Picture the scene: it’s 1993 and a fresh-faced art student sits on the floor of his painting studio next to a cross-legged Buddhist.
For the last half-hour they’ve been talking ‘God’. To the outside listener the conversation seems an incoherent ramble. Yet the student knows better. There’s method in his glibness. Unknown to his ‘enlightened’ subject he’s carefully preparing the ground for an evangelistic piéce de resistance.
Then, like a spiritual stealth bomber, he moves in on his target: ‘But without Jesus in your life you’ll never find lasting peace’. Ha ha! What will she say to that!? Then comes the mystical rebuttal: ‘But I have invited him into my life. I feel his presence every night when I meditate.’ What now? The student’s mind is reeling. ‘But you still need Jesus in your life!’ he repeats mindlessly like an exhausted mantra. Yet inside his morale is crumbling. For the next five minutes he lurches from one increasingly lame exhortation to another as the crushing reality hits him: he’s run out of things to say and can feel a headache developing — like the one he had after failing his mocks.
