David Brooks has a lovely essay published in the New York Times yesterday on his journey from agnosticism into faith. It came not, he says, through some academic study or intellectual enlightenment, but through experiences in life.

When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences…. In those moments, you have a sense that you are in the presence of something overwhelming, mysterious. Time is suspended or at least blurs. One is enveloped by an enormous bliss.

He describes occasions, literally from the mountain top to underground (the New York subway) where unusually beautiful and real things broke through into his awareness, changing his perspective on reality.

That contact with radical goodness, that glimpse into the hidden reality of things, didn’t give me new ideas; it made real an ancient truth that had lain unbidden at the depth of my consciousness. We are embraced by a moral order. What we call good and evil are not just preferences that this or that set of individuals invent according to their tastes. Rather, slavery, cruelty and rape are wrong at all times and in all places, because they are an assault on something that is sacred in all times and places, human dignity. Contrariwise, self-sacrificial love, generosity, mercy and justice are not just pleasant to see. They are fixed spots on an eternal compass, things you can orient your life toward.

This process took time, Brooks says, describing it as less a “conversion” than an “inspiration”, where new life was breathed into things he had already intellectually known for a long time. And it results in something that is less a concrete certainty than a new longing:

The most surprising thing I’ve learned since then is that “faith” is the wrong word for faith as I experience it. The word “faith” implies possession of something, whereas I experience faith as a yearning for something beautiful that I can sense but not fully grasp. For me faith is more about longing and thirsting than knowing and possessing.

And in a paragraph that would make Jamie Smith smile, Brooks observes that what you desire shapes who you are becoming.

It turns out the experience of desire is shaped by the object of your desire. If you desire money, your desire will always seem pinched, and if you desire fame, your desire will always be desperate. But if the object of your desire is generosity itself, then your desire for it will open up new dimensions of existence you had never perceived before, for example, the presence in our world of an energy force called grace.

There’s so much goodness in this essay that I could quote the whole thing but really just recommend you go read it. This gift link) gives you the full article even if you’re not an NYT subscriber. It’s such a delight to hear someone talk so freely and publicly about their faith journey.