(More of Alex Caldon's writing can be found in the book The Quest For Truth: On Finding The Grail, available from www.thequestfortruth.co.uk.  Some people will be eligible for a FREE copy.  Happy Questing! )

A Christian minister was discussing spiritual matters on a UK national radio programme.  He was considering why clinics which specialise in extending a man’s penis size so often use junk email to market their service.  The clergyman realised that a man with a small penis is unlikely to want everyone to know about it by openly announcing that he is going to a clinic to get it sorted out – so responding to an email has a handy degree of anonymity.  To be approached in the street by somebody offering to enlarge your penis is likely to cause some offence – even if one’s manhood is tiny.  Why is that?  After all, the service being offered is for the benefit of the customer - something is being provided which has the potential to improve quality of life.  But admitting one needs a larger penis is admitting one is somehow inadequate, no matter how kind the intentions of the people offering penis enlargement.  As the clergyman observed, it is the same with love.  How often do we get preached at weddings, or door-stepped by the Jehovah’s Witnesses or evangelised at by environmentalists, and how often when it happens do we take offence?  Often.  Such people seem “Holier Than Thou”, and make us feel small by comparison.  they tell us we need to change – pointing out where we’re going wrong; they go on and on, making us feel guilty.  But why are they hassling us?  What are they trying to get from us?  The answer is they’re not trying to get anything!  They’re giving to us.  They’re showing us how we can have greater quality of life by practising love in our lives.  It is because they want us to be happier that they feel we must all address the ways in which we cause our own unhappiness through our selfishness, badness and lack of loving.  If we meet the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the doorstep, without being conscious of it, our guilty conscience takes over, and we choose to close our ears to them, but ironically we’re turning away the people who are trying to help us!  When we do this we are shooting ourselves in the foot.  We should at the very least listen, thank them, and not be so weak as to belittle their efforts.

John Lennon experienced this rejection of love.  He spent a great deal of time trying to give love to people, and trying to stop war. But for his efforts people often didn’t like him and thought of him as arrogant.  He had admiration for Mahatma Gandhi, another loving individual; whilst discussing Gandhi’s assassination John said “I can never get my head round that”.  When Gandhi was killed, it was an example of the persecution of love.  There isn’t any logic to it. 

There are scales of compassion, from Gandhi to Hitler, and we are all somewhere in-between; there really does seem to be good and bad in all of us (a cliché because it is true).  When a person has listened to their conscience, and acted on it they take a step upwards on the scale of compassion.  It’s like the ladder of social esteem.  But when we meet someone higher up the scale, their life shows us to be less compassionate, or loving.  They make us feel guilty, and we may be tempted to scapegoat the good person as they have the rather irritating habit of exposing our badness just by standing in the same room as us!  But persecuting loving individuals will not help us.  Shutting the door on Jehovah’s Witnesses or shooting Gandhi, or crucifying Christ won’t benefit our lives.  We will actually step down the scale of compassion by punishing the good people.

The same persecution of love occurs with environmentalists.  Sometimes they seem to be such irksome, opinionated, muesli-munching-crusty-hippy-righteous-tree-huggers!  They make us feel guilty when we use our cars too much, or when we want to buy mahogany, or when we can’t be bothered to lobby our MP, or recycle our newspapers.  It is so much more convenient for us to ignore them.  But it is because the environmentalists want us all to be happy that they feel they must listen to their hearts and take responsibility to improve our environment.  The environmentalists have listened to their consciences, and they found the strength to put their principles into practice.  But of course, if every environmentalist in the world never uses a car again, it isn’t going to make any difference – they account for such a small percentage of the population.  So they have to try to convince everybody to change:  it is because environmental campaigners love us that they want to change us.  When we understand them, we realise they are on our side.  And when we realise they are on our side then we are more likely to become receptive to what they are saying.  Take the example of transport.  Environmentalists want us to use cars less, so less carbon dioxide is released, so global warming is reduced, so life on Earth will not suffer.  The very least we can all do is listen, and maybe once in a while catch a train or ride a bike.  And road traffic kills about 3600 people in the UK every year – if an illness did that, there’d be a national panic.  An order of magnitude more are maimed, and about 20,000 suffer or die from road traffic pollution related illnesses.  Compare that figure which occurs every year to the statistics for those killed by terrorist acts, which in the UK is hardly any each year.  Then look at the relative reactions of people for traffic deaths compared to terrorist deaths; people become far more fearful and preoccupied with terrorism than of road deaths, even though the statistics show it should be the other way around. 

In doing what they do the environmentalists are giving love to us all.  Caring for the environment and loving people are one and the same thing.

"The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.”  Jean de la Bruyère