Faith Like Falling in Love?

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I’ve often quoted New York Times columnist David Brooks in these blogs because I find his columns unusually insightful. And, unlike many columnists in that publication and others, he doesn’t come off as arrogant or all knowing. And I often have gotten the impression that he is sincerely seeking God.

So, I was especially interested in one of his recent columns entitled, “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be.” It indicates that he has taken another step – or maybe many more steps – on his long road to God.

“When I was an agnostic,” he writes, “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.”

Not a "Believer"

Brooks’ religious background was a mixture of occasional Jewish and Christian connections. He sometimes engaged in the formalities of Jewish tradition, but didn’t consider himself a “believer.”

“When faith finally tiptoed into my life,” he writes, “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.

“Looking back over the decades, I remember rare transcendent moments at the foot of a mountain in New England at dawn, at Chartres Cathedral in France, looking at images of the distant universe or of a baby in the womb. In those moments, you have a sense that you are in the presence of something overwhelming, mysterious. Time is suspended or at least blurs. One is enveloped by an enormous bliss.”

These experiences didn’t answer any of his intellectual questions about faith, but gave him the desire to know, and experience, more.

David Brooks
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“Wonder and awe are the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something just beyond the rim of our understanding,” he writes.

He was especially moved by the Beatitudes, part of what is known as “The Sermon on the Mount” in Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels. “Beatitude” comes from the Latin “Beatus,” meaning “blessed.” And if you recall, they all start with the phrase, “Blessed are …” the poor, mourners, those who thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the clean of heart, peacemakers and people who are persecuted for righteousness.

“This logic struck me as both startling, revolutionary and astonishingly beautiful,” writes Brooks. “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.”

Dazzlingly Shines Through

So, today he feels “more Jewish than ever,” but sees the Beatitudes as the part of the Bible “where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through.” He’s “enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang.

“Sometimes I feel pulled by concrete moments of holy delight that I witness right in front of my face — the sight of a rabbi laughing uproariously as his children pile over him during a Shabbat meal, the sight of a Catholic priest at a poor church looking radiantly to heaven as he holds the bread of Christ above his head. I’ve found that the most compelling proofs of God’s love come in moments of radical delight or radical goodness — in the example of those who serve the marginalized with postures of self-emptying love.

“Faith,” he writes, “is more like falling in love than it is like finding the answer to a complicated question.”