Something has happened in the last few months.
Or actually, it's been years.
But everyone laughed at me when I said it back then.
They don't anymore.
Everyone can feel what's coming.
So let me write this now, while it's visible to most that we stand in a wave that can neither be slowed nor stopped.
There's only surfing left.
Christianity has begun to appear in places where for decades it was unwelcome - in speeches, in programmes, in debates, among people who a short time ago would have cleared their throats and changed the subject if anyone had asked what they actually believed. And somewhere in me, it brings joy. But another place sits an unease, and that's what I'll try to share with you here.
Because I notice how many are reaching for faith the way one reaches for a tool. Something to be used. To carry an agenda, to give a project a weight it can't muster itself, to win something that in reality isn't about faith at all. And *almost* no one asks the question that should come BEFORE everything else, the question everyone owes themselves, long before they owe anyone else anything -
Can you explain to yourself why you believe what you believe?
Not defend it in a debate. Not quote someone who said it better. Just explain it. Quietly. In your own language. For yourself. With your own fumbling words.
And notice that the question I'm asking doesn't only apply to those who call themselves Christian. All people believe in something - whether it's progress, science, climate, justice, or the next system that's supposed to save us. Most just don't think of belief that way - and precisely because of that, they'd handle the question worst of all. But the question applies to anyone who opens their mouth to tell others what they should believe. Regardless of what it is.
If the answer lies completely beyond your reach, you have a problem with your faith. Not necessarily with what you believe in - but with your relationship to it. For faith isn't quite the same as knowledge, and it shouldn't be. But neither is it less than knowledge.
True faith rests on recognition - on the ability to clearly see why one stands where one stands. It carries its own "why" with it. And "I feel it" isn't an answer here. That's where the sentence begins. Not where it ends.
There will be those who object that faith precisely contains the Mystery, what we cannot see to the bottom of, and they're right. But notice the difference - the one who has truly worked with their faith knows precisely where clarity ends and Mystery begins - and can point to the boundary. That itself is a form of clarity. Mystery isn't the same as mud. With the one who has never descended into their own faith, everything by contrast is equally foggy - and in fog, anything can be attached to anything.
We experience disturbingly much of that in these years. Fog. Mud. The incompatible being fastened together.
Others will object that faith is a gift and not an achievement - that it's granted, not earned, and that no one should pass a test to be allowed to believe. And they too are right. Nothing I write here is about qualifying for one's own faith. The one who receives faith and lives it owes no one in the world an account. The old woman in the back row, whose faith is deeper than most learning, doesn't have to explain anything to anyone. The gift stands untouched.
But even Peter knew there exists a threshold - "always be ready to give an answer about the hope that is in you". The demand for a "why" isn't a foreign rationalism pressed down over faith from outside. It stands inside it - and it awakens the moment one begins to speak on faith's behalf.
So if you're someone who wants to convince. Proclaim. Connect faith to projects and programmes. From that moment it's no longer the gift being tested.
It's the spokesman.
That responsibility naturally doesn't weigh the same for everyone who crosses that threshold. It becomes heavier the deeper it is you want to touch.
The one who wants to speak about habits and taste doesn't owe much. But the one who wants to dig into the deepest in Man - into faith, into meaning, into what a Man stands on when everything else slides - has taken on the heaviest thing there is. Because in there, there's no room for guessing. In there it's required that you've walked the path yourself. That you've been there. That you don't know the landscape from the map, but from your own feet - from the nights, from the doubt, from what you lost along the way, and what you found. Only then do you know what your words do to the one who takes them in.
And that's where the unease comes from.
Because a faith that knows its own structure resists when someone wants to harness it to a foreign wagon. It has form, and form rejects what doesn't fit. But a faith without self-understanding is a blank banner, and anyone can write their agenda on it.
And RIGHT NOW I see banners being written on at a pace I haven't seen before - from all sides - by hands whose relationship to what they're writing on has never been examined.
So I'll try to pass on a warning that isn't mine. It's history's.
Christianity carries at its core a claim that is larger than any project - it claims there exists a Truth Man doesn't own, but stands under.
One cannot therefore take its language, its morality, its weight, and simultaneously hold the claim itself at arm's length. One cannot push it in front as a shield and hide behind. It's been attempted, again and again, from throne and from square, from right and from left - and each time it's ended in the same place. The church that sold forgiveness for money was split down the middle by precisely the word it traded in. The rulers who made the cross a banner for their own wars stand in posterity as the opposite of what they invoked.
It rarely goes quickly. The deepest doesn't work in election cycles. But it has never - not once in two thousand years - allowed itself to be used as a tool without finally crushing the hand that grasped it. Not because punishment stands behind. But because the genuine always, in the end, separates itself from the assumed - and the day that happens, you stand alone, with what you yourself were.
So before you tell others what they should believe - anything at all you want them to believe - go down into your own faith and see if you can reach the bottom, or at least see how deep it is. Find your "why".
Not because anyone demands it of you, but because the deepest thing there is deserves people who know what they hold in their hands.
And because the wave is coming, regardless of whether you're ready or not. And there's a difference between those who know the water and those who just throw themselves out. The one who understands what carries him can rise on it and stand - light, almost playful, while the greatest rolls beneath him. The one who doesn't understand it gets rolled. And only discovers down there how little his banner weighs.
A faith you cannot explain to yourself isn't yet yours.
And a wave you don't understand, you cannot surf.
