Relaxation is the point
If you go to so-called masters, so-called monks and sannyasins, you will become more tense; you cannot relax. Go to a monk: you become more tense, you become more afraid. And he creates guilt; he will look at you with condemnatory eyes, and the very way he will look at you will say you are a sinner. And he will start condemning: This is wrong, that is wrong; leave this, leave that.
This is not the way of a really enlightened person. He will make you feel relaxed. There is a Chinese saying that if you reach a really great man you will feel relaxed with him; if you reach a false great man he will create tension within you. He will make, knowingly or unknowingly, every effort to show that you are low, a sinner; that he is high, above, transcendental.
A buddha will help you to relax, because only in your deep relaxation will you also become a buddha. There is no other way.
If you are drinking tea with a buddha, you will immediately feel that you are not alien, not strangers. Buddha pouring tea in your cup... Buddha has come down to you. Buddha has come to "this", he has brought "that" to "this". Christians, Jews, cannot conceive it; Mohammedans cannot conceive it. If you knock at the gate of heaven, can you conceive of God coming and telling you, "Come, have a cup of tea." It looks so profane. God will be sitting on his throne looking at you with his thousand eyes, looking at every nook and corner of your being, at how many sins you have committed. Judgment will be there.
Laotzu is nonjudgmental. He does not judge you, he simply accepts. Whatsoever you say, he accepts and says, "Come and relax with me." Relaxation is the point. And if you can relax with an enlightened person his enlightenment will start penetrating you, because when you are relaxed you become porous. When you are tense you are closed; when you relax he will enter. Asking you to have a cup of tea is making you relaxed, friendly, bringing you nearer, closer. Remember, whenever you are taking food and drinking something with someone, you become very intimate. Food and sex are the only two intimacies. In sex you are intimate, in food you are intimate. And food is more basic an intimacy than sex, because when a child is born the first thing he will receive from the mother will be food. Sex will come later on when he becomes mature sexually, fourteen, fifteen years afterwards. The first thing you received in this world was food and that food was a drink. So the first intimacy known in this world is between a mother and a child.
Christians are wrong when they call their priests "father," because father is a very unnatural thing, a societal phenomenon. The father doesn't exist anywhere in nature except in human society; it is a created thing, a cultured thing. The mother is natural. It exists without any culture, education, society, it is there in nature.