【橘猫推书】
The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
by David Brooks
TWENTY-ONE
A Most Unexpected Turn of Events
THE QUICKENING upload
Then came the events of the summer of 2013 and the suffering that entailed. My divorce happened. I was lonely, humiliated, adrift. I had a constant physical sensation of burning in my stomach and gut. I saw the world as if through some sort of muddy, distorted funhouse mirror—through the prism of my own pain and humiliation.
In seasons of suffering, you have a tendency to grip the steering wheel tighter, trying to redirect life, but sometimes you get defeated and just let go of the wheel. Strange things begin happening. “Healing means moving from your pain to the pain,” Nouwen writes. “When you keep focusing on the specific circumstances of your pain, you easily become angry, resentful, and even vindictive….But real healing comes from realizing that your own particular pain is a share of humanity's pain….Every time you can shift your attention away from the external situation that caused your pain and focus on the pain of humanity in which you participate, your suffering becomes easier to bear.”
The knowledge that we acquire through suffering can be articulated, but it can't really be understood by someone who did not endure the path it took to get there. I will say I did not come out of that pit with empty hands. Life had to beat me up a bit before I was tender enough to be touched. It had to break me a bit before I could be broken open. Suffering opened up the deepest sources of the self and exposed fresh soil for new growth.
And that's when it happened. I was sitting in my apartment one day when Jesus Christ floated through the wall, turned my water into wine, and commanded me to come follow him.
No, I'm kidding. Nothing like that happened at all. Though that sort of thing does seem to happen to other people, and I don't make light of it. But my experiences have all been more prosaic and less convincing. They came as stray moments of porousness. I was going about my normal day-to-day life when suddenly, for reasons I don't understand, some mystical intrusion pierced through, hinting at a deeper reality.
One morning, for example, I was getting off the subway in Penn Station in New York at rush hour. I was surrounded as always by thousands of people, silent, sullen, trudging to work in long lines. Normally in those circumstances you feel like just another ant leading a meaningless life in a meaningless universe. Normally the routineness of life dulls your capacity for wonder. But this time everything flipped, and I saw souls in all of them. It was like suddenly everything was illuminated, and I became aware of an infinite depth in each of these thousands of people. They were living souls. Suddenly it seemed like the most vivid part of reality was this: Souls waking up in the morning. Souls riding the train to work. Souls yearning for goodness. Souls wounded by earlier traumas. Souls in each and every person, illuminating them from the inside, haunting them, and occasionally enraptured within them, souls alive or numb in them; and with that came a feeling that I was connected by radio waves to all of them—some underlying soul of which we were all a piece.
I suddenly regarded the whole crowd with a kind of awe, a reverence, not from the depth of a particular morning but from the depth of centuries. If you think about that for a bit, you are confronted by the possibility that we are connected not just with the souls living now, but with the souls of all the people who have ever lived, from generation to generation, who are still present today because this underlying animating spirit is still and always omnipresent. And if there are souls, it's a short leap to the belief that there is something that breathed souls into us through an act of care and love. I remember that as quite a wonderful thought.
Rabbi Heschel says that awe is not an emotion; it is a way of understanding. “Awe is itself an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves.” And I find that these days I can't see people except as ensouled creatures. I can't do my job as a journalist unless I start with the premise that all people I write about have souls, and all the people I meet do, too. Events don't make sense without this fact. Behavior can't be explained unless you see people as yearning souls, hungry or full depending on the year, hour, or day.
That summer, I took my annual walk up to American Lake, which is at the top of a mountain near Aspen, Colorado. I was in a spiritual frame of mind that morning, and on the hike up the mountain I composed a list of all the things I would have to give up to God if He actually existed: my work, my reputation, my friendships, my life, my loves, my family, my vices, my bank accounts.
I reached the lake, sat on a rock, and pulled out a book of Puritan prayers that I'd brought. Most of them are grim affairs, about human depravity and all that. Then I came upon one called “The Valley of Vision.” The first line is “Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly.” I looked at the spare and majestic mountain peaks in front of me. Just then a little brown creature who looked like a badger waddled up to the lake, not noticing me. He came within two feet of my sneaker before looking up, startled, and scrambling away. High and holy, meek and lowly.
The next sentence is “Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision.” Well, there I was in the bowl formed around that lake. “Where I live in the depths but see Thee in the heights.” I was in all sorts of depths but could see mountaintops. “Hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold Thy glory.” The rest of the text summarizes the whole inverse logic of faith: The broken heart is the healed heart. The contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit. The repenting soul is the victorious soul. Life in my death. Joy in my sorrow. Grace in my sin. Riches in my poverty. Glory in my valley.
I had a sensation of things clicking into place, like the sound of a really nice car door gently closing. It was a sensation of deep harmony and membership, the kind Jayber Crow described on that bridge: that creation is a living thing, a good thing, that we are still being created and we are accepted in it. Knowledge crept across my skin. I didn't so much feel at one with nature. I had a sensation that there is an animating spirit underlying all creation. The universe bends toward our goodness.
I'd always heard that phrase “God is the ground of being”—that he's not a big guy in the sky with a beard but a caring moral presence that pervades all reality, a flowing love that gives life its warmth, existence its meaning. By the lake, I had the sensation that life is not just a random collection of molecules that happen to have come together in space. Our lives play out within a certain moral order. I sat there for a while and looked at the sloping hillsides surrounding the lake leading up to the mountain peaks. I imagined little moral dramas and clashes of armies—Lord of the Rings style—the forces of love and selfishness playing themselves out within this mountaintop basin. And all of it is held in the cupped hands of God. I wrote an account that day: “God really does tailor himself to you. For those of us with a sense of not belonging, of being sojourners, He gives membership, acceptance and participation.” The hike down took about an hour and half and was marked by giddiness.
This was not a religious conversion. It wasn't moving from one thing to another. It felt more like deeper understanding. I understand those who cannot relate to this experience or who just see it as an emotional response to nature. 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. Like there's a play you've been watching all your life, and suddenly you realize that the play you are seeing onstage is not the only play that's going on. There's an underplay, with the same characters, but at a different level, with different logic and forces at work, and greater stakes. There's a worldly story to follow, as people move closer or further from their worldly ambitions. But there's also a sacred story to follow, as souls move closer or further from their home, which is God.
It's easy to not be aware of the underplay, but once you see it, it's hard to see the other play about worldly ambitions as the ultimate reality. The main story is the soul story.
Jonathan Haidt is a secular Jewish academic who studies moral sentiments. Early in his career he went to India to study. When he got there, he found that people experienced everyday reality in not just the normal dimensions, but also in a spiritual dimension. This other axis was a vertical axis. Everything you do can take you up toward purity or down toward pollution. Everything people in India ate, everything they said, everything they thought, and everything they did could move them up toward consecration or down toward degradation on this spiritual axis.
When Haidt returned to the United States, he missed being surrounded by people who felt the vertical spiritual dimension in everyday life. He began to think of the United States as “Flatland,” a thinner realm. He found that he was still carrying around the Indian mentality, even though he was back home in Flatland. He felt disgust at the thought of wearing the shoes that he'd been marching around in all day in the sanctity of his own home, even into his very bedroom. He noticed a sudden shame in bringing certain books into the bathroom. He became more aware of his subtle feelings upon witnessing sleazy behavior, an awareness that people were somehow bringing themselves down, toward pollution and away from holiness. He was still seeing reality through all these gradations of purity and pollution.
After my hike up to American Lake, I realized I was a religious person. I became aware of this supernatural presence, which is God, permeating the physical world. Jews have a concept of tzimtzum, or contraction, to describe the way spiritual essences infuse the material world. Christians have a concept of incarnation: when divinity became incarnate on earth in the man. Through Jesus, Christians believe, the world of eternity stepped into time.
To be religious, as I understand it, is to perceive reality through a sacred lens, to feel that there are spiritual realities in physical, imminent things. Thomas Merton once wrote that “trying to solve the problem of God is like trying to see your own eyeballs.” God is what you see and feel with and through.
Most of us carry this kind of proto-religious consciousness around with us as we go about our lives, even if we are not religious. We are morally repulsed when terrorists decapitate a prisoner, not only because there has been a death, but because something sacred has been insulted. A human body is not just a piece of meat; it is also a temple with some ghost of the transcendent infused within it. Even when a person is dead, the body still carries the residue of this spiritual presence and deserves dignified handling. This is why we feel elevated by the Jewish ritual of taharah, when members of a synagogue tenderly wash the body of a congregant who has died earlier that day.