We use the word radicalised all the time now.
It's said and used about people we've decided we're done with, and it almost always means something closed, someone who has turned away from us and become dangerous.
But a human being can be changed all the way down to the root without being pulled anywhere near that - and being changed at the root can just as easily mean that one has finally come Home to something.
Because if I'm honest, the word fits me.
I am radicalised. By the West.
By what our worldview and civilisation was built and raised upon. By the thoughts and ideas my forefathers kept refining and died defending - the very cornerstone and foundation beneath what I am and where I come from. And the longer I look at it, the less I'm willing to let go of any of it. To move. To negotiate.
I am radicalised by the simple thought that there exists a Truth, and that one is freely allowed to search for it. That the world hangs together in a way reason can actually reach, and that I've been given intellect and language precisely for that, so I could ask, doubt and find the way myself.
This is what the ancients called Logos, the Word and Meaning behind everything. The strange thing about that gift is that it doesn't close anything. It opens. A Way that reorients and grants access to living life more fully. Connected.
I am radicalised by Freedom. Not as a word one shouts in a square, but as the simple and heavy reality of being able to choose wrongly and still be the one who chose. For a freedom that cannot fail is no freedom at all.
I am radicalised by Love, which demands nothing in return.
I am radicalised by Justice, which can see precisely what a person has done - but never forgets that it's still a Human Being. Which strikes down hard on the action itself, while holding a shield over the one who did it.
I am radicalised by Truth, which doesn't become more true because the crowd nods along, and no less true when it stands completely alone.
I am radicalised by Beauty, not as decoration laid on top of the True, but as the true made visible. The old conviction - that the beautiful doesn't lie, but points beyond itself toward Him who gave it form.
I am radicalised by the quiet fact that a Human Being becomes Whole and Sound by finding their place rather than forcing their way to it - and that Love for my neighbour only becomes real where it begins to cost me something.
I am radicalised by the thought that every single Human Being carries an image that means something in itself. A dignity. Something Holy. Inviolable. Imago Dei. Not because a state has granted it, not because a majority has voted it into being, but because it was placed there before any of them had anything to say - and which cannot be removed without something decisive following.
I am radicalised by the boundary the West drew around Power itself. The refusal to let any power become the final word. No King, no Party, no Order, no Movement gets permission to be God.
The deepest thing the West ever did was to draw that boundary and hold it. To say "give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's", and thereby fence a space inside the Human Being where no Caesar has access. Every Tyranny worthy of the name has tried to tear that fence down. For a power that cannot reach all the way into the soul can always be answered, judged, refused, outlived.
That is the entire secret behind The Open Way. Where nothing earthly gets permission to be the highest, the book can never close completely, and the pen stays in your own hand.
The Order we live in, the West, is built on precisely that.
Not on one party, one era or one zeitgeist, but on The Open Truth and that image of the Human Being.
That's the entire reason you may speak your mind freely, turn around, make mistakes and start over. And beneath it all, older than any order, the freedom to fall and still be saved by Grace.
The West is an Open Way.
You can see where you're walking, you can stop, you can go back and try again.
And there I am immovable. Not because I'm closed, but because the one thing I hold onto is the only thing that keeps everything else open.
When someone comes and wants to trade The Open Way for something already written to the last page, and calls it "progress", "freedom" or "security for my own safety's sake", I say no, because I can tell the difference between a way and a book.
I don't move either because a closed order comes from outside and wants to colonise the house from within, just as I don't move because a godless technocracy - which speaks the language of social justice fluently but is only loyal to money - shows up and promises to free me from my own inheritance, as if it were a chain around my foot.
One wants to overwrite the house, the other wants to hollow it out while speaking of progress, and both hand me the same closed book to sign.
The inheritance I've been given is no chain.
It is the ground beneath my feet.
So yes, go ahead and call me radicalised. I have been led all the way down to the root of something that points up and out, not in and down.
An open way you can always turn around on, and that is, when all is said and done, what Christianity is.
A liberation of the Human Being. A way of living where you are set free by the religion, and where the heart, once surrendered and given over, never walks the way alone, because the way turns out to be Someone - and He walks every single step with you. As a living, breathing relation to Truth, to Christ, to God.
A closed book is the opposite. It's already written, right down to the pages about you.
Communism has one like that. Nazism has one. Islamism has one. Wokeism has one. Technocracy has one. Climate religion has one. Scientism has one. Every single one of them comes with the entire story and answer key laid down in advance and hands you a pen you're only allowed to sign with.
And to them all my answer is the same.
No.
No thank you.
❤️🔥🪽
