St. Paul is the master at drawing examples from the everyday life of his audience to use when preaching the Gospel and exhorting his listeners towards virtue. Some of his most famous passages refer to the Greek games his audience would have known (1 Cor 9:24-27; 2 Tim 2:5), while others use images from agrarian practices (2 Tim 2:6; Rom 11:17) or ordinary human experiences like looking in a mirror (1 Cor 13:12) or the parts of the body (1 Cor 12:14-25). While I’m no St. Paul, today I’m taking his lead and using an image from our modern society to see what it can teach us about evangelization. The image? That of the whiskey connoisseur.
Whiskey, particularly bourbon, seems to be the drink of choice for my generation these days, and whiskey experts seem to materialize at every gathering of young professionals. What lessons can we learn from this art that we can apply to evangelization and the Catholic faith?
1. Don’t be a snob about it.
If you know a lot about whiskey, or you’ve developed your palate more than the average person, you can go two ways with it. You can be a snob and go to a party and make everyone feel inferior for drinking bottom shelf bourbon. Or you can take the opportunity to propose a better alternative, welcoming them with an invitation where they will feel encouraged to seek something better than their current drink. Everyone has encountered the person who thinks they know everything, whether it is about whiskey or the Catholic Faith. Don’t be this person. You don’t know everything, and even if you know more than the person next to you, no one wants to listen to someone who thinks they’re better than everyone else.
The key to evangelization is the proposal of the Truth. God never forces himself on humanity, so why should we? Introduce, welcome, invite. If you’re confident you have a better answer for someone, you should be confident enough that the answer will stand for itself once it is proposed.
2. A bad early experience can put someone off.
We need to be patient in the proposal. We don’t know what wounds people are carrying or what walls they have built from bad previous experiences. I know someone who had sworn off bourbon because of something that had occurred twenty years earlier. They just needed the proper re-introduction to clear that bad experience. In a much greater way, someone’s past experience with the Faith could lead them to have misconceptions, barriers, hesitations, and wounds that prevent your proposal from immediately taking root. That’s okay. Have patience, help them find healing, and show them by your good example that their first experience wasn’t necessarily valid across the board, not does it have to dictate their future experience.
3. Don’t be afraid to develop your palate, despite the responsibility it will require.
Once you develop your palate, you can’t imagine going back. It would be hard for me to drink bottom shelf bourbon, and that’s okay—I’ve developed my palate. Does this have some inconveniences? Sure—with better bourbon comes higher price points! But is it worth it? Yes.
Maybe at some point in your life, you could miss Mass on a Sunday here or there without thinking much of it. But once you attend every Sunday, it becomes a way of life and you can’t imagine life without it. It’s hard for me to go several days without daily Mass. It’s the air I breathe.
With the faith, the more we develop our palate—the more the Christian faith becomes who we are, the more we study why we believe what we believe, the more we incorporate prayer into our life, the more we read the writings of the saints or the Popes—the harder it is to imagine living life without that perspective. And that’s a good thing. Does it require a greater responsibility? Yes. The more we learn about our faith, the more we practice our faith, the more we pray—the more we’re going to be called to account for what we know. A friend of mine quipped that her life was easier before she knew me, because before she knew what the Catholic Faith required, the less responsibility she had! She was joking, of course, because she sees her life as fuller and freer now that she knows the Truth. With knowledge comes great responsibility, but with it also comes happiness.
4. Be responsible.
I hope it goes without saying that I’m speaking about responsible behavior with alcohol. I am not encouraging over-indulging, over-spending, or any other behavior that would be sinful. With evangelization, we also have to be responsible. Not that there’s usually a temptation to over-evangelize—on the contrary, I think most of us have to be encouraged to be vocal and increase our efforts, not to moderate them! However, we always have to keep in mind that if we end up ostracizing our friends because we keep beating them over the head with the invitation, we aren’t going to get very far. Evangelization should come through two avenues—word and deed. Sometimes one speaks louder than the other, and it takes prudence to know when to speak and when to act.
5. Be patient. It doesn’t happen overnight.
Whether you are developing your own palate or you’re helping someone else develop theirs, it doesn’t happen overnight. Just like the process of aging whiskey, which requires time and patience, acquiring the taste does as well. It’s a journey and a process.
There isn’t a magic formula for evangelization where one convincing argument results in a complete change of heart for every person. If we want to spread the Gospel, we need to have the patience to walk with our brothers and sisters.
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Obviously, when it comes to the vital importance of evangelization, we can’t really compare it to sharing our love and knowledge of whiskey! One is a matter of life and death, and the other is pretty frivolous. In fact, wouldn’t the world be a different place if everyone was as passionate about their faith as they were about their favorite hobby? But we can learn from the pitfalls of the whiskey snob. When you share the faith, propose patiently, knowing that life on other side is better.
And as with all metaphors, this one is imperfect. If you give up whiskey for Lent, don’t give up evangelizing too!
