Ed Note: In this essay David Brook shares his journey about faith. The influences of his Jewish heritage and Christian leanings are presented. Faith, of course, is very personal but what does it really mean to you? Some feel that faith alone is what saves us and that being born again is the saving factor. But isn’t faith really demonstrated by how we live our lives, how we show love to our neighbors? 18th century scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg put it this way: “That which stands in the way of goodwill and faith being received, above all else, is selfish love. Indeed, within self-centered love there lies contempt for all others in comparison with oneself; there lies hatred and revenge if one is not venerated most highly; and there lies mercilessness and cruelty, thus the worst evils of all, into which goodness and truth cannot possibly be introduced, since they are completely opposite.” (Secrets of Heaven 2327.3)
By David Brook
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. 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.
The art historian Kenneth Clark, who was not religious, had one of these experiences at an Italian church: “I can only say that for a few minutes my whole being was irradiated by a kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before.” (continued)