Aging & Wisdom Quote by Bede Griffiths

Conversion, in Bede Griffiths' framing, stops being a conquest narrative and becomes a discipline of attention. The line quietly demotes the classic missionary posture - the confident Christian "going about" to win souls - and replaces it with something more radical than tolerance: reciprocal vulnerability. "No longer a question" signals a historical turn, as if the old paradigm has expired under modern conditions. Griffiths isn't just offering a kinder evangelism; he's suggesting that certainty itself has to change its habits.

The subtext is shaped by Griffiths' own context: a 20th-century cleric who made his home in India, immersed in Hindu and Christian contemplative traditions, speaking after colonialism had exposed how easily "faith" can ride shotgun with power. In that light, proselytizing reads less like spiritual charity and more like cultural extraction. His alternative - "ready to listen" - is not passive. It implies preparation, humility, and the willingness to be altered by what one hears. That's the hidden provocation: if you "grow together", then neither party stays in possession of a finished religious identity.

The rhetoric works because it swaps competitive verbs for communal ones. "Convert" is directional and asymmetrical; "mutual understanding" is a shared project with no guaranteed winner. Griffiths is also protecting Christianity from its own worst optics, proposing a way for faith to survive pluralism without turning into either aggression or mushy relativism. Listening becomes the new form of witness: persuasion by presence, not pressure.