Last week I tried to start writing about why it seems so hard, for so many Catholics trying to live faithfully, to "meet people where they are," to really welcome people in. I wound up veering off course (seemingly) into a monograph about pronoun usage in the Divine Mercy Chaplet.
I mean, it is relevant, but it wasn't quite where I intended to go, as I tackled this mass of unformed thoughts I have been having.
This is me coming back around from another direction and trying another stab at the beast.
And as you'll see, I wind up being deflected again into a place I didn't mean to go when I started the post.
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A friend of mine posted this quote-meme on Facebook:
My friend added,
Everything starts with actually loving people. If you don't love the person first, for who they are right now, why the heck would they want to converse with you about deeply personal topics? I sure wouldn't.
Love before all else. Love underlying everything. Love informing every action.
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I agree with her, and I agree with the meme, except I would tweak it in one way. I would prefer a different adverb, or no adverb at all, where the meme says "loudly." No qualification there is needed.
Discrediting what others believe does not do any of the work in drawing people to Christ; or at least, it pulls very little of the weight, and then only if it's done by an unusually well-spoken and sensitive person.
Now: Lots of us believe that people are intellectually convinced by good arguments. Especially, those of us who value logic and therefore believe that we ourselves were convinced mainly by good arguments, like to believe this. I believed it for a long time. Let me tell you a story:
Once when I was a teenager, mostly still being shuffled back and forth between weekends at one parent's house and school days at the other parent's house, I found myself away and alone and with an opportunity to go to Mass. I stayed after everyone else had finished shaking hands, had left; and approached the priest (very, very nervously) and asked if I could talk to him.
When I got him alone I spilled out my story, living at home, no car, longing for what the Church offered, having many months before I would go away to college, wondering what to do in the meantime.
He listened to me and he gave me a copy of a book that he had handy -- it was a catechism for adults -- it's not important which one -- but not "the Catechism," which wouldn't be released yet for another year or so. A thick paperback, about the size of the Catechism that would come out later, but written by some American priest. It had an IChThYS on the cover. I took it home and hid it and read the whole thing. It explained so much that I had been wondering about.
And you know, for years and years I told myself that the important thing, what pushed me to go through RCIA when I finally found myself living in a college dorm across the street from a Newman Center, was content of the book. That its clear and logical explanations, along with other ones I encountered later when I sought out more books like it, had spoken to my mind and my intellect, had convinced me.
The book was important, yes. But:
It wasn't until relatively recently that I realized that the thing that started everything moving forward was not the book, but that the priest listened to me, and that he responded. The first thing that this first representative of the Church offered me was not, actually, the book that explained Catholic doctrine. The first thing he offered me was a chair and a box of tissues.
The thing is, even I do not know how significant the chair and tissues were, relative to the book. I am a fairly cerebral person, and a private one; it was easier for me to accept the book (free book!!) than to accept the tissues. Perhaps the main thing that drew me in for good really was the catechism, and the tissues -- the "You are welcome" message of the tissues -- only mattered insofar as they got the book into my hands.
Then again, maybe they were everything.
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So, that is the story that I did not plan on telling today when I started writing this post. But now that I have, I want to get back on message. Let me just throw something out there:
We, human beings, are evidently readier to listen to and understand new and different ideas when they come to us from a person with which we have a relationship based on trust.
This is inconvenient to people who like to believe that the only thing that matters, or should matter, is objective evaluation of the facts. But apparently many apparently rational decisions are really made in intuitive reaction to rapid emotional response. One of the ways we fool ourselves, apparently, is by letting our reasoning powers (Jonathan Haidt called human reason the "press secretary of the emotions" in his fantastic book The Righteous Mind) convince ourselves retroactively of the satisfying logic that supposedly led to our judgments -- judgments that our emotions made in a flash, leaving our reason to catch up.
(Besides Haidt's book, I strongly recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman for more on how intuition makes decisions that reason subsequently ratifies.)
None of this, by the way, implies that the steps of reasoning are faulty; it only means that most of the time, unless we are sitting down to do a geometry proof, we don't begin with an intellectually reasoned step in the most logical direction. The reasoning part, especially if we are careful to remain skeptical of our own biases (as scientists are supposed to be trained to do), can be transformed from a satisfying rubber-stamp of our impulses into a check upon them. I find that writing out those steps of reasoning -- or of back-justification, or of rationalization, call it what you will -- does at least sometime lay them bare to where I am forced to recant my first conclusion.
Kahneman put it this way: "People can overcome some of the superficial factors that produce illusions of truth when strongly motivated to do so." (Although they often do not.)
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If you need logical convincing of the practical importance of relationship-building in evangelization, you would do well to read those two books.
Haidt, for example offers data that demonstrates that the only thing that is reliably associated with the moral benefits of religion is how "enmeshed" people are in relationships with their co-religionists, and that our minds are designed for a sort of groupthink, based on feeling a sense of belonging with the group. This can be a feature, not a bug, if we accept that it isn't going away, if we reach out to people with commonalities instead of right away underscoring the things that set them apart from us, send the message "You could belong -- if you change -- which means that you don't belong at this time."
Each human being is, evidently, adapted to regard with suspicion and skepticism all groups to which s/he appears not to meet the criteria of belonging.
Furthermore, information (this is Kahneman again) that comes from "a source you trust and like" carries with it the "sense of cognitive ease" that reinforces an impression of truth; this implies the converse, that information that comes from a source you dislike or distrust carries with it a sense of cognitive stress that doesn't dispose you to accept it.
I don't write this in order to advise you to pretend that you are trustworthy and likable in order to get people to swallow your difficult message.
I write this in order to make plain that few interlocutors will consider your pleasant-sounding but difficult-to-believe messages, let alone your unpleasant-sounding ones, if you are not demonstrably worthy of their trust.
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Like, not putting on a trustworthy face, but actually really you are really trustworthy, and they can sense that reality.
If you can't do that, it is not their fault if they do not listen to your truth.
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