Radical Amazement

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across this piece from David Brooks, a well-known New York Times columnist. I’m quoting much of it here because I thought it was so right on. Entitled, “Alone yet Not Alone,” Brooks writes:

…There is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book, God in Search of Man: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement...get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. ...To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

And yet Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion.”

There must be something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid, unambiguous, unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the Scriptures oppose it.

And yet there is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and moral demand.

For example, Audrey Assad is a (30-year old) Catholic songwriter with a crystalline voice
Audrey Assad
and a sober intensity to her stage presence. (Go to YouTube to see her perform her song “I Shall Not Want.”) She writes the sort of emotionally drenched music that helps people who are in crisis. A surprising number of women tell her they listened to her music while in labor.

She had an idyllic childhood in a Protestant sect prone to black-or-white dichotomies. But when she was in her 20s, life’s tragedies and complexities inevitably mounted, and she experienced a gradual erosion of certainty.
She began reading her way through the books on the Barnes & Noble Great Books shelf, trying to cover the ones she missed by not going to college….

…She also began reading theology. She’d never read anything written before 1835. She went back to Augustine (whose phrases show up in her lyrics) and the early church fathers. Denominationally, she went backward in time. She became Baptist, then Presbyterian, then Catholic: “I was ready to be an atheist. I was going to be a Catholic or an atheist. “

She came to feel the legacy of millions of people who had struggled with the same feelings for thousands of years. “I still have routine brushes with agnosticism,” she says. “I still brush against the feeling that I don’t believe any of this, but the church always brings me back. ...I don’t think Jesus wants to brush away the paradoxes and mysteries.”

…Her life, like all lives, is unexpected, complex and unique. Her music provides a clearer outward display of how many inwardly experience God.

It is encouraging to be introduced to someone like Assad, who has found the "pearl of great price" and rejoices in song. Reminds me of the old Protestant hymn, "How can I keep from singing?"

 Brooks’ column ends with a quote from St. Augustine for secular persons “curious about how believers experience their faith.” For brevity, I’m not including it here but you can Google “What do I love when I love my God.” And if you go to YouTube to experience Assad’s beautiful song but don’t catch all the words, here they are.

I Shall Not Want
By Audrey Assad

From the love of my own comfort
From the fear of having nothing
From a life of worldly passions
Deliver me, O God

From the need to be understood
From the need to be accepted
From the fear of being lonely
Deliver me, O God
Deliver me, O God

And I shall not want, I shall not want
When I taste your goodness, I shall not want
When I taste your goodness, I shall not want

From the fear of serving others
From the fear of death or trial
From the fear of humility
Deliver me, O God
Deliver me, O God


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