Evangelism

It’s a curious trait some people have, this compulsion to evangelize. They want to sell you their religion, or their diet. I have a couple of ecologically-minded friends who are always urging others to accept cast-off items for which they can imagine possible uses. More than one woman has tried to talk me into being a lesbian. Then as you get older, people try to get you to have the same ailments they do.

Not long ago, my sister’s friend Marge tried very hard to sell me on sleep apnea. She was sure I must have it.

“Why?” I asked

“Do you wake up during the night?”

“Yes, but that’s because I have to pee, or the dog is barking at the raccoons in the garbage barrels. Then I go back to sleep.”

“You don’t wake up because you need to pee. You wake up from the apnea, and then you feel like you need to pee.”

I think I wake up because I need to pee. I have dreams that ingeniously incorporate needing to pee and not being able to; say, I’m in the stall in a public restroom trying to pee, but there’s a bossy-looking woman standing in the open door, watching me, so I can’t. Then I wake up and go pee. I worry that one of these nights that woman is going to shut the door and go away, and then I will pee in the bed.

“Do you snore?”

“Who’s to know?” I said. Except the dog, of course. I burned out on men some years ago, even before I became uninteresting to them, and the aforementioned lesbian evangelists have not brought me around.

“Virtually anyone who is overweight will have sleep apnea,” said Marge, firmly. “And if you get treatment, you will be so much less depressed.”

“Do I seem that depressed?” I asked, beginning to doubt myself. But as it turned out, Marge was using “you” in the sense of “one,” that is to say “I,” and the depression in question was her own. She discussed it at great length, the various medications she had taken over the years, and I gradually gathered the impression that she was still battling depression and that having sleep apnea had perhaps not cheered her up so very much after all.

Evangelism seems to be based on an assumption that people are more alike than they really are, or perhaps a desire for company in your (one’s) own joys and misfortunes, or perhaps a bit of both.

I remember a conversation I once had with a Christian evangelist, back in the days when I used to have conversations with such people. (I’ve since learned that, like jerks hassling women in public places, they take any sign of notice as a sign of encouragement.)

This woman asked me whether I believed in reincarnation, and I said yes. Seeming to pounce on an opening here, she hastened to explain that Christ offers the promise of eternal life; if you are saved, you will spend eternity in heaven, and you won’t have to keep coming back.

Well, there you have it. She doesn’t want to come back. For her, this life is something to be saved from (I’d always sort of wondered what it was they were being saved from.) I want to come back again and again, to do the things I haven’t done, to repair mistakes, to try things differently the next time. I certainly don’t want an eternity of anything, no matter how pleasant it might be for the first ten thousand years or so. I have never heard any description of heaven that didn’t sound as if it would eventually get on my nerves.

She is happy with the prospect of not coming back, of spending eternity somewhere else. But all my hopes are of this world, and I am happy with the prospect of returning forever.