Update: New York Times Podcast: David Brooks: I Found My Faith in a Crowded Subway Car
New York Times Op-Ed: The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be, by David Brooks:
When I was an agnostic, I thought faith was primarily about belief. Being religious was about having a settled conviction that God existed and knowing that the stories in the Bible were true. I looked for books and arguments that would convince me that God was either real or not real.
Some people are spiritual but not religious; during that time, you could say I was religious but not spiritual. I grew up in a Jewish home where we experienced peoplehood more than faith. I went to a Christian school and camp where I sang the hymns with pleasure, not conviction. I lived through decades of Jewish adulthood (kosher home, the kids at Jewish schools) but all that proximity still didn’t make me a believer.
When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences. These are the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time. …
In 2013, … I was in a crowded subway car underneath 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue in New York (truly one of the ugliest spots on this good green earth). I looked around the car, and I had this shimmering awareness that all the people in it had souls. Each of them had some piece of themselves that had no size, color, weight or shape but that gave them infinite value. The souls around me that day seemed not inert but yearning — some soaring, some suffering or sleeping; some were downtrodden and crying out. …
In that subway car it occurred to me too that if people had souls, maybe there was a soul-giver. Once you accept that there is a spiritual element in each person, it is a short leap to the idea that there is a spiritual element to the universe as a whole. As C.S. Lewis once observed, an atheist can’t guard his faith in nothing too closely; a mere glimmer of the spirit can bring that faith crashing down.
Then in late June that year I was hiking alone in Colorado when I climbed up to a lake that was surrounded by mountain crests on all sides. I sat on a rock by the lake and some sort of marmot or gopher scuttled up to my feet, noticed me and scooted away. Because I’m me, I had books in my backpack, including a volume of Puritan prayers. The one I opened to begins with these words:
Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly,
Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision,
Where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights;
Hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory.
That passage contained a nice set of coincidences, given my surroundings. The next passage had a strange effect:
Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up,
That to be low is to be high,
That the broken heart is the healed heart,
That the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
That the repenting soul is the victorious soul.
Look at the inverse logic in those verses. Most of the time we go through life governed by a straightforward logic: Practice makes perfect, effort leads to reward, winners get admired. But here was a moral logic radically at odds with that: The meek shall be exalted, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who hunger and thirst, where there is humility there is majesty, where there is weakness there is might.
This logic struck me as both startling, revolutionary and astonishingly beautiful. I had the feeling I had glimpsed a goodness more radical than anything I had ever imagined, a moral grandeur far vaster and truer than anything that could have emerged from our prosaic world.
It hit me with the force of joy. Happiness is what we experience as we celebrate the achievements of the self — winning a prize. Joy is what we feel when we are encompassed by a presence that transcends the self. We create happiness but are seized by joy — in my case by the sensation that I had just been overwhelmed by a set of values of intoxicating spiritual beauty. …
Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang. My Jewish friends, who have been universally generous and forbearing, point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point.
It’s been 11 years since that first quickening. I’ve spent these years trying to grow in understanding and faith. Why did God ask Abraham to murder his son Isaac? What did Jesus mean when he said, “I did not come to bring peace but a sword?”
The most surprising thing I’ve learned since then is that “faith” is the wrong word for faith as I experience it. The word “faith” implies possession of something, whereas I experience faith as a yearning for something beautiful that I can sense but not fully grasp. For me faith is more about longing and thirsting than knowing and possessing. …
These days I go to church more than synagogue. But I’ve learned you can’t take the Jew out of the boy. I’m attracted to Jesus the Jew, not the wispy, ethereal, gentle-faced guy with his two fingers in the air whom Christians have invented and put into centuries of European paintings. The Jewish Jesus emerged amid revolution, violence and strife. He walked into the center of all the clashing authority structures and he overturned them all. The Jewish Jesus was a total badass. …
Faith has not always been pleasant. It has radically widened the gap between my actual self and my desired self. But it has been a grand adventure. I hope that it’s made me more vulnerable, more gracious, but I don’t really know. …
I’ve been grateful to live in an enchanted world, to live toward someone I can seek and serve. I’ve been grateful to have to learn and relearn yet another startling truth, that faith is about yearning but it’s not about striving. You can’t earn God’s love with good behavior and lofty thoughts, because he’s already given it to you as the lavish gift that you don’t deserve. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness, Lord,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “and you gave them to me.”
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