By the light of fireflies: A Review of A Holy Haunting: Why Faith Isn't a Leap but a Series of Staggers from One Safe Place to Another

Review by Rev. Dr. Malcolm Himschoot

Title: A Holy Haunting: Why  Faith Isn’t a Leap but a Series of Staggers from One Safe Place to Another

Author: Sam D. Kim, with a foreword by Leighton Ford

Publisher: Morgan James Faith, isbn 9781631959905, $19.99

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A Holy Haunting by Sam D. Kim

I was drawn into reading this book by the people Sam D. Kim is speaking to. Those who have deep spiritual longings, who are not all about church. Those who are in church, who know they have deep spiritual longings. And those who have left the church because it did not share their real, lived questions. These diverse audiences he calls “far, near, and somewhere in between.” Speaking to all of them together in the language of faith relates to a task Christianity calls “apologetics.” Kim’s blurbers say as much in the foreword to the book A Holy Haunting: Why  Faith Isn’t a Leap but a Series of Staggers from One Safe Place to Another.

While intrigued, I approached the book with justified caution. I think of apologetics as “making faith make sense” using the language and symbol system of a surrounding culture not of that faith. By touching on points of meaning already in the world(view) of people beyond the church, and translating a spiritual contribution made in that area by Christianity, apologists have – in the last 2000 years or so – both welcomed newcomers and edified the faithful. As translators of ultimate meaning, they have been creative and expansive. They have also been stubborn and entrenched, argumentative, defensive and combative. Any new book of apologetics risks the same errors.

The cultural ‘surround,’ for Kim as a Christian pastor in New York City, is not any faith specifically, but the absence of a faith tradition. He reaches to secular academics and successful professionals, to connect thinking people to join the church that he pastors. Surprise surprise, educated adults can at times find themselves drawn into the fabric of a faith community! This makes sense, the book says (and I concur) because human beings are made for community and for Love. A spiritual framework for community and for meaning provide an astonishing amount of people with higher well-being than others, simply by being part of an inter-generational tradition. The Easter faith of courage and hope amidst pain and sacrifice is one such tradition, attested by many reputable and irreputable people through times and across cultures.

I myself value mystery as much as logic in my religious world. Yet I share with the author a compassion for rational adults when they are making a faith commitment, and/or when needing to deconstruct/reconstruct their faith as adults. They deserve to know that their place of (chosen) belonging is not an infantilizing cult, that they can have other reference points beyond the canon of whatever sacred text started it, and they can expect openness instead of shame for ongoing lived spiritual experience and interpretation. They deserve this even in evangelical Christianity, which is far too often known for the opposite.

From his own experience, the author tells of a “tsunami of doubt that would rip the seams off my youthful faith.” After facing the potential death of his mother, as a young man he developed a more compassionate sense of prayer amidst unanswered questions. “From hindsight, I’ve learned that struggling with doubt while grappling with loss is not apostasy; it is just human.” Instead of thinking “something was wrong” with him, feeling like a “renegade,” or staying “in spiritual exile” with the fullness of his emotions and critical thinking, he came to look back on this period of life, his sadness and his questions, as a “spiritual puberty” – a necessary part of growing up.

The best thing about this book is its stated commitment to reduce shame and stigma for people when they question, doubt, and explore their beliefs – saying instead that this should be viewed an important part of the human life cycle. As Kim says, “What has been typically valued in Christian spirituality is an unhealthy dependency on certainty that leaves little room for ambiguity when both life and faith are often messy and tumultuous.” True belonging and meaning actually depend on these expressions of authenticity.

Where this books falls down is with a lack of self-critique within the tradition. For example, Kim omits how religious LGBTQ people suffer when a sense of belonging is withheld from their sacred community, and when their framework for moral and spiritual meaning is jeopardized from the beginning. By not exposing how the church has actually harmed the well-being of queer groups of people, in his chapter on the epidemic of suicide the author tacitly blames queer people for their own suffering. For these and other stigmatized groups, Kim stops short of addressing harmful norms that have accrued onto Christian faith. Of which there are many!

I picture Sam Kim as the enthusiastic guy with a marker at the whiteboard – half the time talking to himself as he draws and writes, half the time talking to the people in the room, who both chuckle and admire the enthusiastic guy at the whiteboard. Faith communities tend to have at least some people like this, teachers infused with ideas who want to get big ideas across! People in the room tolerate them pretty well, as long as they don’t get into fights with other big-idea-marker-people. Of course different faith communities have different people with different markers. It goes ok until someone with a marker wants to hit others over the head with their marker – which Sam King expressly doesn’t.

Yet I have the feeling that many of the people this author reads would totally hit others over the head with their marker. And their influence shows. Kim’s footnotes detail 20^th century American forebears with Billy Graham megaphones and a rigid conception of who is in and who is out. While Kim’s memoir-style case for faith seeks to expand the circle of participation, I notice that only men are quoted in A Holy Haunting (with the exception of Anne Lamott, whose inspiration lent the excellent subtitle of the book, and Margaret Atwood whose post-Christian fiction was used as a kind of a cautionary tale). A tone of confrontation comes through. The book includes a somewhat random chapter debating evolution. It ends with a C.S. Lewis quasi-archival plea for certainty regarding the New Testament. The final pages can be used as a tract, which does not suggest dialogue and development, but rather goal lines and conversion. I was disappointed.

Early on, the author states: “My goal isn’t to win religious arguments that you couldn’t care less about, but rather to start a genuine dialogue about things that really matter and touch the deepest part of our lives.” If this is a genuine motivation in his pastoral work, I hope Kim will also recommend other 21^st century authors to people in his church:

• I recommend Jacqui Lewis, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Molly Phinney Baskette, Lauren F. Winner, Heidi Neumark, Ann Kansfield, Rhina Ramos, and Christina Kukuk – all Christian pastors, all women who have written memoirs.

• Plus women who haven’t been pastors, but who (like C.S. Lewis) have written as laypeople to fill out the church’s ministry of teaching, feeling, and critical thinking in a complicated world: Diana Butler Bass, Debie Thomas, Kat Armas, Bekah McNeel.

My own book might be too far afield for this list – one pastor’s queer theological memoir written by a transgender man. Even as I name that caveat, I can only guess that some people baptized in Sam Kim’s congregation are going to need to have a real gender conversation at some point! For their sake, I applaud the spirit of staggering, and the author’s human demonstration of authenticity.

Contributed by Rev. Dr. Malcolm Himschoot, author ofReading Secrets: A Queer Inheritance of Life and Scripture and the article “Practices of Spirit for Genderqueer and Transgender Christians