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Let the breath of new life be breathed by youÂ
through the forms already existing.Â
—Ralph Waldo EmersonÂ
From where I live on the west side of Manhattan, it’s a fifteen-minute or so walk to Broadway. I usually go east along Twelfth Street, where the blocks are lined with big co-ops and condos. On Sunday mornings, in warm weather, doormen are often out in their suits hosing down the sidewalk. There are stretches of beautiful townhomes too, with scrolling stone stoops and door-sized windows just up from the street. At Fifth Avenue, the big brownstone bell tower of a Presbyterian church looks down on the traffic and on a fenced side lawn the church uses for outdoor coffee hour. I read somewhere that Marilynne Robinson once preached here, and I keep telling myself I should attend sometime, if only to pay tribute to a writer who has influenced me and so many others so deeply, for so long. But on Sundays I keep heading east. Crossing Fifth, if I look to my right, I can see the famous arch of Washington Square Park. Another block on, looking left past a long rack of Citi Bikes, there’s the southwest corner of Union Square with its chess players and incense merchants and street vendors peeling and cutting and fitting long mango slices into baggies that almost won’t seal. On other days, I might walk around Union Square too, but on Sundays I’m heading straight for Broadway, where, just across the street, red awnings announce the Strand, the largest used bookstore in the city.
Outside the store, rolling carts with Strand logos hold bargain books. Inside, the front of the store is filled with new books sorted by genre and staff picks and categories like Banned Books or Best of the Basement, along with books wrapped in concealing brown paper and offered, with a teaser hint, as a blind-date reading surprise. This bookstore is vast and multi-storied. At peak hours, especially during a holiday season, or even just when the weather is especially nice, the crowds inside make it hard to navigate the aisles, and where that should make me impatient, it actually delights me and kind of inspires me: In a city famous for distractions, in a time when all of us, young and old, are fighting obsession with our screens, people are here browsing and buying actual books. Even when I’m not buying, I like being among all these books and all these seemingly serious readers.
Past the tables of new releases up front are high shelves filled with used books toward the back. Various aisles hold ladders. After a lap through the fiction section, I go down to the basement to browse philosophy and literary biographies and literary nonfiction, and these days, as my life comes full circle and I’m going to church again and rereading the Bible, I browse the religion section too. On the far end of the philosophy shelves, an industrial metal fan, at least in summer, blows propeller-loud along the back wall of the store. That’s where I like to stand and read. It reminds me of college, when I read in the windowless recesses of the main, older library. There were fans there too. Philosophy itself feels less urgent than it once did. At seminary in my late twenties, and then on through my thirties, I read through the canon of Western thinkers because I felt I needed to fit Christianity into a larger intellectual context. A decade as an evangelical had left me feeling that the tradition was too narrow—a sturdy house without enough open windows. I did what you do when you feel your world is missing something: I read that world’s critics, especially philosophers. Kwame Anthony Appiah has observed that if you read twentieth-century theology, you will end up reading philosophy. I did just that, and I saw how easy it could be to deconstruct and critique basically any way of seeing, not just a religious one. Unmasking can feel liberating (or maybe vindicating) for a time, but its dopamine left me light and drifting, with nowhere to settle or stand.
Eventually, I realized that the philosopher’s critique is only one mode of being and one way of seeing, and not a particularly nourishing one at that. I think I treated it for a time as a kind of supervisory knowledge, a frame that every other picture of the world had to fit into to be valid, a check on weak thinking, a test your own thinking had to pass. It took me too many years to accept that philosophy, too, was a way of seeing: one more way that people report what they haltingly see and then connect it to what other people see. We’re all in conversation and in company—the Strand’s literature shelves upstairs, the philosophy and religion downstairs—sharing a feeling of discovery and attempt, even if, at any given moment, we misname and misunderstand what we think we see.
Walt Whitman once said of the poet that he leaves space ahead of himself. It can be useful also to leave space behind.
It’s possible to read philosophy because it spurs denser thinking and not because it has a truer aim. When I was struggling with my earlier beliefs, I thought philosopher-critics had a truer aim. Now, in the Strand’s basement, calmed and even lulled by the gusts of the fan, I can read philosophy and listen for what seems to attach to other things I’ve heard and care about and am still curious about, and then I leave a lot of the rest of it alone. Total comprehensiveness is an understandable game when you’re young. I played it hard. But the older soul can skim and set things aside. Walt Whitman once said of the poet that he leaves space ahead of himself. It can be useful also to leave space behind.
If you stood with me outside the Strand and looked north, you would see the other half of Union Square. If you turned south, you would see, a single block away, past some simple restaurants, a vintage sneaker store, a Halloween costume emporium, and the gothic spire of Grace Church, where I go most Sundays now. In fact, what I love is to go to the Strand soon after it opens, browse and read and linger by the basement fan, then walk down for the eleven o’clock service at Grace Church. Depending on the weather, one or both of the big bronze doors will be open. An usher wearing a boutonniere will hand me a bulletin and lead me to my seat. The pews have waist-high wooden doors, and the usher will reach over to turn the wooden latch, gesture me into the pew, and then close the tiny door and turn the latch again. While I situate myself and glance through the bulletin, the organist will play a prelude. The music director here loves Bach, as do I, as does the writer J.M. Coetzee, whose marvelous tribute at the end of his novel Diary of a Bad Year moves me the way the music itself does: “The best proof we have that life is good, and therefore that there may perhaps be a God after all, who has our welfare at heart, is that to each of us, on the day we are born, comes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It comes as a gift, unearned, unmerited, for free.” I always flip through the bulletin’s order of service first thing, to see if the prelude or postlude is Bach.
After the prelude, a different gothic door will open off to the side, and we will glimpse the choir waiting there in a tiny vestibule, and they will chant a summoning prayer a cappella before the organ strikes the first hymn to life. Then the robed choir will emerge and process down the south side of the nave while we all stand and sing, and the processing choir and the robed ministers behind them hold folders of music like monks holding books in old paintings. One of the choristers has a little reading light clipped to his music. One or two use iPads. In the pews around me, we will all be trying our best with the hymn, and then the wave of deeper, practiced voices will approach down the aisle and pass by, lifting our attempt as they walk on, singing with a choral doppler effect that the ribs and recesses of the building hold as echoes. After some prayers and acclamations, we will sing some more, and chant, and read responsively by whole verse. We will sit and listen to the first reading, from the Old Testament, then sing or pray or listen again, and then listen to a second reading from the Epistles, and then a third reading from the Gospels. And people do listen and participate, and almost never do I see anyone looking down at a phone. Almost never. This act of collective attention is striking and affirming, extraordinary even, as if maybe, despite centuries of philosophical challenge and decades of tech distractions, everyone in here really does believe, or at least wants to believe.
And I do too, even if my confession still feels crowded by qualifiers and hesitations that once felt more important than they do now. I no longer try to refute the critical inner voices that come—and they do. I try to hold and respect my full biography. But these days I also do my best to set the older hesitations to one side. I don’t answer them. I just let them be what they are, over there. When I sing in church, I sing. And if we have communion that day, I go forward eagerly. I used to try to will myself to see and feel a certain way, in and out of church. But church is now a place where I let myself participate in the collective act of believing and feeling and praying. I sing and listen with sincerity and gratitude because whatever all this is, in the details of the theology and the inherited rituals, whatever all of it amounts to when you set it in multiple frames, philosophical frames included, in the end there is something that those details are striving to account for that is resonant and living. It’s just more mysterious than I once allowed. “The map is not the territory,” Alfred Korzybski observed. Those philosophy books are maps. I still admire their work. But church is territory.
Before we go forward for communion itself, after the liturgy of prayers, we sing a little anthem while the ministers prepare the table. At a key moment the rector turns, and sometimes all four of the ministers turn in perfect unison—I watch for this; I sit forward in the pew to see it—and the rector, holding up the small silver plate and the chalice, says, “The gifts of God for the people of God.” It moves me every time, in an exaggerated way that I do not need or want to analyze. He raises the plate and the chalice and continues: “These are the gifts of God for the people of God. Take them and remember that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving.” And I do take them and receive them, with real gratitude. I include myself in that community stretching back two thousand years, not because I’ve weighed and sorted all the possible options and answered at long last all the philosophers, but because this is the gift I felt being offered to my one life, the gift I have managed to finally just receive. Emerson’s breath of new life breathing through forms already existing. How marvellous that the author of “Self-Reliance” points away from the self to old forms. Here were those forms. They came to me young. They come to me again. My evangelical self would consider my approach and understanding too cavalier, I know, too undisciplined. But it’s not cavalier, I would insist to my younger, striving self. It’s openness and gratitude, humility and wonder.
Sitting in church, my mind sometimes still does wander. Sometimes I am still critical of the sermon as it’s preached. All the reading I’ve done over the decades insists on having a turn. When I recognize the criticality coming, I name it, but I don’t fight it. I don’t engage it defensively. I don’t play its game by offering counter-arguments. I sit quietly, and I try to listen, and if the criticism whispers, then it whispers, and that doesn’t keep me from singing, to borrow Luther’s great line, as if I had a thousand throats. I sing and I pray and I listen, and almost every time I’m there something catches my attention and manages to hold me and move me: the music of a hymn, a verse that gets read, a phrase in the liturgy, a story in the sermon, the unexpected silhouette of a pigeon flying by the building on the other side of stained glass, this being New York City.
Weather permitting, I walk to my school job along a park reclaimed from a set of old elevated train tracks called the High Line. Where I enter is just by the Hudson River. Once, for one hundred straight days, I stood at the top of that staircase and took a picture of the river from the exact same spot, every morning. I was trying to slow myself down, trying to pay better attention. I took the picture and paused for a bit, just for the ritual of it. Then I headed on to work.
Halfway on my journey every morning, the river hidden by big new buildings now, I always look east and see what used to be the sprawling brownstone campus of the General Theological Seminary. Most of the handsome old buildings have been sold off or leased. Very few seminarians remain. In the distance, behind the campus, you can see the Empire State Building lifting its bayonet spire. You can see the Chrysler Building too, though this once-tallest building in the world is now an ordinary tree in the feral forest of the Manhattan skyline. Nearer the High Line, the buildings crowd styles and eras: brick and glass and steel, colourful murals on the backs of old buildings, the twist of whimsical high-end high-rises. The restaurants on Tenth Avenue sit among galleries and shops and an out-of-place old diner I assume is rent-controlled or just owned by the same person for a long, loyal time.
All of it is part of the jazz of the New York streets, the play of harmonies and contradictions, solos and improvised ensembles. The bell tower of the seminary’s chapel is there too, its turrets just visible, and when I look over, I often feel an urge to retreat from all of this, to seek out a Walden Pond or a Mount Athos of my own, or I wonder if the seminary there would give this old pilgrim-seminarian, this persistent though not exemplary believer, a room. I’d just need a room, I tell myself. Wall space for books. A twin bed would do. A small table for a coffee mug. A little natural light. And I tell myself this is the fantasy of a young man taunting a man almost sixty, and I think it must be the pressure of the city focusing this fantasy of simplicity and withdrawal, and instead of fleeing for actual escape, I let that tension frame me, and I keep going. With its thousands of daily distractions, the city paradoxically presses me to pay attention to what matters. The dynamic is not straightforward. Sometimes it feels like compromise, or avoidance; other times it feels like courage, or mystery.
Why prefer the spur of a question to the healing of an answer?
But then I ask myself why I should opt for tension this way rather than allowing for a dissolving of the tension. What is so objectionable about embracing a thing that calms? Why should equilibrium be seen as indulgent and contradiction as serious? Why prefer the spur of a question to the healing of an answer? Whenever I find myself being drawn toward comprehensiveness again, another instinct pulls me back. The same thing happens when I try to convince myself of rest. I sometimes think those hesitations are a plea to remember the full texture of my life, which has been full of false starts. Then, chiding myself, I think, what a fancy way to describe your time on the little cinder of this earth. And I think, you would trade your artistic apprehension for a crust of bread if your life had been less lucky. Then I think, so many people have been less lucky and the life and teachings of Jesus speak to the weight of human history far more than anyone else speaks, and I think, what exactly are you doing with the remaining years of your life, by the way, that is so much more compelling than following in those footsteps the way you used to do? What exactly is your hope and plan? How much of it involves reading even more books? And why all those books? I tell myself to crave simplicity, like Thoreau’s journal entries; grandeur, like Saul Bellow’s prose; generosity, like a William James essay; love, like the answers of the carpenter’s son.
And then I think there must be a way to love and live simply and gratefully without stopping or stepping away, without fleeing for some next thing, without endlessly analyzing and searching. The frantic streets of Manhattan stir and lift my mind. I keep reading books and am energized. I should be done thinking and churning now, I tell myself sometimes. I am not done thinking and churning. I stand above the river admiring the flowing obedience of the water. Joggers crowd the river walk. On the High Line the other day, wild bouquets of lavender flowers—two shades of lavender—rustled in the wind. It made me stop. I was the only one around. On Tenth Avenue one day, a guy played a miniature accordion out of the driver’s window with his left hand while he steered his SUV with his right. Jaded New Yorkers turned to see the spectacle of him. I register it all as a feeling. It is not a picture of anything. It is wind, which, as Jesus told us, bloweth where it listeth, to quote the King James Version of my childhood, and if we cannot tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth, still it seems to signify something and maybe everything, the feeling, the wind, the sense of something pulling past the boundaries of what we can say. What is the status of that feeling about the world, and what if we can’t organize it as ordinary knowledge? Should I be troubled or puzzled by this? Or might I just abide?
It’s early autumn in New York. Today is Saturday. Outside, it’s cool and misty. I plan to run along the river before it gets dark. Last night I had dinner with my daughter and her boyfriend, and then we saw Our Town on Broadway. Richard Thomas played Mr. Webb. When I was young, and he was young, he was John Boy Walton. It was thrilling to see him as an aging man, like me. My daughter moved to New York only this past summer, and already it’s so meaningful having her as a neighbour. My other daughter is taking the train up soon. We’ll all do something together. At work I am learning the ropes of a new role, which is hard and rewarding and draining. Lately also I’ve been reviewing books again, and I’ve been staring for some weeks at Simon Critchley’s book Mysticism over on my stack, and I’m trying to figure out how to say something about it and about schools because they seem to have something to do with each other. What could mysticism possibly have to do with education? I don’t know yet. I’m inside that quandary. I’m hearing it as a provocation. I’m wondering. I have my hunches. It has something to do with occupying different modes of thinking, different ways of being. I think. I like the puzzle, and the challenge.
Tomorrow morning I’ll go to church. Nobody there will know anything about these colliding parts of my mind or my story. I won’t know all the versions of theirs. But we’ll sit together inside our little closed pews, and we’ll sing and we’ll recite and we’ll chant and pray and attend. “The gifts of God for the people of God.” Why does that fragment go on moving me? Maybe it’s simply the poetry of it, the cadence. Maybe it’s the idea of gift—the gifts of God. Presented a gift, the thing you do is open it. If tomorrow is communion, that line in the liturgy will move me again, and something else too I don’t know to expect. And when church is over, I’ll pass through the small vestibule with its gothic stonework, and at the door I will thank the rector, and I will mean it. Thank you for holding this space and stewarding this long, patient story and making room for unsure believers like me, who still believe despite the noise and their own inconstancy and hesitations. It’s still belief. And I will step out onto the sidewalk along Broadway, and the city, even on an ordinary Sunday, will teem and rush, and it will be dissonant, and it will be hard to follow, and it’s more like an orchestra tuning than an orchestra actually playing. Yet the city will also somehow, for all that, to move the metaphor just a note, seem to be trying to sing. Or wanting me to.
