Every once in a while I come across a passage in a book that hits me with the force of revelation. Here’s one: “A person’s way of being human is the most authentic expression of their belief or unbelief. A person’s life speaks more about their faith than what they think or say about God.”
That passage is from Tomas Halik’s book “The Afternoon of Christianity.” Halik is a Czech sociologist, priest and philosopher. When the Czech Republic was communist, he served in the underground church; after 1989, he was a close friend and adviser to Vaclav Havel and an admirer of Pope Francis. I like the passage because Halik is cutting through the categories we commonly use to define people.
That is a rarity. These days a pollster or a social scientist might call you up and ask some superficial questions and put you in a box like “believer” or a “none” (a person without belief). And somehow people are content to accept and live within these crude categories of separation.
Once you put people into categorical boxes, you are inviting them to see history as a zero-sum conflict between this group and that one. And sure enough, today we live in a political, cultural and religious war between two impoverished armies.
On the one side are the Christian nationalists, who practice a debauched form of their faith. Christian nationalism is particular rather than universal. It is about protecting “us” against “them” — the native versus the immigrant. It is about power more than love. It is about threat more than hope. It is rigid and pharisaical rather than personal and merciful.
On the other side are the exhausted remains of secular humanism. That humanism started out trying to liberate people from dogma, but it has produced societies in which people feel alienated, naked and alone. It has failed to formulate a shared moral order that might help people find meaning and solidarity in their lives. It is so enfeebled that it is being replaced by the religion of the phone — by shallow, technological modes of living.
A way out
When I read Halik’s passage I immediately glimpsed a way out of this stale and life-deforming culture war. That passage reminds us, first, that the categories in our heads are inadequate for the great diversity of human questing we see around us.
In my experience most believers have their periods of unbelief. Two people who call themselves evangelical Christians can think and behave in very different ways. Crude labels like “believer” or even “evangelical Christian” do not accurately summarize most real-life humans.
Meanwhile, the category “none” is itself an idiocy. How does this negation capture the lives of people who conduct their own spiritual adventures outside of a faith tradition? Most important, human beings have a lot in common that those categories don’t see.
Halik’s passage reminds us, second, of what matters most. To get a little preachy, it’s not the propositions that come out of our mouths but the care that flows from our hearts. It’s how we each try to fulfill the task of being human.
The passions of the heart
If there is one thing I have learned in my adult life it is that the passions of the heart precede and are greater than the machinery of reason. The theologian says that deep down each person possesses a yearning soul. The cognitive scientist says that deep down each person possesses unconscious layers from which desires flow, where 99.9% of our thinking gets done. Whether your language is spiritual or scientific, the bottom line is that the energy that animates the world emerges from the human depths, from the mysterious regions where passions form.
When you look at people only at the shallow level of their stated beliefs, you see ideologies that are likely to clash. But when you look down into the depths, you see struggling people in all camps, wrestling with impulsions they can barely control or understand.
Some of these impulsions are dark and destructive — hatred, resentment, the lust for power. But human beings are also oriented toward the good. All human beings seem to possess desires for greater understanding, belonging, meaning, beauty and love.
Theologians naturally describe these longings in religious terms. “Humans were created by God in God’s image and the desire for God was implanted in the structure of our humanity,” Halik writes. In his own book “Passions of the Soul,” the former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes, “If we are growing in spiritual maturity and discernment, what we desire is always to go on growing and to go on desiring.”
Nonbelievers may use different language, but I believe most will recognize these spiritual longings. I have lived through decades of nonbelief and now more than a decade of belief. In both phases I ached, like most people, for a transformation of the heart — to gradually be a better person deep inside, to gradually be a better presence in the world. Coming to faith didn’t sate these longings; if anything, it has inflamed them.
Seen in this light, we’re not warriors clashing, we’re sojourners exploring. Each of us start with our own foundational truths — Christian, Jewish, rationalist, whatever. Each of us is swept along by the currents of our own traditions. But each of us longs to grow, to become better versions of ourselves. In the day-to-day realities of pluralist life, each of us stumbles and falls, and hopefully we help one another along our parallel and intertwining pilgrimages toward a horizon that we will never reach — at least in this world.
Pilgrimage metaphors instead
Which brings me to the third point inspired by that Halik passage. Today, we’ve been trained to think in battleground metaphors — believer versus nonbeliever, MAGA versus the wokesters. But if we’re going to get out of this nasty age of ours, we’re going to have to see the world through pilgrimage metaphors instead.
In the Book of Exodus, Moses asks to see God’s face, but God shows him only his back. Perhaps that’s because you don’t see the face of one you are following. The early church father Gregory of Nyssa argued that Christians are meant to attend Christ in exactly this way — to follow, to move in the direction of Jesus’ movement. Christian faith, Halik argues, is a journey toward and with Jesus, who said, “I am the way.”
You can choose to live your life in the trenches, going nowhere, and good luck with that. Culture warriors are static, and their certainties are terrifying. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert once observed that human beings are works in progress who think they are finished. But people who see themselves as pilgrims know they are unfinished; they know they are still on a journey that will change them. They embrace the dynamic, forward flowing nature of life. If they are clawing at anything, it’s not one another but the brambles that block their common path.
I got to meet Halik this past week at a conference sponsored by the Faith Angle Forum, which brings theologians together with journalists. I attended because I’m looking for a form of Christianity that is more attractive and compelling than Christian nationalism and which we can use to pry people away from that nationalism.
A better way to be faithful
Led by these wise people like Halik and Williams, I now see glimmers of a better way to be faithful in the world. St. Augustine advised us to follow what seems delightful, and in this pilgrim’s way of living I see the delight of pluralism. The world is too complicated to have all its truth encompassed by any single tradition — by Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Enlightenment. You can plant yourself in one and learn from them all.
I see the delight of self-forgetting. As so many sages have told us, if you dive down to the deepest realms of yourself, you find there a desire for self-transcendence that leads you to a highway straight out of self — toward loved ones and friends, toward God. You’re no longer trapped in your small, insecure, self-absorbed self; you’re outward facing, maybe not thinking about yourself much at all.
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I see delight in humility. I love Williams’ definition of humility as a “capacity to be a place where others find rest.” Williams adds that the people Jesus calls blessed “are those who live in welcoming stillness yet are at the same time on fire with longing for the well-being of the neighbor and the healing of the world’s hurts.”
I see, finally, a glimpse of the America I thought I knew. For centuries we have been a hopeful people, a people on the move, defined more by our future than our pasts. Sometimes this relentless passion for growth has led toward gaudy materialism and even exploitation. But American history has been at its best when the passion for spiritual and moral growth has been just as strong. When people have said: I want my heart constantly enlarged, my nation constantly moving toward fairness.
Somehow MAGA has swept in and made us a frightened nation, stagnant, callous and backward. I don’t think this alien cultural implant can last forever. Eventually Americans, restless as any people on Earth, will want to replace threat with hope and resume our national pilgrimage. When that cultural and spiritual shift occurs, a lot will change in our religious and political life.
David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.
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