Proselytism: A Last Entry

I am at the point where this subject has ceased to be of interest for me. This is mostly due to the fact, I think, that I fall in the camp whose members do not believe that someone is going to hell because her own spirituality places her outside of a narrow “law”, which we must admit is mysterious if it exists at all. After all, to proselytize is really to try to convert someone so that she believes what I believe; and what I believe, I have already said, is mysterious even to me; and what I believe, since I have written a lot about happiness, I must admit does not always make me happy, and I am not in the business of leading someone to be certain about something about which I myself am not certain.

So I gladly transition to life, setting aside this question of evangelism. I am not a salesman. St. Francis of Assisi reputedly said, “Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary, use words”; St. Augustine said, “Love, and do what you will.” I am happy to spend the rest of my life exploring God, fully aware that Jesus warned us to be wary and to watch out for false messiahs and false prophets; and I hope to do this in the company of friends who, like me, have questions more than they have answers.

Proselytism: Exemplification or Discussion?

After having yesterday completely obliterated my own previous assumptions about proselytism, it seems only fair to upend myself by returning to some of the questions that I asked on Saturday; and I will focus on the following one: Is it good enough simply to be an exemplar of your faith/happiness, or is the discussion necessary? After all, the three points that I made in yesterday’s blog entry would be to a certain extent moot if exemplifying your happiness were the point and matter that would necessitate another person’s also being happy. (I will for now stay on the idea of happiness rather than return my focus to faith, since mature discussions of faith are really born of transcending the idea of happiness once we have exhausted its utility, really a focus on a more complex truth.)

To see ourselves merely as exemplars is probably to ignore our nature as social creatures; in fact, it would be an extremely rare and perhaps suspect person whose happiness was circumscribed by the Self. Happiness is more directly than inversely proportional to our engagement with others, which, if it is to be true engagement, must include the opening of the heart, must include vulnerability in regards to happiness and unhappiness. Thus, happiness as mere example is impossible, and could even be the result of discussing the topic with the exemplar.

How to Proselytize?

I ended yesterday’s exploration of proselytizing by saying the following: if you find that your faith brings you happiness, and if you are not so much concerned about salvation versus damnation, then proselytism is for you your ongoing conversation with others about happiness.

In some ways this is not really proselytism at all; or rather, it is a fresh way of looking at proselytism, a suggestion that we are probably already doing this in the course of our normal lives, without any burden of obligation, but with joy and intellectual hunger. So the question of how to proselytize becomes far more broad: how to talk about happiness?

This seems like a ridiculous question to ask, but I think that the question has some things to say to us. First, it forces us to know ourselves as creatures of happiness or unhappiness.

Second, the question of how to have a conversation about happiness forces us to ask whether we know our fellow human beings intimately enough from our own sense of ourselves that we should be able to presume that our own procedures for happiness are requisite for the happiness of the other.

Third, any conversation about the happiness of the individual should necessitate further discussion about the happiness of all individuals, and whether the happiness of one can exist without the happiness of the many, or whether the happiness of one can exist without the happiness of all.

It is likely that these discussions will lead to discussions about belief, either immediately or after a period of some time; but we must also be open to the possibility that discussions about belief may not suggest insight about happiness for every person involved.