There have been many questions after the recent posts about Denmark as a Christian country - both in the comment threads and in private messages. Of course also the usual condescension, the ridicule, the misunderstandings and the anger, that comes with the territory. But in between there are honest questions, and many of them circle around the same thing at different altitudes -
What does one actually believe, if one is Christian? What precisely is it I keep pointing at? And why do I do it?
Let's take the first one now.
The rest will follow in a later post.
I should be the first to say that I am not a theologian, and I speak neither on behalf of the church nor for any other institution or order. But I have been more than twenty years underway, on a journey that began from the outside, in personal development, and which has ended in deep faith and a recognition of the world's and everything's coherence. And along that way I have noticed that almost all the questions - including the ones I myself once asked - treat Christianity as an opinion. Something one has or doesn't have, like a position on tax rates. And perhaps that is precisely where we talk past each other.
For what I see is not an opinion. It is something that works in the Human Being, layer by layer, and which transforms the one who carries it from within - and that is what I will try to show. Not because I am an expert. But simply because I have sought, seen it happen and understand the difference in the depth of the steps.
For one cannot at first glance see it from the outside.
Two people stand next to each other at a Christmas service, sing the same hymns, bow their heads at the same time, and there is nothing in their faces that reveals that one carries the word like a jacket he puts on once a year, while the other has been taken - sometimes literally torn - apart and assembled again from within.
For "Christian" is not one thing.
It is not a button that is on or off. It is a depth. A being. And the question is rarely really whether one believes, but how far down one has let - or allowed - one's faith to reach.
At the top, where it is easiest to carry, lie the values. These are the ones we talk and write much about in the media. That politicians like to claim ownership of the meaning of. It is the most harmless layer.
Here Christianity has become a collection of conclusions without the premise they grew out of - the kindness, the forgiveness, the inviolability of the individual - held as opinions one can subscribe to alongside everything else one subscribes to. It is a beautiful inheritance, and the one who carries it will often defend it honestly, without noticing that he lives on a capital he has not himself earned, and which does not renew itself. It is the fruit without the root. Values we don't quite know, or can explain to ourselves why we have. Other than "one has that in a modern society".
It holds, as long as there is something left in the account.
A bit further down sits the culturally Christian. It does not live in the opinions but in the body and in the calendar. That is to say - in baptism, in confirmation, in church on Christmas Eve, in the way one instinctively folds one's hands at a coffin even though one hasn't prayed since one was a child. It is not faith. It is faithfulness to a form, a memory that keeps the shape alive while the content has gone quiet.
And it should not be despised, for it is often the form that preserves the place, so the actual can return. But the culturally Christian orders the year. It does not yet order the Human Being. Not really.
And let me pause here briefly, and say it very clearly, before we go further down - the descriptions are not a ranking. None of the layers makes the Human Being better or worse than another, and they determine nothing about how God sees one. Grace is not something one works one's way toward - it is given, in baptism, finished, paid - and the one who never gets further than Christmas Eve is not less loved than the one who has given everything.
The only thing the layers determine is something else - how much of oneself the Story has been allowed to touch.
The difference is not what one is worth. The difference is what happens to one while one moves through them.
With that said.
At the next step we come to the place where a boundary is crossed, almost imperceptibly, and yet decisively. It is the step where one stops ONLY subscribing to the values and ONLY belonging to the form, and begins to mean that it is True. With a capital T.
That He was. That it happened. That Logos lies at the bottom and the beginning of All Creation, and that it is not a force - but a face.
In that moment something changes first in the psyche, before it changes anything else at all, for now one no longer lives in a silent cosmos where one must oneself be the origin of any meaning, but in a Cosmos and Universe that has a ground. A beginning. One is no longer author. One is accountable.
And there is an essential difference to understand here, which saturates everything one is, that I can best describe like this -
A human being who believes himself alone in a mute empty room of randomness and meaninglessness, and a human being who believes himself seen, knowing that everything is created with deep meaning, intention, structure and order as expression of an underlying unlimited Love - do not carry the same nervous system into daily life and into Life. One lives on guard, where the other can rest. Not because the world has become less dangerous, but because that Human Being no longer carries the entire world alone.
But even that is not the deepest that can happen.
For one can mean that the above is True and still sit with both hands around one's own Centre. The deepest, and the hardest, is not to believe that it is True, but to give the Middle - one's Centre - away.
"Not my will, but Yours".
And this is where it stops being something one has, and becomes a Self one no longer owns.
And the same happens with the relationship to oneself. For the deeper the recognition reaches, the better one understands one's own material - one's nature, one's patterns, one's structure and one's inner order - and then one stops treating oneself as 'a project' and begins to treat oneself as 'something entrusted'.
The body, the mind, the habits, everything one previously wore oneself out on to become good enough, becomes something one tends and lifts, because it is not one's own. The old word for this is "temple", and it may sound solemn, but it just means this - that one keeps one's entire house - body, mind, heart and spirit - and strengthens it and carries it properly. Not to mirror oneself in the result, but because one knows whose image one carries. And the strange thing here is, the deeper one goes the more the resistance disappears.
And the strange thing is, the resistance disappears. The old inner struggle - the one I myself was caught in for a decade and a half under names like "personal development" and "the best version of myself" - where one part of one wants something and another part resists, quiets down. Not because one has become stronger, but because there are no longer two masters to serve.
And thereby and therefore the entire movement changes character.
It is no longer one who builds oneself up - it is one who returns Home and recognizes the place.
The Church has had a word for it for almost two thousand years, and it is not apotheosis, the Roman word for the Human Being who makes himself into God - that was probably where I myself had spent those fifteen years. No. It is called theosis - that God, layer by layer, restores his image in the Human Being who has stopped standing in the way.
Something has taken over the place that Leads one. The quality of The Deepest Voice within has changed character. Is drawn through one from somewhere else.
For when the centre is first surrendered, everything else falls into place underneath, almost by itself. The relationship to others changes, because one stops using them. One can love a human being without demanding that it should complete one, because it is clear the completion comes from an entirely different place. The body becomes different, for it is a particular kind of body, the one that has released its grip, the one that no longer has to be its own god from morning to night, and forgiveness turns out to be putting down a weight one didn't know one carried. And love becomes possible in an entirely new way, where it is no longer a transaction, and no longer a need seeking to be met and fulfilled, but as something that can FREELY be given without having to be paid back.
And here lies perhaps the strangest thing, and what the modern world never quite seems to understand -
The Surrendered Human Being is The Free Human Being.
The one who owns himself is slave to every fear, for he has everything to lose. While the one who has given himself away has nothing left that can be threatened - and therefore can no longer be forced. It is not powerlessness. It is the only Freedom that Power cannot reach.
It is difficult to quite get hold of. Took me forever. So read those two passages again, if it slipped between your fingers.
Let us catch our breath for a moment, and take the entirely reasonable and correct objection seriously - that one knows plenty of Christians who are neither free nor resting, but anxious, petty, condemning - then one is absolutely right, and has simultaneously confirmed the entire picture. For that is precisely the difference between carrying the Word like a jacket - and letting it reach down there, where it costs something and transforms one from within.
It is this transformation that makes it so the one who stands in this step can also bear the Truth. Regardless of where it points.
For the one who builds his entire security on the world holding together in a particular way cannot really look at what actually is. He becomes forced to turn his gaze away from what hurts and hold fast to what soothes.
We all know it - especially from politics - the man or woman who CANNOT (will not?) admit a fact, because it would cost him too much.
While the one who stands on something outside himself has the means to look directly and unflinchingly at things and the world. He does not need the truth to fall out in his favour. And that is also why his justice remains justice and does not slide into revenge. For he does not need to see the other punished, to himself feel whole. He no longer carries the wound alone.
And then the last.
The mythical layer in Christianity.
All the way down, rarer than we think and deeper than most of us reach, lies the Holy.
Here there is not much Self left to stand in the way, and one senses it in a particular way in the few people who have reached there. They don't want anything from you, they don't need to prove anything, they rest in a way that makes others calm just by being near. And for them there is no longer a Holy part of life and an ordinary part. The grey, the daily, what one usually walks right past - it suddenly stands and Shines. And God expresses himself through Everything that is.
And this is what The Christian Story does, all the way down through you and Reality - if you let it.
It does not give you different facts than the neighbour. It gives you a different universe to stand in.
Two people can agree on every single number and every single event and still live in different worlds, because one sees an accident that happened to become meaning, and the other sees a meaning that preceded everything…
And if you are now sitting and thinking that this doesn't apply to you, because you "don't believe in anything" - think again. No human being lives on evidence alone. You believe that your senses speak truth, that reason can carry, that life is better than non-life, that your children are worth more than strange numbers in a statistic. Thousands of things none of which can be proven.
It is faith, all the way down, in all of us - the difference is just that most have never chosen theirs. They have inherited it unnoticed from the spirit of the age, as one inherits a dialect.
And perhaps this is the most adult thing an upright human being can do - to take responsibility for what one believes. Not by choosing the comfortable, but by searching for what is True - and The True one knows among other things by the fact that it carries. Across body and mind, across families and peoples, across centuries.
And standing there and searching honestly, then The Christian Story stands before one as one of the deepest, most thoroughly tested and most beautiful answers the Human Being has ever been handed.
In the end it is not about Believing in the Story. It is about letting it reach all the way down.
❤️🔥🪽
Good Wednesday, friends ☀️
