The Opinions - David Brooks: I Found Faith in a Crowded Subway Car

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Over the past decade, the Times columnist David Brooks has gone from agnostic to deeply religious. In this episode he explores the evolving role of faith in his life, a force he describes as “a longing.” As he explains, “The joy is not in the satisfaction of the longing, but the joy is in the longing itself. It’s a good feeling to worship generosity itself.” Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name's David Brooks. I'm a columnist at the New York Times. I write about politics, about culture. And these days, even about faith and spirituality. Well, it's the holiday season, so religion is supposed to be in our minds, at least as much of shopping. As a kid, I experienced religion mostly as boredom. So from time to time, I would go to services with my grandfather in the synagogue, but I went to a Christian school.

And so I went to chapel every morning and sang the Christian hymns. So half of my life was in the world's Judaism, going to synagogue, and half of my life was in the world of Christianity. It didn't really matter to me because I didn't believe in God. So it was just two stories, and I didn't really see a problem with having these two halves of my life. And then I spent about 50 years as an agnostic or maybe as an atheist somewhere. in that territory. And in those days, when I thought about faith, I thought it was all about belief. You had to believe that certain things are true, that God really does exist, that the stories in the Bible are true. And so I was looking for books or arguments or something that would rationally

convince me that there was indeed a God. I wish I could say faith came into my life with a big flash of lightning and like Jesus walking into my room and saying, come follow me. But it was definitely nothing like that. It came in gradually and on tiptoe. I would have these experiences what they call numinous experiences, which are sort of transcendent experiences. I remember just walking by a mountain called Mount Monadnac, which is in New England, early dawn one morning, and just had a sense that I was overawed by the experience that surrounded me. And so I'd always had random experiences that I couldn't really explain, experiences of mental

elevation. But in 2013, I had a thing they call illumination. And illumination is not just some spooky experience. And illumination is an event or an experience. event or an experience that leads you permanently changed, that changes the way you see the world. So one morning in April, I was in the subway under 33rd Street and 8th Avenue near Penn Station. And if people know that subway station's possibly the ugliest spot on the face of the earth. And yet I looked around this crowded subway car and I had this sense that everybody in it had

souls, that every single person in this car and every single person in the world has some piece of them that has no size, weight, color, or shape, but gives them infinite value and dignity. And I had the sense of these souls, not just sitting there inertly like the brain matter, but alive and moving. And some people's souls, I imagined, were soaring with joy. Some people's souls were suffering and crying out. Some people's souls might be yearning for something. As I experienced that, it felt enchanted. There's not just material atoms, that there's some force in the universe, and can't really be easily explained by a bunch of neurons rubbing against each other. And so if you think that there's a spiritual element in each person, then it's an easy leap

to believe that there's a spiritual element in the universe as a whole, and that would be God. After a series of what you'd say were spiritual experiences, I didn't really have any vast change in my life. I didn't have a vast change in my thinking, but I started reading a lot, and I started reading books about faith and coming to faith. It was just a gradual, incremental process, and the way I describe it is I like it to like, you're riding on a train, and you're sitting there reading the paper and all around you, people are drinking their coffee and doing the normal things that people do on trains. And nothing seems that remarkable. But you look outside the window, and you realize there's a lot of ground behind you,

that you've traveled a lot of ground, and I had traveled a lot of ground from atheism. At some point, I had crossed a boundary, a border of some sort, and I was in a new territory, and that territory was belief or faith. And I didn't have any firm ideas of what God was like or what he would say to me or which parts of the Bible were true and which were mythical.

I didn't have any of that. I just had a sense that there's something out there, and I should try to learn about it. When you start telling people that you're exploring faith, I've learned one of the things they do is they send you books. And so over that six months in that period in 2013, I probably got six or 700 books that people sent me from all religious traditions. And, you know, I'm a bookish person. So I just started reading about religious experiences. I just wanted to know what it was like for them. And I started hanging around with religious people

and having all sorts of conversations with rabbis, priests, pastors. So gradually, gradually, I've become accustomed to living with faith. And at some sense, I feel more Jewish than ever, because the stories that we used to read at the Passover Seder, the Exodus story or the story of David, those stories seem fundamentally true to me, maybe not literally true, but they contain divine bits of wisdom

that are part of the nature of being human and point to things that are holy. And so I feel very Jewish, but, you know, I can't unread Matthew. I've read, obviously, both Testaments a fair bit. And somehow it's in the beatitudes. It's in the sermon on the Mount, where to me the celestial grandeur comes through.

And, of course, my Jewish friends say, well, you buy into both New and Old Testament, you're not really a Jew anymore. That's not how it works. I don't really feel that way, but I understand. And so if people want to give me a label, I guess Christian is the right label. And I spend a lot of my time reading books in a Christian reading group. I go to a church more than I go to a synagogue. And so I basically embrace the whole shebang.

The journey to faith is a ridiculous journey in many ways because it's a belief in something that's unseen. but I've been confronted time and again by radical goodness. And a lot of us are trained in university to think that people are basically self-interested. But I met a guy named Panchraguelez who lives in Houston, and he is a deep Catholic, and he did run something called the Living Hope Wheelchair Association, which took undocumented workers, immigrants who had him paralyzed in construction accidents. And he gives them wheelchairs and other things so they can lead dignified lives. And he's just a joyous human being.

And I said, Pancho, you radiate holiness. And he said, no, I just reflect holiness. And that's a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around because I grew up in a world of the meritocracy where you're supposed to achieve, everything you accomplish. it's all about your effort, it's all about your work. The idea that God is working through us, that the blessings we possess are gifts from God, that sometimes we just have to let go,

these are hard shifts for people like me to make, and when it happens, it has the power to shock. The big surprise to me coming to faith is that faith is not the right word for it. Because faith suggests possessing. There's a bunch of ideas that I possess. or there's a belief system that I possess. But that's not how faith feels to me.

It feels more like a longing. And I get the sense and intimation of something just beyond my reach, some spiritual element, some force of love. And I just long for it. And the joy is not in the satisfaction of the longing, but the joy is in the longing itself.

It's a good feeling to worship's generosity itself. I think we're all impelled to explore the world in all its aspects And if some people think, well, the world in all its aspects is, you know, neurons and carbon and land continents and material things, believe me, I get that. But somehow, to me, that's not the whole picture. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vichaka, Phoebe Lett, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Brzeck, and Annie Rose Strasser.

Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuelski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.