Our theme for the month of October is “haunt.”
When my mom was a child, she and her siblings sat in the pews of their Korean church, their heads bowed in prayer. In a moment of no explicable significance, my mom suddenly opened her eyes and felt herself looking down at her own body, her spirit floating a few feet above. Then as suddenly as it happened, she felt her spirit resettle into her body.
She turned to her three siblings, all of whom were wild-eyed and bewildered. They whispered, “Did you feel that too?” and discovered they all had the same experience. She would’ve thought it a dream if they didn’t have the same memory.
When my dad was in his twenties, living on his own after graduating from high school, he moved into an apartment complex owned by someone who sought out spirits. He didn’t know her specific beliefs, but he said that she invited spirits into the building.
Despite having no previous history with mental illness, he fell into a deep depressive episode within a couple months of living there. He was glad to find residence elsewhere when his lease was over.
The day that he turned in his keys, he took one last look at his bedroom window before he left. Even though his landlord wasn’t home, even though there was no one else who could have access to his apartment, he saw a dark figure move past his window. And as soon as he started living somewhere else, his depression disappeared.
He also had a friend who lived in the suburbs of Colorado Springs. My dad would rave about the goodness of his friend, and he talked about how much God loved him.
He told my dad that he stopped at a red light when he saw an angel float through the intersection, and then a car flew through at like eighty miles an hour. What he didn’t see before was that the red light had turned to green, and the speeding car ran its light. If my dad’s friend didn’t stop to look at the angel, he would’ve surely died.
My senior year of college, my medieval literature professor led a discussion about whether or not angels were real. He asked believers to raise their hands, and less than ten people did. He asked the nonbelievers, and the rest of the hands shot up.
Growing up, my parents talked about supernatural spirituality as if it was the most evident thing in the world, and I was aghast that anyone—especially Christians—could ignore such a fundamental pillar of our existence. Then I became entrenched in utility bills and dishwasher politics, and with my mind so consumed by the minute details of everyday life, the supernatural felt like a joke.
But so much of Christianity revolves around faith, it seems peculiar to me that so many Protestants are content to sit in their disbelief. Sure, some of the Bible may be metaphorical, but an entire arm of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit. We think ourselves more evolved than our predecessors because we prioritize what we already know or can know in our lifetime, and we dismiss anything else as absurd.
To be entirely honest, I’m not sure what I believe about angels, demons, or ghosts, but I know I will probably never know for certain, and I know that my mom and dad experienced something that felt otherworldly. I don’t wish to deny them that experience, and I think keeping an open mind is the most rational thing I can do.
Tiffany Kajiwara graduated from Calvin in 2022 with majors in literature and writing. Now, she continues to live in Grand Rapids and works at Baker Academic Publishing as a marketing assistant. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, thrifting, and psychoanalyzing cartoon characters.
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“ We think ourselves more evolved than our predecessors because we prioritize what we already know or can know in our lifetime, and we dismiss anything else as absurd.”
YES. Christianity is weird and mystical and post-enlightenment Christians tend to forget/ignore that. Thank you for these stories!