Proselytized!

Haaken and I were playing with Duplo blocks this morning when the doorbell rang. I cringed when I walked into the living room and saw a couple standing at the door, probably in their sixties, dressed like it was still the fifties and they were arriving for Sunday dinner. Shit, I thought, I'm about to be proselytized. Against my better judgment I opened the door anyway. And sure enough, with rigid formality the man, dressed in a stiff gray suit (with stiffly combed-over hair to match) made a couple comments about the nice weather (at least we agree on something, I thought), and promptly launched into his message, which was every bit as adamant as his dress. Asking if I agreed that people don't take the Bible as seriously as they used to, he opened his own worn copy, read II Timothy 3:16 as if it were a incantation and this were an exorcism, and then pulled out his stack of Awake! magazines. The whole time, I'm trying to figure out how I should respond. Or rather, wrestling with how I wanted to respond and how I ought to respond. Because I wanted to be obnoxious. I kept trying not to smirk (somewhat successful), make a smartass comment on already having my ticket to heaven (successful), or cut to the chase and just say fuck off (successful--although some of the smirks that slipped onto my face came because the song playing on my speakers while the man was talking was Modest Mouse's Teeth Like God's Shoeshine, which musically and lyrically is essentially saying just that). Once he pulled out the magazines, though, I (politely enough) told him I wasn't interested (to which he responded "Just trying to do the work Jesus commands us to do"), and I suppressed another smirk as I shut my front door and effectively squelched my chances of becoming one of the 144,000.

I won't get into the valid reasons for my visceral response to this sort of "witnessing" and the brand of religion that brings it about. Rather, my thoughts after this incident returned to (surprise, surprise) the aforementioned essay I read last week in David James Duncan's God Laughs and Plays. Later on in "What Fundamentalists Need for Their Salvation," Duncan writes:

But to merely shun those trapped inside this ideology is also futile. Those who are not fundamentalists are too often satisfied with expressing derision, intellectual superiority, or revulsion toward them and calling it good. John of the Cross proposes a more difficult but promising course of action: "Have a great love for those who contradict and fail to love you, for in this way love is begotten in a heart that has no love. This is how God acts with us: He loves us that we might love by means of the very love He bears towards us." (49)

I am, as described above (and, I suppose, in the post below), fairly guilty of the derision, arrogance, and revulsion that Duncan cautions against. And in acting on these instincts, I find myself in a place that is not very different from those whom I am reacting against--thus missing that essence of Christianity, the "truly compassionate, self-abnegating, empathetic, forgiving, and enemy-loving" (45) imitation of Christ, which I claim to be trying so hard to find (and, ostensibly, live).