When The Second Mountain is the Wrong One

David Brooks has produced another fine book. His skills of analysis and synthesis are on full display in this work as in all his others. Studded with insight The Second Mountain can be read with profit by many different kinds of people. That said, this book also shares a fundamental weakness with his other works, and, indeed, with all other works of social analysis/self-improvement (and I don’t mean that pejoratively), at least from a Christian perspective. Which is highly ironical because the book reflects Brooks’ own journey toward a more explicit and deeper grounding in an increasingly Christian faith.

Every so often, Brooks notes, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They . . .begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant and were taught to climb: success, to make one’s mark, find personal happiness. But if that happens, such folk are not satisfied. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain.

And so they take off on a new journey toward a second mountain, often around midlife. Now they pursue a self-centered rather than other-centered life, things that are truly worth wanting, A life of interdependence, not independence. A life characterized by commitment.

On the journey toward The Second Mountain, four commitments stand out:

-to a spouse and family,

-to a vocation,

-to a philosophy or faith, and

-to a community.

Our execution of these commitments leads to personal fulfillment, meaning, and ultimately happiness. Brooks probes the lives of those he considers well on this journey and collects and sifts their wisdom for it.

As I said, all this is helpful and worth considering, especially so since Brooks is trying to think and evaluate his (and our) lives anew from a more Christian viewpoint. This is where I find the problem. Brooks is fundamentally right using the (well-worn) trope of a journey for life. But the life he seeks is not, Christianly considered, a morality, an ethic, or even a commitment of the kind we usually consider. And the commitment it is overturns all other commitments.

And it’s climbing the mountain of that commitment that constitutes the true mountain of our lives. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of our best guides for the journey to and onto this mountain. That’s why his guidance to it, so divergent from Brook’s, is so important. He describes this journey as one that is exclusive, eccentric, and epical. He writes: "There is no other (exclusive) rule or test for one who is a member of the people of God or the church of Christ that this: where there is a little band of those who accept this word of the Lord (eccentric), teach it purely and witness against those who persecute it, and for that reason suffer (epical) what is their due.'" --No Rusty Swords

A peculiar relationship, one that decenters us from the direction-setting, decision-making role in life, and catches us up in a durable, risky, and dangerous adventure in a people of long history and memory with God in whom to play our (gifted) role is life’s highest privilege and necessity.

The Bible’s God often highlights himself on mountains. Eden (Ez.28:13-16), Sinai, Carmel, the end-times mountain and temple (Ez.40-48; Rev.21-22), Sermon on Mount, for example. Brooks is right to seek God/the good life on a mountain. He just hasn’t found the right one yet. For there is one more “mountain”/hill where God is found in exemplary fashion living out himself the life he offers, expects, and enables for us: Skull Hill, Golgatha, the place of Jesus’ crucifixion. And that life lies beyond all rule, precept, principle, formula, or law. It lies instead deep in the heart of God, deep in the heart of the love that made, makes, and will make work out as God intends.

Brooks’ second mountain is a perfectly acceptable, even desirable, way to live. Obviously better than most of us do. But it is not that mountain where what Brooks finally seeks is found. That on a little hill outside Jerusalem with the rejected and treasonous are found executed. When the people of God find their destiny on that hill, rejected and despised as that will make them to the world’s powers, they will have found their “second mountain.”