Proselytizing

 A few posts recently on the subject of proselytizing. Obviously a touchy subject. Live and let live is the cry, yet if we feel we have found something truly valuable it seems right in some ways to wish to share it.

"The Tao can be shared but not divided"

The Dharma, Buddhism, has its own scriptural exhortation to spread its message:-

Go forth, O monks, to bless the many, to bring happiness to the many, out of compassion for the world; go forth for the welfare, the blessing, the happiness of all beings.........Go forth and spread the teaching that is beautiful in the beginning, beautiful in the middle and beautiful in the end.

(From the Theravada scriptures)

Maybe we can only truly share ourselves? There were the words on one young girl who was new to Buddhism, who said something like "when I was a Buddhist, no one listened, but when I was a Buddha they liked me."

Well, maybe so, but trying to act like a Buddha can be pretty demanding...........if not impossible.

One of the reasons that I like Thomas Merton is that he was rarely, if ever, didactic. He wrote as he saw it and left it up to you. In a letter written to an Indian lady he said:-

I hate proselytizing. This awful buisness of making others just like oneself so that one is thereby "justified" and under no obligation to change himself. What a terrible thing this can be. The source of how many sicknesses in the world. The true Christian apostolate is nothing of this sort, a fact that Christians themselves have largely forgotten. I think it was......Tauler (or maybe Eckhart) who said in a sermon that even if the church were empty he would preach the sermon to the four walls because he had to. That is the true apostolic spirit, based not on the desire to make others conform, but in the desire to proclaim and announce the good tidings of God's infinite love. In this context the preacher is not a "converter" but merely a herald, a voice, and the Spirit of the Lord is left free to act as He pleases. But this has degenerated into a doctrine and fashion of "convert-makers" in which man exerts pressure and techniques (this awful business of "modern techniques of propaganda") upon his fellow man in order to make him, force him, bring him under a kind of charm that compels him to abandon his own integrity and his own freedom and yield to another man or another institution. Little do men realize that in such a situation the Holy Spirit is silent and inactive, or perhaps active against the insolence of man. Hence the multitude of honest and sincere men who "cannot accept" a message that is preached without respect for the Spirit of God or for the spirit of man.

(I just wish the guy had been a bit more PC.......)

But whatever, Merton explained his attitude elsewhere, in a Preface to one collection of his writings:-

I have tried to learn in my writing a monastic lesson I could probably have not learned otherwise: to let go of my idea of myself, to take myself with more than one grain of salt................In religious terms, this is simply a matter of accepting life, and everything in life as a gift, and clinging to none of it, as far as you are able. You give some of it to others, if you can. Yet one should be able to share things with others without bothering too much about how they like it, either, or how they accept it. Assume they will accept it, if they need it. And if they don't need it, why should they accept it? That is their business. Let me accept what is mine and give them all their share, and go my way.

But, as for the vulture evangelists, who - however they try to hide it - always imply that eternal torment (or at least the gnashing of teeth) awaits anyone who rejects their message........well, I would not want any of them to come within 10 miles of my grandchildren.