"What do you know to be right in your soul?" - Angie Speaks
The brave and uninitiated will hence forth proclaim a necessary change for others who are more firmly embedded in the ways to which I speak.
Something I knew immediately, as I began my journey along this path of Christianity, was that I would not be the guy who promotes Christianity to others. I didn't come about it via a conversion through the doctrine or through the messages of a member of the faith. Christ visited me, as I called out for help.
"And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith."
Matthew 21:22
It is faith, that oft maligned of religious garments, which seems to be hardest for the secular to don. Faith is knowing, not believing, that you are not shown the entire picture.
It is faith, too, that I am attaching my apostate estrangement to. The world doesn't need more salesmen for God. I actually don't know what the world needs. I am getting better at identifying what is unnecessary. It is the lack of necessity for liturgical marketing that appears clear to me.
I wasn't visited by Christ as a follow up from the sales pitch of a congregation. I am still yet to attend Church. When I use to be visited by Jehovah's witness, it was not their desperate leaning forward to gather my presence at their mass that made their message intriguing. It was their faith.
I know, such is my faith, that God is unknowable in anything approaching the common desire to grasp or understand fully. Those who think that if God was described concisely enough that they might relinquish their secular ways and flail the Good Book about mass, are missing the meaning of Revelation. Revelation is not when an otherwise obscured reality is suddenly open to comprehension. Revelation is the washing of our senses within the undeniable, the unshakeable, the unveiled oneness of our lives, in the myriad constituents, with a divine order. It is not revealed, which speaks, dissonantly, of "veiling again". It is to "lay bare" a unity of selfhood with Godhood.
Was that a sales pitch? I don't think so. Christianity has had the benefit of a lingering occupation of our way of life from fifteen hundred years of stealing, coercing, murdering and conversing the truth of Christ and God and the Good Book with as many cultures as it could reach. Now though, that privileged position has granted the average Christian as much marketing prowess as your average Money Twitter growth guru. It falls onto our tongues in acrid bitterness and stiffens the nearby bodies into repulsed rejection of anything and everything related to the material at hand.
Christ doesn't need another witch hunt in His name, another Wizard hunt in His name, another Crusade in His name. Doesn't need another cocaine thumping, prostitute lapping, sexual deviant evangelist with a penchant for howling at the the drug taker, the sex worker and the sexual non-conformist. Doesn't need another hate slinging, vein popping, shame slinging Pastor to rail against the ills of our world with such vitriol that the faithful bow their head and accept the blades being unsheathed. Doesn't need another rally against the dead soldiers who may or may not have been Gay, Trans, Islamic, Jewish, or anyone of ilk, that is anyone considered Other.
Christ offers hard lines of radical hospitality. Seek after his ways and be humble in your failed attempts to get there. That's about all it takes. The further you go, the closer you reach, the better for all. But if you're going to get people to the gym, don't offer them the Seal's Hell week at the door. Also don't spit on them, rape them for their sins, murder them for their beliefs, or judge them at all. In Luke 6, 37 it is said, "Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned." Those involved in the recent LQBTQI+ bomb threat on Target could learn something here. Is it not in our Life that our punishments are reaped? Should someone miss the mark or transgress, the divine order does not need vigilantes to attend these troubles.
Our social mores, our cultural milieu does not need to be defended. If it has enough life force within it, enough given to it, if it comes from a living place, it will take care of itself. These things come alive in our relationship to them and need not be guarded by tooth and claw, sword and shield, cancellation and moral high grounding.
This too, I think is another pillar of what I am speaking to. Christ does not need to be defended. Christ held his own in his day and in His name we have wrought cruelty. It is not He who needs to be saved but He, sent to us by the Holy Father, that is here, was here, will be here to save us.
Now, not that I'm anything like the severe examples I offered, but it needs to be said that the spreader of Christ's message have not uncommonly been the worst people in history. Seeking after their own redemption no doubt, they brandish the Good Book like a weapon, or a sanitarium, or a pair of shackles, or, indeed, a brand. Little do they pay attention to the way that Christ was, who in mentorship studied, not just in the word but also in deed was he versed. His actions became liturgy, his words affirmed by thus and we follow these.
So in deed and word, I too will stand my own. I refuse to proselytise because my soul tells me it is not right. I will speak of God and the merits of a life following this faith. I will proffer the potent words of the Good Book, the mystery of God and the actions of Christ. This is the fate of one who has been changed from the inside out by such beauty. But I won't twist your arm to find Him or act as Wormtongue and advise you in distorting language to seek forgiveness for your way of life. I am a faulty Human, nay I am a Human and fault is implied, as such I hold no capacity to judge you and affirm my beliefs with a heaping weight of condemnation of you and your actions.
Ryan Dickinson