A Priest Wrote to Me Today

A priest wrote to me today.

She had been following me for a while and appreciated much of what I write. But she had heard there was no Human inside it. That it was all written by artificial intelligence, and that it was only written because I wanted to sell some t-shirts.

Most people would probably stop at such a message. I didn't, because it wasn't unexpected - what was unexpected was the sender. That a priest, whose office consists in recognizing the living, could find the rumour credible enough to ask. But having said that, she did the only right thing. She wrote TO me instead of ABOUT me. She went to the source, as people once did, and that is more than most do in a time when conclusions are drawn in silence and passed along as if they were findings.

So what follows is not a confrontation with her. I had a brief but precise dialogue with her, and assured her of connections I will unfold here. So this is an answer to all those who have thought the same without asking.

Because her question is an almost perfect picture of the condition of the times. Mistrust has become our first language. Even when we find something that gives us value, the reflex appears - there must be something wrong. Something must be constructed. Someone must want to sell us something.

And when people ask why I write every day, I have often answered that I need it for what I am here for. It is a vague answer. And a deliberately vague one. I admit that, and we will return to it. But let us first take events in chronological order, so everyone can follow.

But first the machine, because it shouldn't be allowed to stand in the way of the rest.

Yes, I work with artificial intelligence. Every day, in all aspects of my professional life, openly and without apology. In that connection I have among other things built what one could call a "second brain" - thousands of documents, of everything I have written and thought through the last couple of decades, in all genres and about all subjects - song lyrics and essays, love letters and diaries, dream journals and notes from years of excavation work in books and courses, therapy sessions, personality typology reports, concepts and manuscripts from the web and gaming years, business, finance, design, correspondences that mattered, blogs, speeches, several hundred hours of transcribed podcasts, lists of books I have read - saved without knowing why back then, and now connected with one of the most advanced language models of the times. I saved it all blindly. Or, you know, to be able to look back on it when I got old.

But now I know what it was for.

Because what the system does is not write instead of me. It holds me up against myself. It is built with several safeguards that stop me when a claim doesn't align with what I have written before - that ask about consistency and position, that uncover the shadow sides I cannot see myself, because it sees my patterns from outside, as no human can see their own from inside.

What I do with it is also that we fact-check. We truth-seek. We set agents in motion, across texts, libraries, news databases and historical archives as I write - if it should require that. And it has cost - detours of hours, half and whole days - one time two weeks - where a text had to wait, because one point would not close until it was true.

And I don't hide the rest either. It's not that I can't write, because I can. And I both write and dictate everything that should stand in all posts. But sentence constructions, punctuation, the order the points land in - some of that craft is placed in the machine's hands, in the same way as heads of state and directors through all time have placed it in the hands of speechwriters, editors and reading groups. That apparatus is just passed on now, to anyone who can figure out how to use it.

And I can.

But with that we are also at what no apparatus can deliver, and which is the only thing the question is really about - a life that has been lived, positions that have cost, a synthesis built through decades, and ground to stand on that one only finds by having gone through the floor oneself. A speechwriter can shape a president's sentences. He cannot give the president something to say. And he cannot carry the frequency it requires to deliver it. What stands in the texts is not the machine's. It is mine.

And the t-shirts? There has not in a single post, at any time, been an attempt to sell anything to anyone. No shop, no link, no funnel at the bottom of the text. What actually drives me, why I write, we will get to - but it requires that we begin at the beginning.

So let me give you, who don't know me, a quick summary of where I come from and how I ended up here. Let me tell -

Once there was a boy everyone liked.

Kind, good, easy to be around. But what no one could see - not even himself - was that his actual life took place somewhere else.

He knew early what he wanted. He was so occupied with what he made, and with what he saw before his inner eye, that he barely gave anything else a thought. What he sat with filled everything, and all the rest - the world, the people around him, the connection to them - slid out to the edge of his field of vision and stayed there. He was always on his way toward something. He was just never really present where he was.

The world was good to him meanwhile, and that would prove to be a curse of the kind you only catch sight of many years later. Doors opened before he reached to knock, and nothing cost him what it cost others.

Early came the first flattering voice - you can become something, you are something special. The voice didn't lie. He could write songs. He could see colours in sound. He could translate the interior to the exterior. Give feelings form and life. The lie lay somewhere else - in the narrowing. In the promise that one single beam of light could carry an entire life, and that everything else in him existed to serve it.

And here the two things met that would cost him dearly.

The focus that closed the world out - and the softness that couldn't say no. Because he didn't want to hurt anyone, didn't want to make anyone sad, and so it slipped away, slowly and imperceptibly, this thing about saying yes and no. He let circumstances rule his life instead of taking hold of it himself. And it succeeded - that's the insidious thing about the story - it succeeded far, far along the way. The talent carried. The doors kept opening. So much of what drove him remained floating thoughts and dreams that were never acted upon, and he was never forced to wake up.

So he lived in the future. The man he was going to become stood vividly before him - vivid and weightless, alive inside his head and nowhere else. And because the picture was so vivid, he believed he was in motion. He burned years on that confusion. Whole years. A man who can imagine everything and gets nothing built is not free. He sleeps. And he doesn't know he sleeps.

That was me.

One day I woke up in a city that didn't know my name. A big city is full of special boys, and Copenhagen had never asked for me. I was nobody, and I needed something to live on. So I went to work in the rooms where the city performs itself - the cafés and restaurants, first behind a bar, later with responsibility for the floor and for the people on it. I myself thought it was something "I did on the side" - what paid for what I really was. I couldn't see that I had stepped into a school. The floor taught me to read a room before entering it. It taught me that a house stands and falls with a hundred small, precise actions that no one ever says thank you for. And it taught me that etiquette is not decoration, but the form that makes strange people able to trust each other for an hour's time.

Later the years took me through the trades the times were busy inventing - the early internet, later the computer games. I built surfaces and worlds and the moods that move through them, always on deadline, always after a brief that wasn't mine, and I learned to do it properly anyway. The work shaped me more than I shaped it. My hands learned to build, long before my soul had anything to say.

What I couldn't see was that there was no ground under the building. There was personality where there should have been a Human. There were answers where there should have been ground to stand on. And at twenty-nine the bill came.

The relationship with my son's mother broke, and the construction that had rested on her presence and on the work and on the easy paths and on the inner flattering voice couldn't bear its own weight for so much as an hour without them.

Everything collapsed at once, and I stood back in the rubble. Or lay. In foetal position. With the experience of having failed everything - including myself.

For several months I didn't want to be here.

I write that sentence soberly, because there exists no other honest way to write it. What kept me here was not strength. It was a one-year-old boy in the room next door, and the unshakeable refusal to leave him with the version of his father that would have been my last action.

That refusal was the first true thing I had ever chosen. And this is not a confession. It is the floor everything else in my life stands on.

The years after were not reconstruction. They were survival - and excavation work. I had to figure out what had gone wrong, not out in the world, but inside myself. The first voices that reached me were American and practical, the kind that speak in imperatives - for a man overflowing with feelings who has lost his interior and his exterior obeys instructions long before he obeys understanding.

From there it went deeper. Depth psychology. Jung and the shadow and the archetypes, the old work of becoming a man. Year after year of patiently laying interior ground, layer upon layer. In 2008 the body came along - a teacher said casually in a sentence that with my typology I should get down into it, and a week later I stood with a training programme, and haven't skipped a week since.

The same year I founded my studio. Alone, without apparatus. What I built with it was not a portfolio - it was time. I made an architecture of hours, where the days belonged to me, and where most of them went to the excavation work inside. I had lacked a floor my entire life. This time I laid it myself.

And the excavation work kept crossing borders. Psychology opened into theology, theology into classical philosophy and the old libraries. And the further down I came, the less of what I found was mine. There was something waiting at the bottom that I hadn't placed there myself.

In 2015 it got a name.

And let me here answer the question that always follows - why precisely the Bible? Why precisely Christianity, when the planet is full of gods and holy texts that people have laid their lives in?

It didn't begin with a revelation. It began with me giving up believing in coincidences - I experienced endless events in my life were strung together with deep meaning, every single time I looked - and then I drew the most earthbound conclusion a human can draw.

I am born here. I have, like everyone else, limited intelligence and only one life to do well with. If I was to have a reasonable chance of truly understanding a wisdom tradition from within - not the tourist's understanding, but the one that costs years - then the wisest bet was the one that lay closest. The one whose language I speak, whose images I have grown up among, whose imprint sits in everything from my sense of justice to my calendar. One doesn't choose one's mother tongue. But one can choose to learn it to the bottom. So that was what I chose to do, to start.

And I already loved what it had built. The Western world - with all its faults, and they are numerous and well-documented - is the civilization that has produced most of what I don't want to live without - the inviolable human, law above power, the freedom to speak against power, the ability to look one's own crimes in the eye and repent them. Not faultless. Just the one with the least bad - and that is, when one looks around in history, a staggering achievement.

So I drilled down.

Athens gave us the order of reason, Rome gave us the law that binds the ruler - both invaluable. But then Christianity did something that isn't done anywhere else. Not that a god dies - dying gods exist several places in the mythologies. But that the highest power voluntarily steps under its own standard. That Truth itself chooses to bear the judgment instead of passing it - rather die than kill. And that the lowest, most cast-out human thereby, with one stroke, gets infinite value that no emperor can take from it.

All other systems, before and since, let the human sacrifice itself for power. Here power sacrifices itself for the human.

That reversal was the seam for me - not as feeling, but as recognition. A tradition that carries that in its core is not built by humans to rule over humans. And that turn I could feel all the way through my being.

And then there is the last thing, which I owe honesty to mention, even though it cannot be used as argument.

I have - both in ritual work and outside it - had what we can best designate as mystical experiences that changed me fundamentally. Not moods. Experiences that permeated my system so deeply that I finally had no choice left - I could accept them or lie about them to myself. What I have experienced cannot be passed on, and it proves nothing for anyone but me. But it would be dishonest to pretend it wasn't there.

In 2017 I stepped into an old order that has carried the same teaching through three hundred years - where the form is the teacher. An order doesn't give a man secrets. It makes him readable to himself.

Beside it stands my marriage. I met Krisztina in the first years of the journey I have just described - twenty years ago this year - and we chose early that radical honesty in all of life's areas should be the way we lived. Also the areas most couples tacitly agree to fence off. So it had to break or bear, because neither of us can live unfree or half.

So we don't pretend at our home. Our relationship is the proving ground where every single claim must withstand - not as words, but as lived life. What is true survives between us. What is performance, theatre, play-acting or assumed - doesn't last a week. We are both like bloodhounds and merciless toward each other if that being gets hold of one of us.

So when I answer "that I write because of what I am here for" - this is the less vague answer.

My entire life the work has been the secondary thing. First restaurant work, later my studio, every single task was what I did with my hands while the real work took place underneath, out of sight, inside me.

Scripture - the Bible - is the first place where it turns for me. The first work that doesn't lie as a cover over the work underneath, but is it - the interior, finally brought up into the light where it can be seen.

And I write because what broke down in me at twenty-nine was nothing special. It took years before I could say that sentence without cringing, but it is true, and it must be said aloud - the overdeveloped surface on top of the underdeveloped soul is not an exception. It is the standard product at the moment of several Western generations of especially men - we are humans trained to display competence for audiences we cannot name, while the interior slowly weathers in the hidden.

I was just one small, local case of a very large condition.

And let me make this precise, because a man who has stood on his own floor speaks differently about life than a man who has not.

I do not wish the breakdown on anyone - it was a grace I would never have chosen myself. I only tell that the floor exists. And that there is something under it.

There is one face on this side where I now stand - and it points where a face should point - past itself.

Nothing of what I am is for sale. It cannot be, because I don't own it myself. I have received it on loan - from the night I almost stopped, and from the boy in the room next door who didn't know he was holding his father fast in the world.

And so we are back at the priest. Because her message fundamentally dealt with neither her nor me. It was a picture of a time that has grown so thoroughly accustomed to the artificial that it has begun to suspect the genuine.

It is not her fault, and it is not yours. It is the water we are all swimming in. But the answer to this mistrust is not to withdraw. It is to stand forth in the light with one's entire life and let anyone who will come and look.

That is what I do here. Every day.

A machine can put words together.
But it cannot have paid for them.

And there is a Human in here.
He has been here the entire time.

Now you know a little of the story.
I will tell more. Much more.

And oh yes - if you want to buy a super cool premium t-shirt with Jesus on it... Now you're waiting for me to write nonsense.

I won't. Because it exists. Of course. My family and I have built a project called The Word. It is streetwear with the Word carried visibly, as one once carried a banner - and the shop is open while you read this. It is not hidden, and it shouldn't be. Inside me it all hangs inseparably together with the writings, one was not here without the other, because both grow from the same root.

But notice one thing, because that is what the rumour got wrong.

You didn't hear about the brand, about streetwear or about t-shirts with Words and frequency from the Bible and its influence on the Western human and civilization from me.

There has in years of daily posts not stood a single link, a single shop, a single call from me to buy anything whatsoever - the shop has stood open without me pointing to it a single time in here.

If what I write here were a sales channel, it would be the worst ever built in world history. What I write here is not here to sell t-shirts.

They are both here for the same thing - and I don't own it myself, so it cannot be sold.

I am here to serve Him who - when I look back - in mysterious ways led me all the way through the above story. Often by paths that were counterintuitive, against my reason and downright incomprehensible. But I learned to recognize His voice. And then I followed. That is what I still do when I write a post like this - which is far, far, far too long (like my podcasts) and the ones I write every day.

Because I know it is for someone.
And I know it means something.

I will show you what.

But now I actually need to sleep.

❤️‍🔥🪽