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| The New York subway… offering one columnist a numinous insight. |
“In the so-called “silly season” columnists the world over tend to reach back to their childhoods for inspiration. If you’re lucky, the result is sometimes gently humorous or deeply spiritual,” writes The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.
In the so-called “silly season” of December-January there’s not much happening in politics, so columnists the world over tend to reach back to their childhoods for inspiration.
If you’re lucky, the result is sometimes gently humorous and might even underline a current trend or a prospect for the New Year.
In fact, I just read a corker by my mate Rob Drewe in the West Australian on the ubiquitous “quicksand” that gave the bad guys that sinking feeling in the old Saturday matinee movies of our youth. It was right on the money.
I’ve been trying to write my new one, but every morning lately I’ve been driven nuts by millions of tiny black ants who have invaded the kitchen and destroyed every morsel of exposed food. But today I put a dollop of Buderim ginger cordial in half a glass of water, and they made a mad beeline for it.
Gotcha!
Anyway, New York Times readers – me included – were not as lucky as the West Australian’s when the deeply serious conservative columnist, David Brooks decided to relate his spiritual saga from woe to go.
He began, he says, as an agnostic. “I grew up in a Jewish home where we experienced peoplehood (sic) more than faith… I lived through decades of Jewish adulthood, but all that proximity still didn’t make me a believer.
‘Some people are spiritual but not religious; you could say I was religious but not spiritual. When faith finally tiptoed into my life, it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences.”
These occurred, perhaps not surprisingly, “at the foot of a mountain in New England at dawn; Chartres Cathedral in France; looking at images of the distant universe; or of a baby in the womb”.
Just whose baby David doesn’t say, however, it seems, “faith” tiptoed out again, even though the experiences “opened up vaster mysteries”. These were accompanied by “wonder and awe” as well as a desire to be “opened up still further”.
That climaxed, he tells us, in April 2013.
“I was in a crowded subway car underneath 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue in New York, truly one of the ugliest spots of this good green earth,” he writes.
“I looked around the car and I had this shimmering awareness that all the people in it had souls. Each of them had some piece of themselves that had no size, colour, weight or shape but that gave them infinite value.
“The souls around me that day seemed not inert but yearning – some soaring, some suffering or sleeping; some were downtrodden and crying out.
“In that subway car it occurred to me that if people had souls maybe there was a soul giver. Once you accept there’s a spiritual element in each person it is a short leap to the idea that there is a spiritual element in the universe as a whole.”
Now, he says,: “I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang.”
Golly. By chance I have travelled on that same subway, though I missed out on David’s numinous insight. One black guy was talking very loudly and his lady friend was telling him to “shut your mouth!”
But here’s the rub: that short leap doesn’t suggest to David that the other creatures of “this good green earth” have souls. Not the wondrous birds of the sky, the mighty whales of the deep, not the living rainbow of the Great Barrier Reef, and (thank goodness) not a mention of the ant population that outnumbers us humans by millions to one.
I can understand David’s overlooking the other living things in favour of the “yearning” subway travellers. I was yearning myself, for the black guy to take his lady friend’s advice and shut his mouth… and until today the same for those little black ants. Heh, heh, heh.
First published at Canberra City News, January 30, 2025
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