The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

Frankl discovered that while the body grows according to what it consumes, the soul grows by the measure of love it pours out.

I understand how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.

the Jesus story was not about worldly accomplishment. It was nearly about its opposite. Jesus bowed down in order to rise up; he died so others might live. Christians are not saved by works but by faith. In fact, you can’t earn the prize of salvation, because it has already been given to you by grace.

But I do think religions point people toward certain visions of goodness.

As Dorothy Day once said, Christians are commanded to live in a way that doesn’t make sense unless God exists.

Vanier exemplifies a selflessness that is almost spooky. He thinks and cares so little of himself. He lives as almost pure gift.

He also understands the beauty of weakness. “Weakness carries within it a secret power. The care and the trust that flow from weakness can open up the heart. The one who is weaker can call forth powers of love in the one who is stronger.”

The Jew does not experience faith primarily in solitude. He or she experiences it primarily in community, in what one does with others. The synagogue is not the locus of Jewish life. The Shabbat dinner table is. My general rule is that most church services are more spiritual than synagogue services, but a Shabbat dinner can be more spiritual than any church service.

The knowledge that we acquire through suffering can be articulated, but it can’t really be understood by someone who did not endure the path it took to get there. I will say I did not come out of that pit with empty hands. Life had to beat me up a bit before I was tender enough to be touched. It had to break me a bit before I could be broken open. Suffering opened up the deepest sources of the self and exposed fresh soil for new growth.

She demonstrated faith by letting God be in charge. And this is a crucial lesson for anybody in the middle of any sort of intellectual or spiritual journey: Don’t try to lead or influence. Let them be led by that which is summoning them.

All pride is competitive. All pride contains a hint of malice. All pride is bloated and fragile, because the ego’s attempts to establish security through power, money, status, intellect, and self-righteousness are never quite successful.

Many people, as I say, sent me books. But the wisest sent me back to the story. If you want to have babies, make love. If you want to explore faith, read the Bible and pray.

The hard part of faith, Kierkegaard wrote, is that it requires infinite surrender to something that is absurd. This requires infinite resignation.

Jesus is the person who shows us what giving yourself away looks like. He did not show mercy; he is mercy. He did not offer perfect love; he is perfect love.

The fuller answer is that the way I experience faith is not a block of concrete. Faith is change. Faith is here one moment gone the next, a stream that evaporates. At least for me.

commitment to faith is a commitment to stick with it through all the various seasons of faith and even those moments when faith is absent.

God doesn’t seem to want the elimination of the will; He seems to want the training and transformation of it. He doesn’t want a lack of will, but a merger between the will of the person and the will of God.

A believer approaches God with a humble reverence and comes, through study and prayer and the spiritual disciplines, to get a feel for the grain of God’s love.

Faith and grace are not about losing agency. They are about strengthening and empowering agency while transforming it.

When people talk about dying to self, they are really talking about dying to old desires and coming alive to a new and better set of desires.

(Every time a pastor begins a sentence with the phrase “The culture,” he should interrupt himself and lie down and take a nap).

they are brutal. But they are brutal in search of excellence. Sometimes Christians are not brutal to one another. They want to be nice; they want to be affirming, and that softens all discussion. So the jewel of truth is not hardened.

there is something contagious about faith that is unafraid to express itself.

As Augustine put it, “Where there’s humility there is majesty; where there’s weakness, there’s might; where there is death, there’s life. If you want to get these things don’t disdain those.”

consider the possibility that a creature of infinite love has made a promise to us. Consider the possibility that we are the ones committed to, the objects of an infinite commitment, and that the commitment is to redeem us and bring us home.

A healthy community is a thick system of relationships. It is irregular, dynamic, organic, and personal. Neighbors show up to help out when your workload is heavy, and you show up when theirs is. In a rich community, people are up in one another’s business, know each other’s secrets, walk with each other in times of grief, and celebrate together in times of joy. In a rich community, people help raise one another’s kids. In these kinds of communities, which were typical in all human history until the last sixty years or so, people extended to neighbors the sorts of devotion that today we extend only to family.

People used to say that depression and other mental health challenges were primarily about chemical imbalances in the brain. But as Johann Hari argues in his book Lost Connections, these mental health issues are at least as much about problems in life—protracted loneliness, loss of meaningful work, feeling pressured and stressed in the absence of community—as they are about one’s neurochemistry.

Most of us buy into a workaholic ethos that leaves us with little time for community.

Most of us hew to a code of privacy that leads us to not know our neighbors. Most of us live with technology that aims to reduce the friction in any encounter, and you get used to that mode of living. But community life—care for one another—is built on friction, on sticky and inefficient relationships.

Weave: The Social Fabric Project,

Community renewal begins, as you can imagine, with a commitment.

The next stage of community building is understanding that you have to fix the neighborhood as a whole. It’s not sufficient to focus on individuals one by one.

Rebuilding community involves seeing that the neighborhood, not the individual, is the essential unit of social change. If you’re trying to improve lives, you have to think about changing many elements of a single neighborhood all at once.

Thinking in neighborhood terms means a radical transformation in how change is done. It means you pick a geographic area and throw in everything and the kitchen sink all at once: school reforms, early childhood education, sports and arts programs, and so on.

When you are unveiling yourself, it can feel like you are going backward. You realize there is so much trauma around; there is so much blame, and so much forgiveness is required. You realize there are so many people torn between the temptation to deny traumatic events and the desire to proclaim them. Often the struggle comes out as anger, blame, and fury, which can make repair seem impossible. But, in fact, the honest, brutal story is the kind of story that produces combustion. We spend much of our time projecting accomplishments, talents, and capacity. The confrontation with weakness can have this detonating effect.

Then there is the common project. Communities don’t come together for the sake of community; they come together to build something together.

Edmund Burke argued that people who have never looked backward to their ancestors will not be able to look forward and plan for the future.

People in community live at a crossroads where their pride of place and anger at injustice meet.

We are enough. The neighbor doesn’t wait for someone else to address the community’s problems. He is not just a spectator.

As Sacks puts it, “To turn a group of individuals into a covenantal nation, they must build something together.” A people is made by making, Sacks continues; a nation is built by building.

When people come together to build something, they make implied promises to one another. They promise to work things out. They promise to do their fair share or more of the work. They promise to follow through on the intention to build something new.

A thick institution seeks to change the person’s whole identity. It engages the whole person: head, hands, heart, and soul.

Jonathan Haidt of NYU advises that if you want to create a thick institution, you should call attention to the traits people have in common, not the ones that set them apart. Second, exploit synchrony. Have people sing or play or move together. Third, create healthy competition among teams, not individuals. People fight and sacrifice more for their buddies than for an abstraction, so embed people in team relationships.

The uncommitted person is the unremembered person. A person who does not commit to some loyalty outside the self leaves no deep mark on the world.

Life is not a solitary journey. It is building a home together. It is a process of being formed by attachments and then forming attachments in turn.

Relationalism asserts that human beings are both fundamentally broken but also splendidly endowed.

The heart is that piece of us that longs for fusion with others. We are not primarily thinking creatures; we are primarily loving and desiring creatures.

The movement toward becoming a person is downward and then outward: To peer deeper into ourselves where we find the yearnings for others, and then outward in relationship toward the world.

Relationships do not scale. They have to be built one at a time, through patience and forbearance. But norms do scale. When people in a community cultivate caring relationships, and do so repeatedly in a way that gets communicated to others, then norms are established.