Blog over de geloofsweg van David Brooks, nav ‘The Second Mountain’

De New York Times-columnist doet verslag van zijn geloofsweg in het boek ‘The Second Mountain” – over dat boek schreef ik een ander blog.

Maar ik vind z’n bijzondere geloofsweg zo interessant, dat ik er een apart blog van maak.

Hij vertelt over zijn Joods opvoeding, maar ook over zijn kennismaking met het christelijk geloof. En daarin is hij heel eerlijk. Hij wordt aangetrokken door een deel van het christelijk verhaal. Dat Jezus hem kan bevrijden van trots en ego – dat trekt hem aan. Maar dat hij ook veel fanatisme tegenkomt – dat stoot hem dan weer af. Sowieso beveelt hij christen aan: ga anderen niet duwen. Oftewel – de ontmoeting met christenen heeft hem in de meeste gevallen niet dichter bij het geloof gebracht.

Maar de kern van zijn verhaal gaat over hemzelf. En hij stelt zichzelf ook de eerlijke “crucial” vraag: ‘geloof ik nou in de opstanding van Jezus?’. Zijn antwoord: soms wel, soms niet. Geloven is dus ook niet zozeer een standpunt innemen, maar eerder onderdeel zijn van een groot verhaal – en Brooks hoopt dat hij er nederiger van is geworden.

Wat mij opviel tijdens het lezen:

I am telling you the story of my journey to faith because even though every leap of faith is mystical and absurd by any normal logic, I want to illustrate how normal it can be. It can happen to the most spiritually average person.

We are alive in the natural world, and we use science to understand that layer of aliveness. We are also alive in another dimension, the dimension of spirit and meaning. We use the biblical stories to understand that dimension of aliveness. (..) If there are no overarching stories, then life is meaningless. Life does not feel meaningless. These stories provide, in their simple yet endlessly complex ways, a living script. They provide the horizon of meaning in which we live our lives—not just our individual lives, but our lives together. These stories describe a great moral drama, which is not an individual drama but a shared drama.

This was the Jewish ethos of my childhood. Imagine a better future; build a better future. Don’t let them destroy us. Make it in the promised land. It was a worldly ethos, but it grew out of a deeper and more eternal one. We are commanded to co-create the world. We are commanded to finish what God has begun. Our common salvation comes through works and good deeds. Salvation through work. Survival through intelligence. Righteousness is something you achieve together, collectively as a people. (..) The other odd thing about my Exodus story is that it led to church. (..) Christians are not saved by works but by faith. In fact, you can’t earn the prize of salvation, because it has already been given to you by grace.

In the Christian story, the poor are closer to God, not the accomplished; the children, not the prominent. The meek are the blessed ones—the leper, the wounded, and those who bear pain. Jesus was blandly uninterested in the rich and the powerful, who could have done him a lot of good and around which everything in the outside world revolved. He gravitated downward—to the prostitute, the outcast, and the widow.

Jesus also offers delivery from slavery, but it is a different kind of slavery—the slavery to pride, to ego, to self. (..) I was and remain an amphibian, living half in water and half on land. (..) Judaism came to me through the precious lineage of my family and our people. (..) Christianity came to me as an arm draped around my shoulder, a hug, the sweaty contact of a basketball game.

I would say that in those days I was a friendly supporter of faith but had none. I was one of those people who endorsed religion in theory and thought it a good influence on other people, but I didn’t believe in it myself. At most, I experienced religion as a useful collection of self-help hacks. (..) Then came the events of the summer of 2013 and the suffering that entailed. My divorce happened. I was lonely, humiliated, adrift.

Suffering opened up the deepest sources of the self and exposed fresh soil for new growth.(..) I can report only how it felt and feels. It was and is a sensation of opening my eyes to see what was always there, seeing the presence of the sacred in the realities of the everyday”

Some Christians crudely sought to woo me over as a sort of win for their team, and they were a destructive force. Most gave me books. I received about three hundred books about faith in those months, only one hundred of which were different copies of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. (..)  This is a crucial lesson for anybody in the middle of any sort of intellectual or spiritual journey: Don’t try to lead or influence. Let them be led by that which is summoning them.

The name of my condition was pride. I was proud of who I had become. (..)

Every form of fanaticism, Niebuhr says, is an attempt to cover over existential insecurity. Many people, as I say, sent me books. But the wisest sent me back to the story. If you want to have babies, make love. If you want to explore faith, read the Bible and pray. Religion is not theology, despite the tendency of bookish people to want to make it so. It is not sensation, despite the tendency of mystical people to want to make it so.

The best way I’ve heard to describe my own moment of decision is this: Imagine you are riding in a train. You’re in your seat, reading a book or staring at your phone. There are people around you doing all the normal things. On the surface everything seems the same. But all the while you have been traveling across miles of country. Suddenly it occurs to you, with no great surprise but simply an obvious recognition, that you are very far from the station where you started. There’s a lot of ground behind you. Moreover, at some point in the journey you crossed over a border. There was no customs officer and no great fanfare. You realize that while God is still a big mystery, you don’t not believe in him. You’re not an atheist. You’re not even an agnostic. You’re not going to live without the biblical metaphysic. You’ve crossed into a different country, and the myths feel true.

It’s fair to ask, Did I convert? Did I leave Judaism and become a Christian? The first thing to say is that while these categories are very much opposites in the world, in history, and in the minds of pretty much everybody I know, they have never been big opposites in my life. I’ve had both stories running through my life since I was four, and nothing is different now. I feel more Jewish than ever before. I was always and will always be culturally Jewish, but now I feel religiously Jewish. God’s covenant with the Jewish people is a real thing.

On the other hand, I can’t unread Matthew. The beatitudes are the moral sublime, the source of awe, the moral purity that takes your breath away and toward which everything points. In the beatitudes we see the ultimate road map for our lives. There are a lot of miracles in the Bible, but the most astounding one is the existence of that short sermon.

The crucial question is: Do I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ? (..) The simple, brutally honest answer is, It comes and goes. (..) The fuller answer is that the way I experience faith is not a block of concrete. Faith is change. Faith is here one moment gone the next, a stream that evaporates. At least for me. The novelist Frederick Buechner once observed that if he were asked what faith is, “it’s exactly the journey through space and time I’d talk about, the ups and downs over the years, the dreams, the odd moment, the intuitions …. Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting.

I have to confess I don’t really resonate with most religious people I meet. I don’t want to use my doubts as a badge of honor to make me seem more reasonable or sophisticated before the world. I fully acknowledge that these doubts probably grow out of my own insufficiency, the years of living life on the upper level of the play. I will just say I don’t experience faith the way some people do, for whom God is as real as the table in front of you. For them, faith is wholehearted.

Faith is said to be a sip that arouses a thirst. (..) A commitment to faith is a commitment to stick with it through all the various seasons of faith and even those moments when faith is absent. To commit to faith is to commit to the long series of ups and downs, to intuitions, learning and forgetting, knowing one sort of God when you’re twenty-five and a very different God at thirty-five, fifty-five, and seventy-five. It means riding out when life reveals itself in new ways and faith has to be reformulated once again. To commit to faith is to commit to change. It includes moments of despair, or it is not faith. (..) Commitment to faith, then, is persistence to faith through doubt; it is persistence in faith through suffering and anxiety; it is persistence in faith through struggle and persistence in faith through all the idiots and immoral cretins who speak for faith.

Faith and grace are not about losing agency. They are about strengthening and empowering agency while transforming it. When grace floods in, it gives us better things to desire and more power to desire them. When people talk about dying to self, they are really talking about dying to old desires and coming alive to a new and better set of desires.

The religious life is not just abstract thinking and feeling. It involves concrete practices, being with actual people, entering actual community. I began to think of my religious journey as the Walk to Chartres. I was on a journey toward God, and I found out pretty quickly along the way that religious people and institutions sometimes built ramps that made it easier to continue my journey, or they built walls, making the journey harder. I found that many of the walls in the Christian world were caused by the combination of an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a spiritual superiority complex. I found that Christians, especially of the Protestant evangelical variety, are plagued by the sensation that they are not quite as intellectually rigorous or as cool as the secular world. At the same time, many of them are inflated by the notion that they are a quantum leap or two more moral.

I hope the journey of faith, thus far, has infused me with a bit more humility than I had before. I’m pretty sure it has infused me with more hope. Today, faith doesn’t feel like faith in an old man with a white beard who is separating waters. It feels like faith in wider possibilities than I had imagined and living one’s life in the shadow of those possibilities. (..) I am a wandering Jew and a very confused Christian, but how quick is my pace, how open are my possibilities, and how vast are my hopes.