Shann’s new novel, Where Blackbirds Fly, releases officially today. It was a long journey full of suffering. He would start writing at 10:00 or 11:00 pm. He would pound the keys with a dizzying speed, pause in a look of exhaustion, and then pick up the intense speed night after night.

Many times, I would come down the hall around 2:00 am and find him lying in the form of a cross crying or listening to praise music. The book came out of him with such struggle because he wanted to write about the human shadow in light of forgiveness, mercy, and grace. 

It is a challenging book to read in its polymathic vision, brilliant with nods to philosophy, psychology, deep theology, history, genocide, and violence. I can hear Shann’s mom questioning why he would write a book like this.

Shann, as a genocide researcher, believes violence begins at the one-to-one level and it expands to include and envelop more and more. Wives and husbands in dislike or even hatred spill into the relationships between sons and daughters, spilling into friends and relations, to strangers, to entire people groups. Cain and Able killing and being killed. 

We often discuss how easy the slide begins, the root of bitterness grows secretly between brothers or sisters blooming until the two no longer speak, no longer love as family, where words become cruel, and actions become evil. 

Every person has this long violent history. How do we emerge? How can we hope to transcend the propensity to hate and to harm that has been in the human DNA for thousands of generations? 

This is the hope, this is the Good News, Love is stronger, forgiveness greater, light brighter. When in darkness, though it can never seem possible, even the smallest light is visible.