Reasons of the heart

It's necessary that the Christian faith have a rational foundation. Necessary that there's available evidence to point to. 

That's different from saying it's necessary that every Christian's faith have a rational basis. God can bring people to the faith, or bring them back to the faith, through avenues that are personally meaningful rather than probative. Not everyone operates at a cerebral level. While it's important to have that as backup, it's not the only way, or even the usual way, that God reaches people. God can and does use a variety of human experiences that speak to the heart rather than the head. Christianity is not an elitist faith. It's not just for philosophers and intellectuals. 

And even Christian philosophers and intellectuals have an emotional side that has to be fed. They aren't angelic, disembodied minds. They have the same emotional makeup with the same emotional needs that everyone else has. This is illustrated in The Rage Against God, by Peter Hitchens:

It is my belief that passions as strong as his are more likely to be countered by the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time (12).

During a short spell at a cathedral choir school (not as a choirboy since I sing like a donkey) I had experienced the intense beauty of the ancient Anglican chants, spiraling up into chilly stone vaults at Evensong. This sunset ceremony is the very heart of English Christianity. The prehistoric, mysterious poetry of the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimitts, perhaps a melancholy evening hymn, and the cold, ancient laments and curses of the Psalms, as the unique slow dusk of England gathers outside and inside the echoing, haunted, impossibly old building are extraordinarily potent. If you are welcome them, they have an astonishing power to reassure and comfort (26).

I briskly informed my preparatory school headmaster I was an unbeliever when I was about twelve…He asked the question expecting the answer he would get…He avoided argument and made a mild riposte about how the deaths of those I loved might later alter my view, which I scorned at the time but which I never forgot and later found to be accurate (41-42).

As a small child I had been rather interested in death, in graveyards and tombstones. They were not concealed from me as they would be now. The English parish churches of those days had generally not cleared away their graves, altar tombs, and gravestones and turned their churchyards into tactful gardens. (49). 

I can easily slip into the self-indulgent luxury of living in the past. I know it is purposeless, wrong, and self-deceiving, since the past is irrecoverably gone. I suspect that I do it now, as many others whose parents have died before they were old do, in the hope of finding a door into a world where my mother and father are restored to life and youth, and I can explain to them how I have at last grown up, and I can introduce their grandchildren to them. But no such door exists… (53).

At this point in my life I had already returned to Christianity, rather diffidently, having been confirmed into the Church of England about seven years before. My reasons had been profoundly personal, to do with marriage and fatherhood–a cliché of rediscovery that is too obvious and universal, and also too profound, private, and unique to discuss with strangers (92). 

I was shocked and (like Virginia Woolf) almost physically disgusted if any acquaintance turned out to believe in God. Now I was discovering that the secular faiths I held were false. I knew, rather too well, that what one believes–and does not believe–is important. I cannot imagine living without any belief of any kind. I was not capable of existing without a coherent view of the universe. But I was suppressing my loss of faith in a Godless universe, and my loss of faith in humanity's ability to achieve justice. My life was devoted largely to pleasure and ambition. 

But what were those pleasures? Two of the arts–architecture and music–move me more than any others, not because I know a great deal about them, but because I can feel their influence upon me, almost as if they were speaking to me…I recognized in the great English cathedrals and in many small perish churches the old unsettling messages. One was the inevitability and certainty of my own death… (100-1).

The most important time was when I stood in front of Rogier van der Weyden's great altarpiece [The Last Judgment] and trembled for the things of which my conscience was afraid (and is afraid)…I went away chastened, and the effect has not worn off in nearly three decades. I have been back to look at the painting since then, and it remains a great and powerful work. But it cannot do the same thing to me twice. I am no longer shocked by the realization that I may be judged, because it has ever after been obvious to me (104).

At about the same time, I rediscovered Christmas, which I had pretended to dislike for many years. I slipped into a carol service on a winter evening, diffident and anxious not to be seen. I knew perfectly well that I was enjoying it, though I was unwilling to admit it. A few days later, I went to another service, this time with more confidence, and actually sang(105). 

The service of Holy Communion is a perpetual reenactment of the night of the Last Supper…it chills the church building with fear and trembling and, in parts, seems to be written in letters of fire. Outside, not far away, are the Garden of Gethsemane, the chilly night of loss and betrayal, the rooster preparing to crow three times and the mob already stirring in its sleep for the show trial, the grotesque procession to the gibbet, and the judicial murder…Evensong in particular has a dreamlike quality, at the edge of both sleep and death. As soon as the opening words are spoken, the mind is drawn away from the daily and the ordinary and toward the eternal (107-8).