The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

you should wake up in your bed and ask, “Can I believe it all again today?” Or, better yet, ask yourself that question after you’ve scanned the morning news and seen all the atrocities that get committed. If your answer to that question of belief is “yes” every single day, then you probably don’t know what believing in God really means, Buechner writes. “At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and…great laughter.” Commitment to faith, then, is persistence to faith through doubt; it is persistence in faith through suffering and anxiety; it is persistence in faith through struggle and persistence in faith through all the idiots and immoral cretins who speak for faith. It is persistence in faith despite the occasional idiocy of the synagogues, mosques, or churches that are supposed to be the homes of faith.