As 2025 Begins, Read David Brooks’ Explanation Of His Journey To Faith
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(OPINION) The New York Times recently published a lengthy first-person essay by columnist David Brooks about his journey from agnosticism to faith. It’s called “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be.”
After reading it the first time, I printed it out so I could highlight with a yellow marker some of the finer excerpts and pass them on to you, but by the time I was done with that second reading, pretty much the entire 11 printed pages were yellow. It may be the best thing on spirituality I encountered in 2024.
It’s just beautiful, just darn near perfect.
Brooks begins: “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.”
He grew up Jewish, but as a kid also attended a Christian school and camp. As an adult, he kept kosher and sent his kids to Jewish schools, “but all that proximity still didn’t make me a believer.”
His spiritual evolution occurred by degrees.
“When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences,” he writes. “These are the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time. … 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.”
There was a transcendent moment at the foot of a New England mountain, another at Chartres Cathedral in France.
But “at least for me, these experiences didn’t answer questions or settle anything; on the contrary, they opened up vaster mysteries. They revealed wider dimensions of existence than I had ever imagined and aroused a desire to be opened up still further. 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.”
In 2013, for whatever reason, these moments accelerated. In a crowded subway car in New York, Brooks received what I would describe as a mystical revelation. It sounds uncannily akin to the vision Thomas Merton saw in 1958 at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville.
“I looked around the car, and I had this shimmering awareness that all the people in it had souls,” Brooks writes. “Each of them had some piece of themselves that had no size, color, weight or shape but that gave them infinite value. The souls around me that day seemed not inert but yearning — some soaring, some suffering or sleeping; some were downtrodden and crying out.”
Then he had a related, and startling, thought:
“In that subway car it occurred to me too that if people had souls, maybe there was a soul-giver. Once you accept that there is a spiritual element in each person, it is a short leap to the idea that there is a spiritual element to the universe as a whole.”
His journey from there is full of nuance, paradox and wonder. It mainly gives him a gnawing hunger to know more, to feel that transcendent joy again, to sate himself with the presence of an unseen but very real God.
“‘Faith’ is the wrong word for faith as I experience it,” he says. “The word ‘faith’ implies possession of something, whereas I experience faith as a yearning for something beautiful that I can sense but not fully grasp. For me faith is more about longing and thirsting than knowing and possessing. … Desire pushes me onward. The path is confusing and sometimes discouraging, but mostly the longing for the holy is a nice kind of longing to have.”
Yes, that’s it exactly.
Later, he aptly describes faith as “more like falling in love that it is like finding the answer to a complicated question.”
He’s not sure whether he’s still primarily Jewish in his spiritual leanings or whether, as some of his Jewish friends have suggested, he’s “crossed over to Team Christian” because he buys into both the Old and New Testaments.
There’s much more to this honest, humble, soul-touching essay. His practice of journalism has been affected by a biblical moral logic that says “the meek shall be exalted, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who hunger and thirst, where there is humility there is majesty, where there is weakness there is might.”
Do yourself a kindness as one year ends and a new, uncertain year looms: find Brooks’ essay. Read it all. Then read it again.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.