The important questions remain: What are you doing? How do I know? What's your search for truth look like? How can I help you do it better?

In order to know how to help, I have to really know what it is that you are doing, and I have to respect it for what it is, and not try to make you do what I'm doing.

Tradition and the Individual Talent (apologies to T.S. Eliot)

Remember the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:13-30)? Some are given 1, some ten, and some thirty.

Should the man with thirty try to make the guy with 1 achieve the same result? What does someone with thirty talents have to say to someone with 1 talent?

Do you think that God didn't know what He was doing when he gave the 1 talent to one guy and thirty to another? In fact, the parable says that the businessman gave to each according to their respective abilities.

Are they measured by where they end up? No, they are measured by the extent to which they made something of what they were given. It's the proportionate response that counts.

So what's the significance of Christ? Is he the 50 talents we've been given? Is Buddha 1 talent, and Mohammed 10? Does it matter who gets what or how much? Are spear-chunking tribesmen deprived of light? It doesn't seem to me that they are, at all. They are indeed given enough light (Romans 1:20) with which to make a certain choice toward the divine. Will they seek truth in truth? Or will they turn away? Will God hide his face from those who seek with their whole hearts? No. Did it matter who got how much in the parable? Not really. What mattered was the heart response to what was given. Do you seek to make the best of it, figuratively speaking? Do you assume that how the folks to either side of you, who have been given 1 or ten talents should act in the same exact fashion as someone with thirty talents?

So the question that follows is what is the function of sharing yourself? What is the place of evangelism? What is the true form of evangelism, if such a term has any currency?