof readers thought most compelling, evidently, was the fascinating story of his dysfunctional family of origin and what became of his mother, his father, and his brother.
It is that story that will astound you, providing an interesting twist to the title of one of Yancy’s more popular books—The Jesus I Never Knew morphs into The Yancy We Never Knew (which could have been an appropriate subtitle to this almost spell-binding book).
It starts with a bang—with Philip the college student discovering the details of his father’s death fifteen years earlier: “Not until college do I discover the secret of my father’s death” are the opening words of this novel-like narrative.
His father contracted polio, found himself in an iron lung, opted out—but I won’t give away the details, or its aftermath, except to say that it precipitated what Yancy and his older brother Marshall called The Curse.
The following chapters describe the family during Yancy’s childhood and adolescence as packed with fundamentalist religion, oppressive poverty, mental illness, classical music, and the two boys’ strategies of surviving and thriving in the worst of circumstances.
Where the Light Fell is certainly the two-story narrative of one family, one public and respectable, the other private and deeply disturbing—and it is the second one, the one hidden from public view, that is so compelling, so troubling, so astounding. How Philip emerges from the toxicity that swamps this family to become the rich and famous author of 25 books is the piece of the story that is insufficiently addressed. He credits grace, of course, and concludes the book with this sentence: “Above all else, grace is a gift, one I cannot stop writing about until my story ends.” His most popular book, I am guessing, is the one we used in religion classes at Georgetown College: What’s So Amazing About Grace? But he fails, I surmise, in giving any deeper, more substantive interpretation as to why he rose above the dysfunction when others in his family of origin did not—that is, now and why it was that a certain saving grace was poured into his life and not theirs.
In fact, the most stunning thing about this narrative is how Philip fades to the sidelines once he is married. There is virtually nothing in the book about either his professional life following college or his family life (with wife and children) in the intervening 50 years. I am left wondering if and how religious fundamentalism, mental illness, or family secrets impacted the grandchildren (and perhaps great grandchildren) of the man trapped in an iron lung a half century ago.
Yes, the narrative describes his on-going relationship with his mother and especially his older brother (the latter of which would make a terrific movie). But the real star of this show is his mother: her faith, her ministry, her hopes and dreams, and her relationship with her two sons. She, above all, was mentally ill, or so I think and so did the psychiatrist who once said to Marshall, “I’ll deny ever saying this, but you do know your mother’s the crazy one, don’t you?”
And, apparently, that mother is still alive, still alert, and to some extent still wrestling with the demons that have haunted her family for 70 years.
Those other 140,000 words? I suspect they will show up somewhere, in another book no doubt; and I will be pleased to buy it, read it, and review it if it tells at least some of the rest of this story. But for now, this much is good and worth reading if for no other reason than the light it causes to fall upon our own journeys, our own secrets, our own traumas and the grace we also receive to persevere.
(October 2021)
