There was a place in my life where I fell so far, I could no longer see a way back.
Not everyone around me could see it. They might have known something was wrong, while I did everything I could to keep the mask on - and I knew it myself.
That is perhaps the darkest thing about that kind of Darkness - not that you cannot see where you are, but that you can, and still spend your last strength playing the role of a person who is managing.
For a short period down there, the thought of ending it all was closer than I said aloud to anyone at the time. The darkness pressed in from all sides. To my fortune, joy, and wealth, I had been given a son who was a year and a half old who Shone so powerfully that I could recognise the Lie. So I cut the Words out of that place inside myself where the Lie had taken hold.
And then I went to War. From the floor I lay scattered across - I had to invent myself from scratch, with tools I did not even know existed. Because the old ones had stopped working.
One of the first things I found, when I had finally gotten halfway up on my knees, was something called NLP. Neuro-Linguistic Programming. A simple, almost mechanical model of how a human being is put together inside, and of the conscious ability Human has to change itself and its behaviour, through simple techniques that do nothing but grasp the story we carry around about ourselves, and rewrite it. Overwrite it. Retell it, so that the one we become tomorrow is slightly different from the one we would otherwise have become. At best what modern self-help rather flatly calls "a better version of yourself".
But what really gripped me was something else. For the creative field I had spent almost every waking moment of my life up to my thirtieth year on, all that which was about creating something outside myself that others could see and hear and feel, turned out to have its origin in an entirely different place. Inside. Stacked in an order I could suddenly see. An order I could touch, move around, change. With words.
Some of it worked - well - and I recognised the structure from the creative field, and therefore the explanation for why on earth it did.
And that was where the interest truly took hold, for Words, in a way whose reach I had no idea of back then - that led to me "happening to" spend most of my adult life on words, on turning them, weighing them, shaping them for myself and for others, sensing which sound carries and which falls to the ground.
And yet years had to pass before I discovered that the heaviest words I myself was given at birth had never been heard. Only recognised. And that there is a difference.
For the words from my own culture's faith were there the whole time, in the language, in Christmas, in the funerals, in the fixed phrases one says without feeling them. I could recite them. I just had never stood still enough to let a single one of them land. That is the quiet deception of everything you grow up in the middle of - you think you know something because you have heard it a thousand times, when in reality it has just become furniture. You walk past it every day. But you never see it. Not really.
What finally broke it open was not theology. The Church never had a pull. The form and the way it tried to reach me was too distant, irrelevant, and incomprehensible. I therefore did not recognise the value in what was happening. It was just - "Well, that's how we do things here". And therefore no questions about why on earth we did it.
What broke it open for me - was the language itself.
Years of conscious work with words, with how meaning is carried and not carried, with how a Human's inner structure is built from the stories and the concepts it thinks through, without knowing it itself - that work rebuilt something in me, a muscle I had lost without noticing it - the ability to actually listen to a word, instead of just nodding in recognition at it. I began to experience myself saying, again and again when I spoke with people about psychology, theology and culture -
"Say that sentence again!? …that word you're saying there… it sounds different than it usually does… let me just understand.. does it mean something other or more than I think.. or know!?"
And it turned out, it almost always did.
And only when that muscle was there again did the old words from my own tradition begin to open, one after another, and FAR heavier than I had expected.
The problem had never been the words. The problem had been that I could not hear them.
So let me try to do what I did not do all those years with you. Let me stand still at one of them. Not to explain it from the outside, but by walking the way the words themselves go, when you let them. For that is the strange thing about the old words, what you only discover when you finally stop - they do not stand alone.
Pull on one of them, and the others follow, like links in a chain you were never told hung together.
This begins further back than you would think.
It begins with the word God.
"In the beginning God" - that is how the Story my culture has grown out of opens, and it is worth stopping at what the first words actually do.
For the first thing we are told about God is not what God is. There comes no definition, no description, no being presented for inspection. We are just told that he is. Before there is anything else at all, there is someone.
And the next thing we are told is not his being but his action. God speaks. Creation does not happen through battle or chance or by something exploding, it happens by something being said.
Reality is, from its first sentence, linguistic.
It is spoken forth.
And the first word that is said is Light. Not earth, not heaven, not life. Light. That which makes it so something can be seen at all, distinguished, known from something else. Before the light everything is one grey nothing. After the light there exists difference, and with difference comes everything else - the separation of light from darkness, water from land, day from night. Creation turns out, upon closer examination, not to be about producing things at all. It is about ordering. About drawing boundaries in chaos, so something can emerge and be what it is, and not flow together with everything else.
Millennia later an old man sits and must open his account of all this, and he chooses to begin in the same place, with the same words - In the beginning.
But he writes in Greek, and the word he chooses for that which was in the beginning is Logos. We later translate it as the Word, and that is not wrong, but it is only the top layer. For Logos means in Greek also Meaning. Structure. Order. Reason. The principle that makes the world hang together and be understandable, that atoms follow orbits, that cause is followed by effect, that two and two cannot be persuaded to become five. That the difference between man and woman is real. When the Greeks searched for a name for that which holds reality together from within, they ended at the same word the Hebrews had heard speak in the beginning.
Two cultures, two paths, one word.
And this is where the word Truth changes character, if you stay standing long enough. For if reality is Ordered, if there is a Structure beneath it all that has not been negotiated into place by us, then Truth is not an opinion you can have, or a claim you can win an argument with. Then Truth is the Order itself. That which holds. That which does not give way when everything else is tested and torn down. Not one correct answer among many possible, but the very ground all answers must stand on to be able to be called right or wrong at all.
And then the old man writes the sentence that no Greek philosopher had dared think, and which the Earth in a way still shakes from -
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
The Order behind the universe, the Light from the first day, the Meaning the Greeks could only point to with concepts - got a face. Got hands. Got a name, and even the name carries it all with it, for in Hebrew he is called Yeshua, an everyday form of the older and fuller Yehoshua, and in that name lie two things woven so tightly together they cannot be separated without the name ceasing to make sense.
The first part is God's own name, the name no one back then dared say aloud. And the second part is the verb to save, to deliver.
Put together it literally says - God saves. The name is therefore not a title he got afterwards because he made himself worthy of it. It is a sentence he got before.
So ALL that. The full sequence of all those words. From the beginning and all the way through Time. That is what happens when you today hear someone say - Jesus is the Truth.
It is not being said that a man was right. It is being said that the Order everything stands on is not a formula but a person - and that it therefore must not, perhaps cannot even, be comprehended but met.
But the chain does not end there.
That is what I myself took longest to see. For the same story says something more, something that turns it all outward again.
It says that Human is created in the image of the one who speaks. That the Light that was in the Beginning illuminates every Human who comes into the World. The chain that begins in God and goes through the Word and the Light and the Order and the Truth and the face in Nazareth does not end in a book or a church or a teaching.
No. It ends in the Human standing before you.
And that is what I look at when I look at a Human. I do not look at an organism, or a highly developed ape that happened to evolve a large lump of fat between the ears that made it self-aware, not at a consumer, not at a voice in a spreadsheet - but a place where the first Word still sounds, whether the Human itself knows it or not.
That is why I stand unbending on the fact that Human is Holy. Inviolable. Free. Created.
All that lies in the language. It has been lying there the whole time. And that is why it is not indifferent what happens to a language.
And that is both why I write, and why I am like a predator over those who are busy dissolving, hollowing out, undermining and therefore destroying the language and the words.
For what you are doing is driving a wedge down between us and the Word, so we can no longer hear it - and therefore cannot understand what we are - and reality's connections, interconnectedness, sequence and depth.
For words can lose their depth. Not by being forbidden, but by being used flatly for so long that no one can any longer remember what they were connected to.
Truth has become 'my truth', a matter of taste you own. Freedom has become 'absence of obligation'. Love has become a feeling that comes and goes like weather. And God has become a private lifestyle choice on par with a diet plan.
The words are still there. But they have become furniture again, and a language full of furniture cannot be navigated by. The flatter the language becomes, the more likely it is we get lost - not because someone has removed the roads, but because the map has lost its contour lines, so everything looks like everything, and no one can any longer see what is up or down.
I know it, because I myself had gotten lost. And the last twenty-two years have been, when I look back, spent on one thing, even though along the way it resembled a hundred different things - re-establishing that language for myself. By more paths than I can count, through psychology, philosophy, theology, symbols and mistakes and all that which resembled detours while I walked them - before I found Home, and discovered that Home had been speaking clearly to me the whole time. I had just been made stone deaf.
Now I am just trying to give the words their depth back, one at a time.
And if there is one thing I have to pass on from the last twenty-two years, it is this -
Never let anyone take your words from you. Let no one determine or dictate which words you may use about what you yourself can see. Not because words are harmless - but precisely because they are not.
For the one who dictates the language determines what reality is for a place. What can be said. What can be thought. And what slowly ceases to exist, because it no longer has a name to exist under.
Some of those who try know exactly what they are doing - though most just repeat what they have been told. But the mechanism is the same, and that is why the battle over words is never just a battle over words.
It is a spiritual battle.
A battle over what you are, how deeply you can see, what you can understand and recognise - and therefore what you can create, shape and become.
The Darkness fears your sharpest weapon.
It has four names, and it is the same.
Truth. Logos. The Word. God.
❤️🔥🪽
Good weekend, friends.
