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
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.
 |
| Audrey Assad |
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 fromSt. Augustine
Brooks’ column ends with a quote from
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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