David Brooks wrote a NY Times column he called “My Decade-Long Journey to Belief.” He writes for a secular audience, so I’m sure there’s more to the story. But it’s his story. Some of it seems to parallel the faith journey of C.S. Lewis.
Brooks describes his pre-faith life as agnostic and religious, but not spiritual. In 2013, he began to have some unexpected and illuminating moments. “I was in a crowded subway car,” he writes. “I had this shimmering awareness that all the people in it had souls… Maybe there was a soul-giver.” Lewis’s parallel thought was, “You have never talked to a mere mortal.”
Hiking in the Rocky Mountains, Brooks sat on a rock to meditate on a Puritan prayer focused on the Beatitudes. The implications startled him. He glimpsed “a moral grandeur far vaster and truer than anything that could have emerged from our prosaic world. It hit me with the force of joy.” He describes joy as “a presence that transcends the self.” Lewis also connected joy to a desire for the transcendent. He concluded, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is I was made for another world.” On another point, Lewis and Brooks both reasoned that human morality posits the presence of a Creator beyond the material universe.
For both men, the next leg of the journey was theism. During this time, Lewis called himself “the most reluctant convert in all England.” Brooks said faith “tiptoed into my life.” He describes faith as a venture toward something, a yearning for something beautiful yet not fully grasped. Both men sought Christian friends to explore their thoughts. After a late-night stroll with friends along Addison’s Walk in Oxford, Lewis realized the “myth” of God becoming man, dying, and raising back to life is actually credible.
This brought Lewis to a major inflection point. What would he do with the Christian gospel? Not long after that stroll, he rode with his brother Warnie on a motorcycle to Whipsnade Zoo. “When we set out,” he wrote, “I did not believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”
Faith is a journey with a major crossroad. At that crossroad, you cross over from sleep to consciousness, darkness to light, death to life. “Awake, sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Eph. 5:14). The call of Christ is to repent (a change of mind) and believe in the gospel (who Jesus is and what He did). Saying “yes” at that crossroad begins the Christian life. Afterwards, the journey features a new way, new companions, and a guiding Helper.
David Brooks has written his final column for the Times. His journey continues.