Try saying it out loud in Danish company.
"I am a believer."
Not as provocation, just as information, on par with the fact that you run in the mornings or grew up in Sorø. And then notice what happens in the faces around the table. That small jerk. The friendly, slightly concerned readjustment, like when someone has mentioned they collect dolls or haven't been vaccinated.
Let me explain.
There is a picture. It was not drawn by us, but it hangs before our eyes, and it always shows the same thing - a Human Being with bent neck and clenched life, who has laid their reason aside at the door and now obeys rules it does not understand, out of fear of a punishment it cannot see.
Faith, we have learned, is what one clings to when one doesn't dare face reality. It is the weak Human Being's crutch. The unfree Human Being's chain.
And let me say it before someone else in the comments does - the picture is not plucked from thin air. It comes from something real. There have lived Human Beings - countless, through centuries - for whom faith was precisely that. Fear beaten in with the rod, Hell painted on the wall for children, Consciences broken by men who spoke on God's behalf but acted on Power's. Probably far more throughout history were DRIVEN into Faith than were DRAWN - and I will not excuse or prettify that, it shall stand here, as it was.
When we together have that in place, then notice what the picture actually shows. For it does not show faith. It shows what Power does when it takes faith as a tool - and Power has taken EVERYTHING as a tool, science, love, the fatherland, progress, without us therefore having thrown any of these things out. No one counterfeits a coin worth nothing.
And so we arrange ourselves, herd animals that we are, according to the picture. We say "I'm not religious, but..." and let the sentence die before it reaches anything dangerous. We call it openness, but it is training - programming - we have learned what one must not think, before we managed to examine whether it was true.
But here is the strange thing. The Human Being who rejects all faith still believes. It believes that tomorrow will come. That words mean something. That love is worth the effort, that the promise should be kept, that truth exists and is better than lies. It lives its entire life in trust of patterns it has never seen the bottom of - and calls it reason. No one lives without faith. One can only choose how consciously one administers it, and how load-bearing that is, in which one has placed it.
For there exists another kind of faith than the one in the picture, which most people have installed in front of the retina. Not submission under rules that cut the Human Being in half - but a covenant with Reality's own patterns. The same covenant all living things have entered into with existence's conditions, long before anyone wrote it down. There exists a faith that does not constrict but carries. Whose fruit is not self-torment but Freedom, not obscuring but Clarity, not fear but a quiet, growing Reverence over the fact that something as improbable as this Life is even possible - and that it has been given voluntarily, as a gift one can accept with gratitude.
Let me unfold it, that faith. Not as doctrine, but as life - for that is where it must be measured.
It begins with something as undramatic as no longer having to lie. When one has placed one's life in Truth's hands, one no longer needs to maintain multiple versions of oneself - one for work, one for family, one for the mirror. One face is enough. And it turns out to be a rest one didn't know one was missing, until one received it. This is where many in the modern human being get stuck - for they too live in a faith, the faith that it cannot be done. That one can no longer say what one believes is true, because the costs are too great. And so one carries the masks a little longer, and a little longer - until the day one discovers they have begun to stick fast.
Then comes Freedom - the real kind, not what we were sold. Not freedom from all bonds, not freedom from consequence - but the inner freedom that comes from living in truth. For it makes us free, precisely as the old promise says - and that kind of inner freedom never stays inner, it affects everything it touches. That freedom is like a string that is tuned - not less free than the one hanging slack, but the only one of the two that can play. That is what it is to live in covenant with the pattern one is created in - not as restriction, but as the form in which power can finally flow.
And when one no longer uses one's forces on defending and inventing oneself, something is left over. It is that surplus others sense as Love - it does not come as a performance one delivers, but as something that overflows, because the spring is no longer blocked. And it flows freely to all living things. Including oneself.
With the faith I often write about comes a measuring stick, and it is not my own. That is the uncomfortable thing about it - it measures me too, it does not let me off. But it is simultaneously the liberating thing, for a Human Being who owns their own measuring stick can never trust a single one of their measurements. It is not even theology - it is psychology. Already in the 1970s, Nisbett and Wilson showed that we confidently explain choices that were actually steered by things we never noticed. We are not reliable narrators of our own minds. Precisely therefore it is a grace that the measuring stick hangs outside us - there, where we cannot reach it with our explanations.
And where the head can deceive itself, the body does not lie. It knows, long before thought, whether a life is in covenant with Truth or at war with it. When direction is clear, the nervous system settles - this is not mysticism, it is part of our inner structure - how we are built. A Human Being who lives with reality's patterns instead of against them wears less on themselves. There comes a vitality from it, a desire for the day, which need not be fetched up from anything, but is just there, because nothing longer works against anything else inside.
For what one believes about the Human Being dictates how one treats it - also the Human Being one is oneself. The one who believes the body is a random machine of meat on borrowed time treats it accordingly - as something one consumes, numbs and repairs when it breaks. But the one who believes it is entrusted - the only place in all creation one is given to dwell - trains it, feeds it properly, keeps it strong and healthy. Not out of vanity, and not out of fear of death, but because one does not let a gift decay that one intends to say thank you for.
In this way the World becomes abyssal again. The apple in hand, the light over the lake, the sleeping child - it stops being scenery and begins again to be what it is - Incomprehensible. One is no longer an accident among accidents, but a thread in a weave that was there before one and continues after. This is what belonging means, when the word gets its weight back.
And innermost, under it all, lies the hardest word and the greatest relief - Surrender. Not understood as giving up - but laying aside the most exhausting project a Human Being can undertake. Having to be one's own God, one's own Judge, one's own Guarantor that everything holds together. One reaches it away. And discovers that it - in a peculiar way - is grasped.
And if you have recognized even one of these - the rest in speaking truly, the calm when direction is clear, the depth in a moment you did not yourself produce - then you have already sensed it. Faith. You just haven't been allowed to call it by its right name.
After having stood in it for a while. Sensing it saturate one's being from innermost to outermost. Dissolving the old reality and experiencing the world shift before one's eyes. Reharmonization. Recalibration. Rebalancing. And experiencing what it does to one.
Then it begins to dawn, what was afoot.
That faith - we were not warned against it because it was dangerous for us. We were warned against it because it makes a Human Being hard to move.
And meanwhile we learned that it was more sober to believe in chance - that this entire coherent, lawful, beauty-saturated pattern we stand in the middle of is noise without sender and direction.
We took the most meaningful thing reality has ever shown us, and traded it for the most meaningless thing we could construct. And called the trade enlightenment.
The question was never whether you believe.
Only whether what you have placed your faith in can carry you.
And that can be measured, more simply than most dare - look at the fruit. Your relationship with yourself. With your partner, your children, your people. The sum of your entire Life. Does it become truer, deeper, more whole from what you believe in - or must it be protected against it?
The tree is not known by its words.
It is known by what grows in its shadow.
Everyone believes.
Not everyone knows what they believe in.
Or why.
❤️🔥🪽
What a wild summer day we've had here in Vendsyssel. Could have used air conditioning - but now it comes to your benefit. Whether you love or hate (looking at or others showing) the Human Body.
The only place the Spark in us can be laid - and the only place the spirit running through you can dwell and express itself.
Here is a believing specimen of one who has neither bent their neck, lives a clenched life, has laid their reason aside, nor obeys rules they don't understand, out of fear of a punishment they cannot see.
Take good care of it. Whether you believe it or not - everyone agrees it matters, for the quality of the only life you have to live, here, in what we call Reality.
Good summer evening, friends. ☀️
Now I'm jumping in the ocean after having broken my head with how this text should be cut all day 😅
