The last four days I have written about Folk, about Faith, about Civilisation and about Incompatibility.
About how a people is not an administrative construct. About how everyone believes in something - and that the vacuum after God does not remain empty. About the three streams that wove together and built something that has never emerged elsewhere in the same way. And about what happens when a differently and more powerfully arranged civilisational worldview meets a foundation that has forgotten itself.
We have seen it clearly now.
Today the question is different.
Not what is wrong. We know that.
But what is required of us.
Each one of us. And together.
...
Today is Holy Saturday.
The silent day. The empty day.
The disciples did not know what would happen. They sat in what had been lost - and could not imagine what was coming. Everything they had believed in, everything they had followed, everything they had sacrificed for - lay in a tomb sealed with a stone.
And the world continued as if nothing had happened.
Europe is in a Holy Saturday.
We know what we have lost. We can feel the weight of it. We sit in the silent space between what has been lost and what we cannot yet imagine.
But we have one advantage the disciples did not have.
We know what came.
And that obligates.
Let me say this clearly before we go further.
My aim is not to drive anyone into church. That does not interest me. If it helps you - fine. But what we are after exists within - not outside. Therefore the institution is less essential than the inner connection.
And let me simultaneously be honest about where I myself stand.
I am Christian. Not as a cultural marker. Not as political identity. But as a human being who has found that the foundation the Western civilisation is built upon - Christianity, its view of humanity, its understanding of reality and truth - is true. And that everything I love in this world rests upon it.
What I am after is the movement that leads people back to this connection - whatever form it takes for them. Back to origin. To essential root. To the living understanding that we are more than consumers and voters and productive units in a system.
That we are created. That we carry something holy within us. And that the civilisation we have emerged from knew this - and built accordingly.
That is where the strength lies.
Not in the building.
In the connection to what it was built upon.
...
That leads me directly to what almost no one on the continent seems willing to say any longer.
Western civilisation - with everything it contains of errors, crimes, colonialism, inquisition and regression - is still the most freedom-creating, dignity-affirming and truth-seeking civilisational model humanity has ever produced.
Not because we are better human beings than others.
But because we inherited a foundation that pointed in a particular direction. Toward FREEDOM. Toward DIGNITY. Toward TRUTH as something that also obligates the powerful. Toward an ORDER where the weak individual has claim to protection against the strong collective.
And because we - imperfectly, slowly, with countless regressions - actually moved in that direction.
The abolition of slavery came from within this civilisation. Women's liberation came from within this civilisation. Freedom of the press, the rule of law, universal suffrage - ALL came from WITHIN.
Not because anyone forced us. But because the foundation contained a logic that in time demanded it.
This is not self-praise. The path here has nearly killed us. Anyone who looks at it with open eyes knows this.
It is a fact that obligates.
So what is required of us?
Let me start within - because that is where it begins. It never begins in Parliament. It never begins in a law or a policy or a programme.
It begins in the individual human being who dares to ask who it is.
Not what it thinks politically. Not what it votes. But what it believes in. What it is willing to stand for when it costs something. What it will pass on to its children - not as opinion, but as living inheritance.
It REQUIRES that one stops apologising for what is worth standing for.
For decades we have been taught that Western heritage is primarily a story of shame. Colonialism. Oppression. Patriarchy. Eurocentrism. And yes - all of that is there. It is real and it must naturally be faced.
But it is not the whole story.
It is not even the most important part of the story.
The most important part of the story is that a small corner of the world - cold, poor and peripheral - over a millennium developed an understanding of the Human Being that has never emerged elsewhere in the same way. An understanding that said - this Human Being - this concrete, fallible, vulnerable human being before you - carries something holy within it. Something that cannot be violated. Something that cannot be taken away.
And that this understanding slowly, imperfectly and under enormous resistance - actually changed the world.
This is YOUR INHERITANCE.
Not as pride that closes its eyes to the errors. But as RESPONSIBILITY that keeps its eyes open to what is worth carrying forward.
Because reconstruction does not start in the great institutions.
It starts in the near.
In the family that knows what it is and what it will pass on. In the friendship that dares to speak of what matters. In the brotherhood that commits to something larger than its own convenience. In the local community that knows its own story and takes responsibility for it.
STRONG PEOPLES are not built by strong states.
Strong states are built by STRONG PEOPLES.
And strong peoples are built by MEN and WOMEN who take RESPONSIBILITY - not because anyone forces them, but because they cannot help it. Because they have inherited something they know is worth carrying forward. Because they have children they want to leave a world to that still knows who it is.
This is not nostalgia.
This is THE ONLY THING that has EVER worked.
And let us certainly talk about what it actually means to think in generations.
Those who built the cathedrals in Europe knew they would not themselves experience them finished. They laid the foundation stone for their children's children's children. They did not think in electoral cycles. They thought in centuries.
That is the form of thinking we have lost.
But which other civilisations - who wish to take over ours - still possess.
We have become a people who think in quarters and opinion polls. In what feels right now. In what is convenient today.
But civilisations are not built that way. And they are not saved that way.
They are saved by people who ask themselves the question that every generation before us asked themselves - what do I leave to those who come after me? Not in money. Not in property. But in world. In culture. In freedom. In story. In faith.
In spirit!
Your grandchildren will not ask if you had the right opinions. They will inherit the world you helped to shape - or allowed to decay. That is what responsibility means when it is greatest.
And then there is the deepest layer.
What all the politicians gladly want to talk about - but cannot. Partly because they do not know their own faith. Or will not stand by it. Or are fundamentally naive enough to believe they can reawaken faith in the Human Being without addressing God.
They think the Human Being's spirit comes from a spreadsheet in a ministry.
It does not.
We must find our way back to the sacred.
Not as institution. Not as compulsion. Not as cultural marker or political identity.
But as a living, personal relation to what is greater than ourselves.
Because a people that does not know what it worships - worships randomly.
And random worship is the vacuum that others - with a stronger, more coherent and more unshakeable faith - are very willing to fill. Will inevitably fill.
We have for decades replaced the living with surrogates. Status instead of calling. Consumption instead of meaning. Therapeutic self-realisation instead of sanctification. Political belonging instead of faith. A fabricated climate religion. And a more destructive identity politics of gender and sexuality that splits both the individual and society.
And all these surrogates have this in common that they do not carry.
Not when it becomes difficult. Not when it costs something. Not when one stands face to face with something that demands more than comfort and self-expression.
There is only one thing that has shown itself to carry under that pressure.
The faith that there is an ORDER behind phenomena. That this order is GOOD. That the Human Being is created in this order's image - and therefore carries a dignity that cannot be taken away. And that this order once stepped forth into the open - not as abstraction, but as a human being who walked, ate, suffered and died - and stood up again.
This is not a fairy tale.
This is the foundation EVERYTHING you love in the Western world rests upon.
...
And let me say something personal here.
I have not always stood where I stand now. Far from it. I have wandered. Sought. Doubted. And committed more or less every possible error.
Gathered along the way - from self-help, courses all over the world, therapy, philosophy, from psychology, from mysticism, from Freemasonry, from conversations that went deeper than most conversations may. And experiences of the kind one is not supposed to have.
And I have paid the price for saying what I say. In lost relationships. In eyes that look differently at one. In the loneliness that follows seeing something clearly that others do not yet want to see.
I am not complaining. I am glad to be me - and be where I am. There is nowhere I would rather be. It is just still true.
But what I have found on that path - and what I cannot go back from - is this -
There is an order behind phenomena. It is good. And it calls upon us.
Not as institution. Not as compulsion. But as an invitation to become what we most deeply are - Human Beings who are created BY something, FOR something, WITH something holy in us that cannot be reduced to biology, economics or politics.
It has changed everything for me.
And I believe it can change everything for Europe.
If we will.
Because that is what a living faith does to a human being - when it is true and not merely performed.
It orients it UPWARD.
A human being who knows what it believes in - and why - does not become weaker. It becomes stronger. Not harder. Stronger. There is a difference. The hard human being closes itself. The strong human being can hold the space open - for others, for truth, for beauty - without losing itself.
It does not become more fragile. It becomes more vulnerable. And vulnerability is not weakness. It is the courage to let what is true touch one - without shutting off.
It does not become ugly in its struggle. It seeks beauty - because beauty is one of the places where truth is closest to the surface.
It does not become darker. It becomes lighter. Not naive. But enlightened - in the word's actual sense. As something that sees more clearly because it has a fixed point to see from.
This is what Western civilisation at its best has produced. Not fanatics. Not self-righteous moralists.
Human beings who were strong enough to be gentle. Courageous enough to be vulnerable. Enlightened enough to see clearly - and still love what they saw.
That is what we have lost.
And that is what we can find again.
...
And so back to the story -
The disciples did not know it that Saturday.
They sat in the darkness and believed it was over. That everything they had believed in was an illusion. That the tomb had the last word.
But we know what came.
And that is not a historical curiosity. It is not a pious story for people who cannot handle reality.
It is the claim that the Darkness does not have the last word.
That what was laid in the tomb can rise.
That a people who has forgotten who it is - can remember it again.
That a civilisation that has wandered away from its foundation - can find its way back to it.
Not because we are strong enough.
But because the foundation carries.
If we choose to stand upon it.
Tomorrow is Easter.
And Easter is not about what happened two thousand years ago.
It is about what is possible now.
It is a call that has been raised through millennia to you. That bids you to rise up. And stand by what you believe most deeply.
For most of us this is about Truth over Lie. And that is the path we must first walk.
Out of lie.
Out of inversion.
Out of the thousand illusions that have been drawn down over our story - as people, continent and civilisation.
Let us go.
Together.
Peacefully.
❤️🔥🪽
