My I urge, then, first of all, that petitions,
prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people - for kings
and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in
all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Saviour, who wants all
people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.
1 Timothy 2:1 - 3
As Catholic schools we should not be
ashamed of our mission to encourage and grow to holiness. The call to holiness
(and wholeness) is made to all of humanity.
But what is holiness, and why is it so important? Holiness is how the Divine expresses
his extraordinary and immense goodness. We all participate in this holiness
through our experience of his presence in our lives. Each of us responds to
those encounters, grows in awareness of his presence, and expresses it through
gratitude, humility, love and justice for others. This doesn’t make us holy,
it means we gain a share, a space, a place in God’s holiness.
Holiness is important because it
permits and resources our capacity to live full and rich lives (wholeness –
they’re intimately related).
So, what does holiness look like? We
have certainly seen it in the lives of St Teresa of Kolkata, St John Paul (II),
St John (XXIII) and surely in the life of the Dalai Lama. But they are very religious. However, I’m reasonably
sure that religious people do not have a stranglehold on holiness.
For gratitude, humility, love and justice for others are experienced and
expressed by so many about us. I have been privileged in my life in having met
a raft of ‘holy’ people – bishops, priests, religious brothers and sisters, but
most have been people like you. Yet when I see the devotion of wives for their
husbands, fathers for their children, grandparents for their grandchildren,
friends for one another, I see quite clearly how holiness overflows into their
lives and it is quite awe inspiring.
Coming to recognise God’s role in
this generous giving is what our job in Catholic education is. In Paul’s letter
to Timothy (6:11-16) we are asked to be ‘filled with faith and love, (be)
patient and gentle’ – that is, we must seek to be holy.
What this means on a day-to-day
basis will be entirely dependent upon your gifts and capacity. In some
instances it may mean offering your every living moment to others through a
life of contemplative prayer, or being a nurse, a teacher, an emergency
services worker, office worker, stay at home mum or dad.
We must ‘fight the good fight with
all our might’ so that the daily grind itself does not become our reason for
living, the fight is to ensure we can see our wholeness being unfolded in word
and action. Wherever we are in our lives - that
is where our holiness, our place and space with God lies.
Peter Douglas
David Brooks on his
life-changing pilgrimage with St. Augustine and Dorothy Day
15 August 2019
David Brooks
quietly walks into a small, glass-enclosed conference room at the Aspen
Institute offices in Washington, D.C., right on time and tastefully dressed in
a conservative suit and tie. The veteran New York Times columnist looks as if
he could have just walked off the set of one of the numerous news shows on
which he has become a fixture over the past 20 years. He is soft-spoken and—in
a surprising inversion of “the camera adds ten pounds” cliché —not as tall as
one might have expected.
His calm demeanor
and well-turned-out appearance belie the fact that Brooks, 57, is a man who has
been experiencing enormous upheaval in his life over the past few years. In
2013 he separated from his wife of 27 years, with whom he has three grown
children. In the wake of the breakup, he was alone and adrift. Despite being
raised in a secular Jewish family and having been a self-described atheist, he
found himself drawn to the lives and writings of St. Augustine and Dorothy Day.
He began exploring Christianity in earnest,
In 2017 he married
Anne Snyder, a writer and former researcher for Brooks’s 2015
bestseller The Road to
Character, who is 23 years his junior and a committed Christian.
It was a move that set a few tongues wagging inside the Beltway punditocracy.
“Having failed at
a commitment,” he writes regarding his divorce and the aftermath in his latest
book, The Second
Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, “I’ve spent the ensuing
five years thinking and reading about how to do commitments well, how to give
your life meaning after worldly success has failed to fulfill. This book is a
product of that search.”
Anyone who follows
his twice-weekly columns or reads his books knows that Brooks has been circling
the topics of virtue and what constitutes a life of meaning for years. This
focus has led to much speculation; Google the question “What religion is David
Brooks?” and you will discover that the subject has become a bit of a parlor game.
Meeting him in person, the first question feels unavoidable: “What is it like
going through the most public conversion process in re
“It’s been pretty
much fine,” Brooks says after a brief laugh. “My Jewish friends have been
mostly fine and charming and given me a long leash. The Christian world has
been welcoming.”
More problematic
has been what he believes is the secular news media’s tin ear on issues of
faith. “They treat it like you have changed from being a Republican to a
Democrat,” he says. “As if it’s that kind of choice. ‘I used to like french
fries; now I like sweet potatoes.’ You feel like there’s something that’s
sacred and mysterious that is being handled with boxing gloves.”
Brooks is no
stranger to rough treatment. His Twitter feed brims with vitriolic comments
from trolls taunting him about his divorce and remarriage. Among Times readers
he is like a Rorschach test. Ask a random sampling of them and you are bound to
hear everything from genuine interest, affection and puzzlement regarding where
he stands (“Is he still a conservative?”) to deep frustration and anger at his
changing perspectives and moralizing.
Brooks is fine
with being tagged as a moralizer. “I’m very happy to spark that reaction,” he
says, “because I do think the public square has been denuded of moral
conversation, and yet it’s completely hungry for it.” But what exactly does
this integration of a budding Christian faith—particularly one heavily
influenced by the life of Dorothy Day—look like in the public square? How do
his beliefs regarding the roles of business, government, market economics and
more square with a Gospel message that emphasizes a radical identification with
the poor, the sick and the hungry?
There is no short
answer to that question. It’s complicated. It is no accident that Brooks’s last
two books have been constructed around the notion of journeying. With Brooks,
it is better to speak in terms of provisional findings than final conclusions.
In Brooks’s
reckoning, the “second mountain” he writes about is the one people begin
climbing once the goals of the first mountain—the goals of success, personal
fulfillment and happiness—have been met and found wanting. “If the first
mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self,” he writes, “the
second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self.”
It is similar to
the distinction he made between the “résumé virtues”
and the “eulogy virtues” in The Road to Character,
but the years since he wrote that book have been the most turbulent of his
life, and his own understanding has changed. “I no longer believe that character
formation is mostly an individual task,” he writes. “I now think good character
is a byproduct of giving yourself away. You love things that are worthy of
love. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people,
build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of
serving others.”
Those thick,
loving attachments and values are at the core of Weave: The
Social Fabric Project, an initiative Brooks has directed for the
Aspen Institute since 2018. The project highlights people and organizations
across the United States who are working on the local level to relieve the
social fragmentation, loneliness, division and distrust so prevalent in our
society and replace them with relationship, community and purpose.
Weave reflects a
communitarian instinct that has long been part of Brooks’s worldview. “David is
the last living, surviving American Whig,” says E. J. Dionne Jr., a Washington
Post columnist and Brooks’s frequent
debate partner on NPR. In the mid-19th century, the Whig
Party—typified by Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln—advocated for “old national
greatness conservatism...internal improvements, use the government to build the
country and its competitive capacity. But there was also a very strong moral
and religious strain to the Whigs,” he says. “Even in David’s most conservative
period, he was always drawn to the communitarian strains of conservatism.”
Brooks freely
admits that it is his own story that he is mining in The Second
Mountain. Conquering his first mountain turned him into someone who was
“aloof, invulnerable, and uncommunicative—at least when it came to my private
life.” He calls himself out as being guilty of evasion, workaholism and
conflict avoidance and as lacking in empathy. “This pattern—not being present
to what I love because I prioritize time over people, productivity over
relationship—is a recurring motif in my life.” In the past few years, he
has begun to resemble the bright student who has finally looked up from
his textbooks and is starting to connect his voluminous reading and thinking to
a more deeply lived emotional reality.
“Life has to
tender you up before you can be touched. So when bad things happened to me in
2013, I moved out of the typical neocon camp, which is ‘I really approve of
religion for other people. I think it’s good for them and good for society,
sort of like eating vitamin D or something,’” he says. “But I never thought I
would actually be implicated. And then I think somehow you just get
implicated.” For readers, Brooks’s getting implicated can feel like a
voyeuristic window into an intelligent mind at work on the ultimate mystery.
Being the dutiful
student that he is, Brooks initially attacked the question of faith as if it
were a syllabus for a challenging new course. He thought that he could just
come to belief by doing the homework and reading the right books. He came into
the Christian world through reading Dorothy Day and St. Augustine but found the
Christian concept of grace a stumbling block. “[Day and Augustine] don’t place
as much emphasis on agency, and I had real trouble understanding surrender and
grace,” he says. “And at first I thought, ‘O.K., it means take your hands off
the wheel and just lay back and let God take over.’” The more deeply he read,
the more he realized how foreign the notion of grace was to him—and yet he was
fascinated and captivated by it.
During his
religious exploration, Brooks was taken by the unabashed faith he encountered
in Christianity and how it contrasted with what he experienced at conservative
synagogues on the high holy days during his childhood. Referring to different
traditions in Judaism, he comments, “In the Orthodox [Jewish] tradition you see
faith. In the conservative tradition, you see peoplehood,” he says. “The rabbis
probably have faith, and some people in the congregation have faith. It’s just
not the main subject. And I think that is, frankly, a weakness that there’s not
more God-talk.”
He also
encountered some serious impediments. “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,” he
writes. “At the same time, many of them are inflated by the notion that they
are a quantum leap or two more moral.” Brooks believes the critique offered in
Mark Noll’s 2010 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind—“The
scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical
mind”—is essentially still true.
“When you have any
spiritual wandering, if people think of you as a thoughtful person, they all
say, ‘Oh, you’ll wind up Catholic someday.’ Just because they think you’re
going to want the spiritual...the hardcore stuff.” Brooks and his wife attend a
Christian church in the D.C. area, but he says it is no secret that his wife
has always been drawn to a certain “Catholic air.” “I don’t know,” he says,
reflecting on what all that means, “there is something different. I’m too new
to this world to really put my hand on it.”
Brooks considers
St. Augustine the most brilliant mind he has ever encountered. “His capacity to
understand human psychology 1,600 years ago is equal to our own,” he says. But
he also recognizes himself in the broad strokes of Augustine’s own life story:
the Ivy League student who found his success empty and unsatisfying.
“[Augustine] was a classic achieve-a-tron who went for the things that clever
people go for—which is closed intellectual systems like Manichaeism. And then
he sort of let his soul take him on the journey it took him.”
The pilgrim
journey on which Brooks’s own soul has taken him reveals a fascinating
contrast. On the surface, it can seem as though this very buttoned-down
personality is having a life-changing conversion experience while still fully
clothed. The inclusion of numerous lists—“Stages of Intimacy,” “Stages of
Community Building” and more—throughout The Second Mountain only
heighten that sense. But in conversation with Brooks, it is hard to ignore that
something deeper is going on. As much as he might be seduced by a beautiful
mind like Augustine’s, he has come across great minds before. In the lives of
St. Augustine and Dorothy Day, it is their acute emotional openness and insight
combined with intelligence that is so compelling. It is an awakening for which
his rational mind does not yet have words.
“I think for
people like me, [Day’s] kind of goodness has the power to shock,” he says.
“Just because, as she said, ‘You should live in a way that wouldn’t make sense
unless God exists.’ She really did live that way.”
So how has that
shocking goodness affected his voice in the public square? “I think I’m more
aware of how capitalism, unbalanced, just rationalizes selfishness.... And it
also justifies a sort of amoralism. It turns off the moral lens,” says Brooks.
“It hasn’t made me anti-capitalist, but it’s made me see the ways that capitalism—and
specifically the meritocracy—have on balance created a very shallow view of
life.”
Though he concedes
there are people better able to debate the issue, he perceives the relationship
between Catholicism and capitalism “as rival mind-sets that balance out each
other in a productive way. It’s a tension that never gets squared.”
It will be
interesting to see how the body of Catholic social thought and the life of
Dorothy Day—that has inspired so much of his wife’s work—will influence his own
thinking moving forward. Day’s faith life was deeply devotional and
conventional; her political, social and economic critiques are not so easily
domesticated.
Thinking, writing
and living in tension has become Brooks’s stock in trade. He grew up a secular
Jew who attended an Episcopal elementary school and summer camp, both of which
had positive impacts on him. He is a self-described “border stalker,” who
has always lived on the line between worlds. No doubt this is one reason he
frustrates so many readers. What some of us experience as cognitive dissonance
is simply a fact of life in the world in which he grew up.
Having been on a
pilgrimage of his own over the past seven years, Brooks has studied the pilgrim
narratives of others, deeply human stories of profound vulnerability and
gradual transformation. If the stories in this genre have a general sense of
coherence and direction to them, it is because they are written
retrospectively, after a fuller understanding of the change has come. Brooks
has not granted himself that luxury; he is writing in real time. Perhaps the
problem is ours, then. Has our desperate need for fixed coordinates in a
complex world made the notion of pilgrimage so foreign that we are frustrated
and intolerant of it in others?
For his part,
Brooks reports he is reading more Jewish authors than ever. He has a particular
fascination with the Book of Exodus. “Frankly, I feel the blood of 3,000 years
of my ancestors more strongly, and I feel protective of it,” he says. “Maybe
because I’m wracked by guilt by somewhat leaving it. So I feel more Jewish than
ever before. I prize Judaism more than before.”
He is also
fascinated by the idea of looking at the roots of Judaism and Christianity and
how the two faiths have become different by 2,000 years of cultural history in
which each group defined itself against the other. He believes that if you
go back to the actual Jesus, the traditions were a lot closer than they seem
today.
Wherever Brooks’s
pilgrimage is taking him, the journey will almost certainly include open
expressions of doubt and unknowingness. “The way I experience faith is not a
block of concrete,” he writes in Second Mountain. “Faith is change.
Faith is here one moment, gone the next, a stream that evaporates. At least for
me.” Brooks comes to faith from a journey that is intensely personal and
connected to his own unique makeup and personality. If we are honest, that is
also the story of everyone who comes to faith as a mature adult.
“I connect more
with a smaller group of people who struggle with faith, who wrestle with all
the ridiculous unlikelihood of faith,” he writes. “I experienced grace before I
experienced God, and sometimes I still have trouble getting back to the
source.”
This article also
appeared in print, under the headline "The Confessions of David
Brooks," in the 16 September
2019 issue of America Magazine
