More Conversion

I entitled this little piece “more conversion.”  I did this because I have written more than once on conversion.  Certainly, that is a big topic in religious circles.  But it happens in other arenas, too.  I think about political conversions and many others.  But I am intrigued by the spiritual dimension of conversion.  History is full of famous ones, like the Apostle Paul, Augustine and others.  The one I want to focus on is the contemporary columnist for the New York Times, David Brooks.

I have read Brooks for many years.  Although I don’t always agree with him, he is an amazing thinking and writer.  Clearly, he is quite bright and well-educated.  He has been taught to observe, analyze and articulate.  His teachers would be proud of him!  But I am more interested in how his life has evolved and how he describes that.  He did just that in a recent piece he wrote for the paper.  Let’s follow his path.

Brooks had a Jewish background, but would have been a secular Jew in today’s jargon.  He tells us he was raised on stories: “Moses leading the Israelites out of oppression, little David slaying Goliath, Ruth swearing loyalty to Naomi.”  Then he spent most of his adult life as an atheist.  He was not an ardent, in-your-face atheist.  Rather, he says, “I thought the stories were false but the values they implied were true.”  Basically, he ditched religion, but kept the values.  The values are the standards by which he lived and thought society could prosper.  This sounds a great deal like so many people I know.

But then, something happened to Brooks.  It was not a sudden conversion.  Rather, as he describes it, “About seven years ago I realized that my secular understanding was not adequate to the amplitude of life as I experienced it.  There were extremes of joy and pain, spiritual fullness and spiritual emptiness that were outside the normal material explanations of things.”  He discovers that life is too big, too rich for a simple secular view of things.  That was insufficient to explain things.

I love how Brooks puts it, which tells you why I enjoy reading him.  He tells us, “I was gripped by the conviction that the people I encountered were not skin bags of DNA, but had souls; had essences with no size or shape, but that gave them infinite value and dignity.”  I never thought about a person as a skin bag of DNA, but it is pretty graphic.  I am moved when he confesses that people have souls.  I would love to have some time to sit with him, have coffee and ask him to tell me about soul.  My own preference is to say I am a soul, rather than I have a soul.  I want to explore this with him.

Notice how he gets back to the idea of value.  But in this case, the value and dignity come from the people themselves.  Our value and our dignity are rooted in my soul, the very essence of me, as I understand soul.  But he does not stop there.  He lets this discovery carry him further into the analysis.  He concludes, “The conviction that people have souls led to the possibility that there was some spirit who breathed souls into them.”  I think this is where God peeps into his life.  He sees “the possibility” there is a Spirit.  I capitalized that word to emphasize what he claims.

Brooks talks about how he moved to a position of faith.  “What finally did the trick was glimpses of infinite goodness.”  It was simple, but profound.  He had glimpses of infinite goodness.  I can imagine him saying that he did not need the full view---no complete picture.  Just glimpses.  This was sufficient to begin moving him.  This was the commencement of his conversion.  He began to turn around---to look at life in a new way.  He said that secularism can see evil.  But, “Divine religions are primarily oriented to an image of pure goodness, pure loving kindness, holiness.”  If you can catch a glimpse of this, why would you not start to long for it and hope to align life in that direction?  

He has so much else to say, but let me cite only these last words.  “These realizations transformed my spiritual life: awareness of God’s love, participation in grace, awareness that each person is made in God’s image.  Faith offered an image of a way of being, an ultimate allegiance.”  He is describing conversion now as transformation.  Life literally took on a new form.  It was grounded in an awareness.  I hasten to add that awareness of God is not the same thing as proof that God exists.  I suspect Brooks has not convinced any other atheists that his path should be their path.  

I value that Brooks sees that we are made in God’s image.  That is an important part of my own faith.  The idea of God is abstract.  But to image that somehow God is revealed in me and in you---at our best---is powerful.  It is not far from acknowledging that God was fully visible in the life and work of Jesus.  We don’t need fancy theological jargon to suggest that we see God in the actions of Jesus.  And we also see God today in the life and actions of others around us.  Jesus did become an “image of a way of being.”  We can live that way, too.

That is the story of more conversion.