There’s a movie called The Mission from 1986 with Robert De Niro, where two different approaches are taken to meet the natives and bring the message of Christ.

In the first attempt, a priest played by De Niro tries the sales approach and in his heavy handed messaging, he irritates the people, gets tied to a cross, thrown into a river, and sent over a waterfall.

Then the second man, Jeremy Irons, comes and plays his oboe. That’s all he does. A beautiful song, simple in its melody, softly plays in the jungle - a song never heard by the people before. The music intrigues the people, and even though they smash his oboe, they don’t smash his face. They take him into their village. The beauty of the song breaks down a wall. And suddenly there is an inroad to friendship, and more importantly, into the life of Christ, because it was beauty, not a sales pitch, that led to interest, and ultimately, a relationship. And beauty is how you bring the message of Jesus Christ to people. It is the beauty of the story, of the person and living God that he is, of who he is, what he is - that’s what needs to be shared, and it can’t be shared in a sales pitch.

The feeling that a sales approach gives is this: “Oh, so I am just a project to you? A notch in your belt? A credit for your way to heaven?”

It’s the same feeling of the Verizon salesman pushing unwanted products when you just want your phone fixed. Evangelism that feels like a one-night stand only lasts as long as a one-nighter. There’s no beauty, and there’s no relationship. It’s just a temporary feel-good, like eating pixie stix.

This is what hurts more than saves: “Did you really just pretend to be friendly just to make me convert?”

It feels dirty. It makes me want to run. Conversion can’t be treated like the old Highlander TV show, where Duncan McLeod slays his enemy and then he takes on their power. There is no sales commission or power gained if you convert someone to understand that Jesus is God. We are to preach the Gospel and “heal the sick,” and much of healing comes from befriending people - as in real befriending.

Becoming friends means having no ulterior motives, no commission, no bonus. Becoming friends does not mean hoping they will be baptized and then you move on. This has the relationship depth of a star football player at a college frat party ranging over the drunk and willing freshmen. Virtuous and real friendship requires the gift of self with no motives of a kickback. (Not coincidentally, this is exactly how we should approach God and the Mass.)

An ulterior motive gets outed quickly if you are only becoming friends with the hopes of converting a person, and then it feels like one party got duped into that one-nighter. Flattery and a few free drinks might get someone laid, but it doesn’t get them love. There’s no substance to it. There’s nothing underneath it.

Conversion by trickery or strategy of any kind is not what God asks us to do. Did Jesus do any of that? I read the Gospel often and I don’t see him tricking anyone. I see relationships forming and lasting, or if not lasting, an authentic experience happens where sin is outed and transformation begins. In fact, I always see that Jesus is non-competitive, non-gimmicky, but he challenges them at the same time - and that authentic challenge what attracts people to him. He’s not acting like a salesman, asking about someone’s mother just to establish rapport. Nor is he playing the game of the Romans, who go out and conquer people by the sword and then spin propaganda, crafting a message about how they brought “peace” to all that they threatened.

Jesus doesn’t play the stupid games that we do.

He isn’t a salesman. He’s not a bully or a genie either. He’s authentic. And that is what we are absolutely dying to find. Something real. Something beautiful that is just offered for his own sake. Something and someone who isn’t selling is what we want. And we want more than just something free, like free beer, we want beauty that touches our soul. In America, our idols known of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” pretend to give us this, but in this pursuit, we turn everything being into a sale, from sports to healthcare to news. Even religion becomes a sale with the prosperity Gospel and therapeutic Deism.

Loving Jesus doesn’t need to be cool. It’s not supposed to be, until you suddenly understand who he is. Then he’s way cooler than anything you’ve ever known or seen. Which is why he is cool. He’s cool because he’s not trying to be cool, he just is a living witness of how beautiful life can be, even when sin makes it ugly.

This is why the Woman at the Well story, and Peter’s “drop the nets” moment, and saint stories like those of St. Augustine and St. Teresa of Avila (and all the rest) make us step back and look at our own lives. We wonder what happened when those people met Jesus as the living God. And until it happens to you, it will seem fishy, suspicious, and too good to be true, because we are accustomed to being sold and told lies.

This is why attempts to make Christianity cool come off so badly to me. Most Christian music and evangelization feels forced. It’s the Robert De Niro kind of forced-feeding versus Jeremy Irons playing the oboe. Recall that people didn’t want to kill Jesus for being cool. No, he rejected all that the world considered cool. The world’s fads of money and power bored Jesus. It was for this very fact that they hated him. He didn’t want what everyone else thought gave their lives meaning. The real threat of Jesus to the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Romans was not that he was becoming popular. It’s that he inverted their whole world and made a mockery of their earthly wants and desires. Power, money, pleasure - he needed none of it.

While everyone is trying so hard to be cool, Jesus is just praying and being friends with people. No concert needed, no TED style talks, no cultural hooks like hot-monogamy, no parades, nothing but being himself. Being a follower of Jesus is not meant to be cool. It’s meant to make you conform your life to Christ, know you are a sinner, take up your cross, and very likely be reviled by the culture, and after all that still be joyful enough to give away money to the church and the poor.

See, it doesn’t make sense, does it?

But it does make sense.

Once you turn into the light, you can see all of it. The world is suddenly illuminated.

It’s not supposed to be cool. It’s supposed to be beautiful.

You want to follow him, because Truth is beautiful, and then you don’t really care about how it looks to the world. However, the wrong kind of friendship, the salesperson kind, is not going to bring the sheep back to the fold. It’s the same result as chasing sheep with a fiery torch. Hellfire scare tactics don’t work, and nor do sugary friendships, nor does flirty bait-dating. People are dying to find something authentic. And here’s the kicker: once they find Jesus to be authentic and follow him, they can no longer die.

A religion that enters into competition has to sell itself to win, and the moment that begins, it’s a product and no longer a way of life. The moment that selling begins, it is no longer Christianity. Evangelization is not about selling. It’s about complete transformation. If selling is required, then it needs a story, and how tempting it can be to craft a story around a product, just a wee bit here and there, and then pretend that the product matches a story instead of the product matching reality. The extreme push of corporations to sell mindfulness products today has the same rank odor on it that the door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses and beach evangelizers at spring break always had.

I have walked into many customer-facing situations where the story told by the salesperson did not match the reality of what the product could do. When reality can’t live up to a sales and marketing story, the jig is up. These are what you call “difficult conversations” where you have to explain, as nicely as possible, that the salesperson was lying, or at least committing certain sins of omission by not volunteering accurate information. However, a sales story that matches reality can be seen in the proof of the product. It can be seen in the continued used of the product. It can be heard in testimonies of those using the product. It can be seen in things built using the product. Proof of use and effectiveness can be seen and heard across the world for something that really works. Like for example, the Old and New Cathedrals of Salamanca, Notre Dame, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Peter square, St. Paul’s cathedral, and a million small churches. Like works of art and literature and songs and stories of saints. These are beautiful things, created in homage to a savior that heals. When I hear “Gentle Woman” and “Ave Maria” and “Immaculate Mary” every year in December on the holy day of Immaculate Conception, I have to sit in the back row because it brings tears to my eyes. It’s just so beautiful. I can hardly take it. I recall this happening with other songs, where the beauty penetrates so deeply that I can hardly stand it, as if my heart could be broken and healed in three minutes. It has happened to me with “No Woman, No Cry” from Bob Marley and the Wailers. The same with Andrea Bocelli’s “Con te Partiro.” Surely we all have songs that can cut us deeply and bring tears of sadness or joy. To hear the songs in Church, however, about Mary and Jesus, is still different because the Mother of God and God Incarnate are the ultimate healers. Every December, or whenever the Marian songs are sung, I can know the beauty and goodness of the Blessed Virgin Mary through song, through the glorious gift of music that God gave to some people. We all have gifts, but musicians have one of the most beautiful ones and they can share it with us to lift us up, just like the birds of the morning who call to one another from the trees, as if God is saying to the world through these amazing creatures, “Good morning.”

Birds aren’t selling their song. They are offering it up. They are giving their song to the world. They are using the gift that God gave them to reveal the beauty of all creation.

In other words, Creation is a product I can believe in, because I can see it, and it’s beautiful. An account manager with steady customers who believe in a product are a far more steady stream of income than customers that were tricked into purchase orders and contracts by a charismatic salesman. God isn’t a salesman. The tricks we play on people aren’t needed with real beauty. The cute smile, the witty rejoinder, the steak dinner, the sleek demo, the free stuff - shirts and pens and mouse pads and all the other crap salespeople unload on customers as if they were kids at parade - none of that sustains trust if the underlying product doesn’t work or isn’t authentic. A huge backlash is happening right now in the post-Vatican II liturgy that tried to “modernize” the Catholic Mass to keep up with the trendy ways of the world. This was a mistake that may slowly be corrected. It’s become increasingly clear to all that the irreverent productions were attempts by Catholics to compete with Protestant services. But once your faith tries to be cool, it’s dying. Who would want it, when it’s entertainment, because like every show or product that needs a lot of marketing to keep it going, it’s not really needed. Beauty doesn’t need to compete. Faith cannot win in the space of entertainment, because it’s more than entertainment. Because it is not made for that space. That space is the complete opposite of what faith and the Mass is about.

We have football stadiums and rock shows and music festivals and strip joints and TED Talks and drive-in movie theaters. All of those are more “fun” than Catholic Mass, but they are all selling something completely different. And none of those things last, as sports leagues come and go, bands break up, music festivals peter out, strip joints get condemned, and TED Talks is on its last days. Drive in movie theaters are barely hanging on. There are a thousand and one options for entertainment which all come and go over the decades. Even Elvis, the King, and the Beatles, will be but a blip in a history book soon. They are completely in the rear-view mirror already.

Given our short attention span that moves on from one form of entertainment to another, this makes the fact that a Church could be the dominant and lasting centerpiece of life for 2,000 years rather mind-blowing. True, there wasn’t the option of NFL football games and music festivals and Burning Man. But those things that draw millions of worshippers today will be long gone before the Church is gone. Why? How did it hang on for so long? It’s not like the Catholic Church was the only religion in existence. Why didn’t one of the other “religions” of the ages before Christianity rise up to replace it? After all, if it was so obviously a bunch of false superstitions of fearful farmers, then why couldn’t something other than Christianity have swept it away?

This is a question that doesn’t get asked out loud.

The answer is they haven’t replaced Christ because…they are not beautiful. Christ’s music makes life sing. He is the way, the healer, the maker of all music, the one who makes the invisible be visible. The reason we love art and music and stories is the same reason we love Jesus, and the reason is because we see the beauty of all creation in him:

Jesus said to Thomas, "I am the way and the truth and the life.No one comes to the Father except through me.If you know me, then you will also know my Father.From now on you do know him and have seen him." (Jn 14:6-14)

Once you hear the music of the original reasons to believe, it begins to make sense. All of the clanging gongs and noise are trying to convert you by beating you over the head, and many Catholics have tried the approach of Robert De Niro in The Mission. For those approaches that used guilt and ugliness, the Church was thrown in the river and sent downstream. And now is the time where we can hear the oboe finally, now that we’ve heard enough of the noise, so that we can be curious enough to take a second look.

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