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.

Who to Proselytize?

Today I would like to address the question, Who to proselytize? Not that I will answer the question completely – certainly I will not; just this simple question itself raises some other questions, most notably, Why proselytize?

So on to that second question. I think that there can only be two answers to this: the first is that you think you are right about a certain belief -- let’s say Christianity, just to be broad – and you believe that Christianity condemns nonbelievers to eternal damnation, but also that Christianity rewards believers with eternal salvation, and you want people to be saved rather than damned; the second is that you think you are right about Christianity, and Christianity makes you happy, and therefore you want to share Christianity with everyone.

If you fall under the first camp, you most certainly have an obligation to proselytize. Otherwise, your lack of effort is the damnation of others; and while you might be saved in the end, you want others to be happy, too, in the end; and besides, your indifference would be your own damnation. If you don’t fall under the first camp, if, for instance, you believe that God can still welcome nonbelievers into Paradise, then proselytism is not a requirement for you because your proselytism has no effect on another person’s salvation or damnation. But you might still fall into the second camp if you believe that God can save nonbelievers.

This brings us back to the first question, Who to proselytize? If you think that salvation and damnation depend on belief, well then, you’d better get to work; your target is everyone who doesn’t believe what you believe. If you don’t think that, however, but you do find that your faith brings you happiness, then for you proselytism is nothing more and nothing less than your ongoing conversation with others about happiness.

Proselytizing

I don’t proselytize, on principle. But I am sure that some people might consider this an anemic Christianity. After all, the Gospels do contain commands to evangelize. That said, here are some questions that might help us think about the issue.

If you were to proselytize, who would you target? Would you target atheists, or would you go after the agnostics first? Or, would you talk to believers of other religions – Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, pagan ritualism, etc.? Or (since I am Catholic), would you engage with denominations that share your own core religious beliefs but that differ markedly in ritual, hierarchy, etc.? What about other religious denominations that differ only slightly from your own?

How would you go about it?

Is it good enough simply to be an exemplar of your faith, or is the discussion necessary?

If you decide that the discussion is important, what do you have to know? How much do you have to know?

Can you reasonably expect your efforts to be effective? In other words, are human beings stubborn or are they willing to embrace change? And if they are stubborn, should they not be? And if they are willing to embrace change, should they be so quick?

Every day this week starting Monday, I will try to look at these questions a little bit more in-depth.

Shelley's A Defense of Poetry

Embarrassment comes in many forms, much to the delight of the rest of us. Today I admit to a rather boring and nerdy embarrassment: I profess to be a writer, perhaps even a poet, and I have never read anything by John Milton (I’m not even sure that John is his first name (off the top of my head)); and not only do I consider myself a writer, I am actually in all truth in possession of a BA and an MA in English literature, and I still have never read anything by Milton. This is not entirely my fault: I tried to take a class on Milton my first semester of graduate school, but the class was full, and I ended up taking a much better class in its place; but it is partially my fault, as I was supposed to read Paradise Lost, at least parts of it, as an undergrad, and I didn’t. It probably seemed too long. I was also supposed to read “Lycidas”, but I really just skimmed it.

This only comes up because we are approaching Milton’s 400th birthday; because there is a new edition of Paradise Lost out, a facing-page “translation” of the poem into a more modern English prose, by Dennis Danielson; and because I was reading Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, in which he can’t stop talking about Milton. So: to celebrate my knowledge of Milton, I throw my hat in the ring with a few quotes from Shelley that have nothing to do with him; and I vow to read Paradise Lost in the coming months (in verse, mind you), and perhaps “Lycidas”.

All quotes are from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry, printed selectively in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. You can see the full text at http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html.

“Although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order.”

“[ The poet ] not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.”

“The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.”

“The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.”

“The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.”

“The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry.”

Even though Shelley is wrong when he says, “all spirits on which [ poetry ] falls, open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight,” perhaps it wouldn’t hurt these days to read a little Milton, or Shelley, or Zaremberg (pending publication – no, no: pending submission; first up, a translation of Shelley into reasonable English).

Jdimytai Damour

We have forgotten about Thanksgiving. How else can we explain the stampeding to death of Jdimytai Damour?

I don’t know anything about Mr. Damour; I don’t know if he was kind or unkind; and I don’t know anything about the people who trampled him; I don’t know if they lapsed or if I should be unsurprised. I don’t really care about blaming anyone for Mr. Damour’s death, although it would be easy to blame the people who trampled him and to not be wrong.

I am more interested in the question, How did these human hearts become hearts of stone? It is one thing to be malicious, to capture people, to blow them up, to shoot them, to decide that one person is worth less than another; but it is something subtly different to be, perhaps, not malicious, but indifferent without margin. At least in our malice we choose to be hurtful. Indifference, however, we gather to ourselves the way a tree gathers fruit to its branches: there is a system in place in the world of which we find ourselves a part – indifference seems to work in us without our knowing.

Unless we fight it. And Christmas, unfortunately, has prepared itself against us. A holiday that, for Christians, should excuse us from “the anxieties of daily life,”* has instead cloaked selfishness in the wool of love; and we are no longer rejoicing with our families if this seeming-love is a burden to us.

There were many factors involved in the tragedy of Mr. Damour’s death and I don’t want to make a simple thing of it. But we can probably sum up the causes into an obvious truth: for a small group of people, for a small amount of time, there was an absence of care -- self-care (not Mr. Damour’s, but the self-care that is absent in the presence of guilt), and care of the fellow. And I cannot shake the feeling that, in some way, if I was ever selfish, or if I ever placated the selfishness of another, I contributed to the culture that led to this man’s death. It is time, therefore, to move forward in simplicity, and to better give of myself with joy.

* “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.” Luke 21:34.

Thankful for Playing With Words

I am fortunate enough that I have a great deal to be thankful for this year. Some of the things I am thankful for are doubtless things that most of us would recognize as worthy of our gratitude: family and friends, a home to protect me and food to eat, my relationship with God (has its ups and downs) – these are all good places to start.

But I am also thankful for a recent development in my life that I touched on in the previous post, namely a rebirth of my curiosity; and while the other day I wrote about my curiosity with science, today I am fortunate enough to be able to write about a rebirth of my curiosity with language.

To write poetry is to commit to something quite difficult: the poet must negotiate the demands of sound, sense, and structure (to borrow from Perrine) to create something that is beauty and meaning. For me, this negotiation has always begun in the realm of sound: sound has always proposed the terms, sense and structure have always had to meet the terms or compromise. I don’t think that this happens joyfully unless I give sound its free reign to propose what is principally odd – sound does not like to give much heed to sense, and structure it either corrals or deals with.

Thankful for my new willingness to play, I share a couple of the oddities that sound has made for me in recent days:

Words words words – the discus is a mantle-claying crown.

Thus they work in pairs –
They work in pairs to cut hairs.

What bears with caring? – O! I think you are a folly!

To flee one’s purpose, never has poor Time.

Fortunately, every now and then sound carries forth some sense.

Science Rocks

I remember an afternoon in high school, at that point in the Earth's solar orbit when the tilt of the Earth's axis begins to favor the Northern Hemisphere, when I sat at a swim meet, waiting for my events and chatting with friends, but by and large reading the illustrated edition of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. I don't remember anything about the book, except that I was dazzled by computer renderings (this was a fairly new thing) of wormholes and black holes; indeed, I mostly remember the boy, and I have been wondering recently what happened to him.

There might be a tendency, when one becomes "religious", to push against science. After all, science is in the business of explaining things, and God, if God exists, is the holy grail of proof; God is probably the only part of existence that we will never prove or disprove, but as science inches ever closer toward possibly explaining the fundamental workings of the universe, I, as a religious person, often confront a fear that God will be, in the instant of some discovery, erased from the realm of what is possible. I always conclude, however, that this will not happen, and moreover, that a love for God can and does include a love of science.

All that being said, the study of nature is becoming for me once again like Christmas morning. Not that I am the one studying it -- but whenever I get to read about some new scientific discovery I am bedazzled. Recently I ran across a special from the show Nova on PBS called "The Elegant Universe". The special is a couple years old, but it happens to be rather timely still, as string theory, the topic of the special, seems to have been stalled since "The Elegant Universe" aired. Physicists, and not just string theorists, are hoping that some observational breakthroughs will come out of the new large hadron collider that just became operational in Switzerland.

So am I. Having been spoiled by growing up in the 20th century, when massive scientific breakthroughs were happening almost every day, I am a little hungry for something astonishing, like the formation of little miniature black holes, or the disappearance of gravity into what seems to be nothingness. But even simple things are fascinating: yesterday my girlfriend and I were talking about her experience at some hot springs -- the idea that you can take a bath in water that is heated by the center of the earth blows my mind; medical researchers are looking at various uses for snail poison; sunflowers detoxify the land that they grow in; and mathematicians can actually figure out that the laws of physics break down during the Big Bang.

It's just cool to let scientists send you on a mind trip.