Title: Where the Soul Hungers: One Doctor’s Journey from Atheism to Faith
Author: Samuel Brown
Publisher: BYU/Maxwell Institute/Deseret Book
Genre: Autobiographical essays
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages:144
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1950304042
Price: $12.99
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association for Mormon Letters
Reading Sam Brown’s Where the Soul Hungers is a revelation, complete with all the insight and awe that word evokes alongside the discomfort and painful self-awareness that it suggests. I found myself nodding in recognition as I saw myself in Sam’s journey—many of the biographical details are different in our lives, but Sam’s shift from a defiant ‘authenticity-seeking’ youth to a sincere disciple-seeking community and connection struck a little too close to home.
The entire book, which is a collection of short essays, is excellent. It is packed with wonderful insights and anecdotes that Sam has gleaned over his life. A couple of the early essays struck me particularly hard, so those will be my focus here, but I would have pulled quotes from the entire book if I had the space.
One of the key insights that Sam offers that I think colors how he describes his relationship with God throughout the remainder of the book is found in the second essay, “Lost in Identity”:
Jesus’s love isn’t just in the heart, it’s also in the mind. This love teaches us how the world works, and it is both glorious and sad. God’s love is all we need, yet it is more than we can bear. There will be laughter and tears, comfort and discomfort. The familiar stories won’t make the same kind of sense anymore. (38)
This duality of laughter and tears coexisting is a theme found throughout the book and resonates with my own life. Often, I tend to focus on the comfort that God offers, thinking about God’s love as all I need, leaving out the discomfort that God’s love should also occasionally inspire, the love that “is more than we can bear”. I hope to keep that sense of God’s love that Sam describes here more in mind throughout my life.
The following essay, “In Praise of the Inauthentic Life” is likely the one that hit me the hardest. Sam opens the essay talking about his defiant nature and the ways that he strove to demonstrate that he was free-thinking and different than everyone else (descriptions that I chuckled and winced at because of how much they resembled my own natural inclinations, which I too have tried to curb). Sam notes that “as I’ve stepped away from authenticity, I find myself fully committed to sincerity and genuineness” (54). Sam puts ‘authenticity’ alongside ‘individuality’ and briefly charts some scholarship and conversation about the ways that we have shifted as a culture towards those values, at the expense of community.
Importantly, Sam argues that:
This is not a story about obliteration of ourselves. As we are honest about who we are—a dazzling combination of individual choices and shared history and commitments to family and friends plus a combination of gifts, talents, and vulnerabilities—we will find ways to contribute to the gospel work as the vessels we genuinely are. (55)
I love this vision of Zion—Sam doesn’t explicitly connect this description to the community of Zion, but it seems appropriate to make the link to me. I love the way that this framework situates individuals alongside their family and community since those have been central in shaping my own sense of the world. I also love reading Sam’s words here because they help me feel seen and not alone in my own striving to embrace community and connection, to find how I fit into this wild tapestry, to discover where I am in the Body of Christ.
I am inspired to continue the work of transforming my defiant, individualistic self and to give myself to God and community reading these words. As Sam reminded me:
The point in this kind of heavenly love is to belong in our differences, to consecrate ourselves and our selves…to consecrate means to make holy as a gift to God, to see anew. (55)
I love the idea of consecration as making holy as a gift to God, rather than an obliteration of. This tastes good to me.
I LOVED Sam’s Where the Soul Hungers and will be chewing on the wonderful insights that he offers for years to come. A fantastic addition to the Maxwell Institute’s Living Faith series and a worthwhile book for all those defiant souls wanting to come to Christ and the community of the Saints.