【橘猫推书】

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

TWENTY-TWO

Ramps and Walls

Now I just had to figure out how to live out this commitment. How do religious people live? By now you can probably figure out what part of faith would be hard for me—the blind surrender part. There's a lot of talk, especially in Christianity, about dying to self, surrendering everything to God, taking your hands off the wheel and letting God drive. There's a lot of talk about the utter depravity of mankind, the supposed opposition between spirit and flesh. I used to think that being religious meant that you admit that God is in control of your life, and you surrender to whatever it is God tells you to do. And I can see why I used to think that. There's a lot of talk in all religions that gives you the impression that God demands an absence of agency. God is master, and you are servant.

Fortunately, that kind of blind obedience or total self-erasure doesn't seem to be what God wants. It's certainly true that the will is problematic. It is self-centered. It tends to see all of human existence as something that surrounds me, as something in front of me, beside me, and behind me. There's a selfishness inherent in the normal human perspective.

The will is also narcissistic. As C. S. Lewis observes, every second thought we have seems to be about the self. If you are not thinking about whether you are cold or hot, or hungry or stuffed, you're rehearsing the clever thing you're about to say, or feeling angry about the way some other person didn't treat you right. Even when you do something really humble and good, the self turns around and admires itself for being humble and good.

The will is also voracious. Your will wants popularity and is never satisfied. The great sins come from excessive worship of self and callousness about others: covetousness, injustice, prejudice, greed, dishonesty, arrogance, and cruelty.

“The moment I begin exercising my will, I find that I have put a fox in charge of the chicken coop,” the late theologian Eugene Peterson wrote. “My will is my glory; it is also what gives me the most trouble.” If you make yourself, as William Ernest Henley's poem “Invictus” put it, “master of my fate…captain of my soul,” you are headed for the rocks.

But God doesn't seem to want the elimination of the will; He seems to want the training and transformation of it. He doesn't want a lack of will, but a merger between the will of the person and the will of God. Peterson described it this way: When he was a boy he was allowed to work in his father's butcher shop. He started out sweeping the floors and then graduated to grinding hamburger. Then, when he got older, he was handed a knife. “That knife has a will of its own,” one of the other butchers told him. “Get to know your knife.”

Peterson also found that “a beef carcass has a will of its own—it's not just an inert mass of meat and gristle and bone, but has character and joints, texture and grain. Carving a quarter of beef into roasts and steaks was not a matter of imposing my knife-fortified will on dumb matter but respectfully and reverently entering into the reality of the material.”

Hackers—bad butchers—tried to impose their will on the beef. The results were ugly and wasteful. But good butchers learned to cut in response to the beef. They worked with a humility before the materials in front of them.

A believer approaches God with a humble reverence and comes, through study and prayer and the spiritual disciplines, to get a feel for the grain of God's love. She gradually learns to live along the grain of God's love and not against the grain. It is not a willful attempt to dominate life, nor is it complete surrender and self-annihilation. It is an enthusiastic response. It is participation, the complex participation of a person's will into God's larger will.

It is, as Peterson put it, not trying to live in the active voice, which is domination, nor in the passive voice, which is submission, but in the middle voice, which is conversation and response: “We do not abandon ourselves to the stream of grace and drown in an ocean of love, losing identity. We do not pull the strings that activate God's operations in our lives, subjecting God to our assertive identity. We neither manipulate God (active voice) nor are manipulated by God (passive voice). We are involved in the action and participate in its results but do not control or define it (middle voice). Prayer takes place in the middle voice.”

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. When I was a boy I loved Kool-Aid, a desire that has no appeal to me now. Now I prefer coffee and wine, desires that had no appeal to me then. When I began my career I really wanted to be famous and get invited into the inner rings. Now I have more fame than I really want, and I've seen so much of the inner rings that they have lost their charm.

The love of God and the participation with God's love represent an overthrow of the ego but not a weakening of the self. Gerald May distinguishes between willfulness and willingness: Willfulness is the desire to be captain of your own ship. Willingness is the desire to answer a call with a strong response.

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.

This combination can lead, for example, to the first wall: the siege mentality. Many Christians notice that there are widening gaps between their values and secular values, especially on matters of sexuality. This can slip quickly into a sense of collective victimhood. The “culture” is out to get us. We have to withdraw into the purity of our enclave. The odd thing is that the siege mentality feels kind of good to the people who grab on to it. It gives people a straightforward way to interpret the world—the noble us versus the powerful and sinful them. We have the innocence of victimhood.

Pretty soon Christianity isn't a humble faith; it's a fighting brigade in the culture war. “Evangelical” stops being an adjective and turns into a noun, a tribe. Pretty soon the ends justify the means—anything to defend the tribe. Pretty soon you get these wild generalizations about the supposed hostility of the outside world. (Every time a pastor begins a sentence with the phrase “The culture,” he should interrupt himself and lie down and take a nap). Pretty soon you wind up with what Rabbi Sacks calls “pathological dualism,” a mentality that divides the world between those who are unimpeachably good and those who are irredeemably bad.

The second wall is the wall of bad listening. There are a certain number of religious people who come into each conversation armed with a set of off-the-shelf maxims and bumper-sticker sayings. Instead of actually listening to the questions from the people in front of them, they just unfurl the maxims regardless of circumstances.

The third wall is the wall of invasive care. Some people use the cover of faith to get in other people's business when they have not been asked. They tell themselves they are just showing compassion and care. They tell themselves that through prayer they have discerned something important in what's going on in another person's life, which is important for that other person to hear. But really they are just wandering into ground they know nothing about, and where they are not wanted, under the pretext that God wants them to be there.

The fourth wall is the wall of intellectual mediocrity. I teach at Yale. When Yale professors discuss one another's manuscripts, they are brutal. But they are brutal in search of excellence. Sometimes Christians are not brutal to one another. They want to be nice; they want to be affirming, and that softens all discussion. So the jewel of truth is not hardened. Vague words and mushy sentiments are tolerated because everybody wants to be kind. Several years ago, Mark Noll wrote a book called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind—and with some notable exceptions the scandal is still ongoing.

Those are the walls. I also found ramps. The first ramp is the ramp of ritual. Religion is filled with lighting candles, bowing down, standing up, processions, and the rest. These habits are collective enactments of the moral order and a sacred story. They are reminders of certain lessons and truths. In the Torah, the lighting of candles is coordinated with the burning of incense because in our lives the illumination of knowledge is connected with the experience of passion and the senses. We are not cold reasoners; we learn with passion.

As the sociologist Christian Smith put it, “Liturgy ritually reenacts a tradition, an experience, a history, a worldview. It expresses in dramatic and corporeal form a sacred belief system in words, music, imagery, aromas, tastes, and bodily movement. In liturgy, worshippers both perform and observe, act out truth and have the truth act on them, remember the past and carry it into the future.” It's weirdly powerful to open your arms in worship; the small physical act opens up the mind and makes vulnerable the heart.

The second ramp is the ramp of unabashed faith. You almost never see unabashed faith at a conservative Jewish shul, but you often see it at an Orthodox one, men enclosed in their tallit, rocking and wailing away, giving themselves over to worship. Similarly, you almost never see unabashed faith at a mainline Protestant church, unless it's faith in the Sierra Club. But you do see it at charismatic churches, where the hands are up, the eyes are closed, the hallelujahs are at high decibel. Sure, there's a performance element. But there is something contagious about faith that is unafraid to express itself.

The third ramp is prayer. I'm not a good prayer myself. I often end up directing my words more to the person I'm with than to God. I unfortunately always perform literary criticism on my prayers, while I'm saying them and just after—ugh, that one was boring, that one sort of lost coherence at the end. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert writes that “human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” My prayers are like that.

But even a person who is just on the way can pray. Prayer is an encounter and conversation with God. The easiest prayers to say are prayers of thanksgiving, for a meal or some other good thing. Even these easy prayers are good prayers, because gratitude is a soil in which egotism tends not to grow.

Our conversations change depending on whom we are talking to. Talking to God is a confrontation with grace, which is not just His unmerited love, but the kind of love that flows most powerfully to the demerits of the one who is receiving it. The deeper prayers thus have a wonderful quality that are not like conversation with normal people. The emotional tone of that kind of prayer is hard to capture in prose. Many people point to George Herbert's poem:

Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,

God's breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

…

A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,

Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,