"God is greatest," he shouted in Arabic, before putting the car in gear and ploughing into the crowd.
That is one image.
Here is another -
The believer who spends an entire life denying everything that brings joy into an existence. The music, the laughter, the body, the celebration. A life lived as one long no, carried by a conviction that "this very no is what God demands".
And let me give you a third.
Environments where people surveil each other. Whether you pray enough. Whether you dress correctly. Whether you "do your faith" well enough for the others to approve it. Faith as social control, where the gaze constantly turns outward, toward the neighbour, toward the daughter, toward the one who might be slipping.
These three images - in countless variations - stand at the front for many of us, every time the word God is spoken aloud. They stand there as guards before a door - and they do their job well, because most of us turn back long before we reach the door. We believe - because we have seen those three - that we have seen what is inside.
We have seen the fanatic, the ascetic and the surveiller. And so we do not need to look any closer at this business with faith and God.
We pick up those three images again later in the text, because we need them as real warnings. But try to set the images aside for a moment. I am not asking you to do so because they are false - they absolutely exist, and I think they should be named - but because they are about something other than what they claim to be about.
I will return to that.
Instead, I want to ask you to look at something very close. Look with both eyes directly at what you spend your time on.
Not what you say you prioritise. Not what you would answer at a dinner conversation. Or a job interview. Or on a first date. All the places where you lie faster than a horse can run. Yes you do, it is ok. Most people do. That is how Man is.
No. Look past how you would like it to be. Past the romanticised image of yourself. Look completely honestly at where the hours of your life actually go, week after week, year after year.
Because your time is not one resource among others. Your time is your life, measured in the only currency you have - and every hour you give to something is an hour of your life you have sacrificed to it. In the most literal sense of the word.
There, right there, in that word - sacrificed - there we suddenly stand somewhere most of us, so-called modern enlightened people, do not really think about.
If you will allow it, then let me help you think a little about it.
What you spend your time on is what you SACRIFICE your life to - and that is - in any meaningful sense of the word - what you WORSHIP. And what you place HIGHEST.
That which everything else must yield to, when it comes down to it.
The man who says he places family above all, but gives the company seventy hours a week and the family the leftovers, he believes in the company.
The woman who says she does not care about others' recognition, but checks in with herself through her social media posts every half hour, she believes in the affirmation and the gaze from outside.
The one who says he does not believe in anything at all, but arranges his entire existence around avoiding discomfort - he believes in comfort, and he sacrifices his life to it daily.
That is precisely what the word God has always meant in daily life.
Not primarily a figure in the sky, but 'the highest'. What one sacrifices to. What one serves with one's life, regardless of what one calls it with one's mouth. In all cultures, at all times, one has been able to read a person's gods in one place - at its altars. Where the sacrifices are laid and what they are sacrificed to.
We have abolished the word, but we have not abolished the altars - we have just stopped seeing them, because they stand so close in our lives that they do not look like altars.
But they are. We sacrifice on them every single day of our lives. And that reveals a simple truth.
NO ONE lives without (a) God.
One can live without having chosen one, yes.
But that is something else.
And here is where it all turns. Or at least where it turned for me.
Because if all people already live in worship - if the hours already flow somewhere, if life is already being sacrificed to something - then the question is never whether one believes. Then the question is only whether one has seen what one believes in and therefore what one worships - and sacrifices one's life for. Or deeper. Whether one's God is something one has found - or something that has found one, while one was looking the other way.
Faith in God can therefore, at one level of understanding, be crystallised as "the conscious choice". It is the decision to take the highest place in one's life - the place that is always occupied by something anyway - and place something there oneself, because one knows well that it is better for one to believe in something, over something else.
For most of us, this "something" is something that is greater than our desires, because we know well that otherwise the desires will take the place quite quickly. And we understand well that that is probably hardly what serves us best. It must also be something that is greater than our fear, because anyone who has lived longer than the teenage years knows well that fear always stands ready as number two and is ready to take over the whole life.
It must be something that pulls one upward toward what one could become, instead of downward toward what is easiest right now.
The old language had words for this, but they are words we have learned to shrug at a little. Sin. And virtues. They sound so old-fashioned. But let us separate them together.
Sin was what happens when one follows the pull in oneself toward where one becomes less. And one knows the pulls, if one dares to look. Pride, which cannot be wrong and therefore cannot learn. Envy, which cannot rejoice in others' fortune without feeling it as a loss. Wrath, which feels like strength in the moment and has cost more than all the others combined. Sloth, which is not rest but flight - all the important things one did not take on, because they could wait until tomorrow. Greed, which never reaches the point where it is enough. Gluttony, which fills the mouth because something else in one is empty. And lust, which takes what it wants, and afterwards calls it freedom. Not one of them is a pleasure someone has forbidden. They are seven directions one can become less in. The ancients called them deadly sins - not because they kill the body, but because, followed to the end, they kill the person one could have been.
Virtue conversely was not proper behaviour either. Virtue was the slow, daily steering toward what builds a Man up - patience, courage, temperance, honesty - all that which requires that one can say no to oneself today to become someone tomorrow. Delayed gratification, the psychologist might say. The Old Language just said it with more weight - to subject the lower in oneself to the higher.
And now we can return to the three images from the beginning. Because look at them again now, and see what they have in common.
The fanatic sacrifices others' lives to PROVE his faith outwardly.
The ascetic sacrifices his own life to PERFORM his faith outwardly.
The environment SURVEILS each other's faith outwardly.
All three images show the same thing - faith as an external law, as a collective set of rules, as something that must be seen, measured, controlled and enforced by other people.
And here we come to what I want you to see. Regardless of what you think about him, regardless of who you think he was, regardless of what inner image you have been given of Christianity.
See this one thing -
It was PRECISELY that which Jesus turned upside down.
It is easy to forget how radical what he brought was. He stepped in and stood in a world of purity rules, sacrificial prescriptions and religious police, and he moved the ENTIRE faith to one place - INTO THE INDIVIDUAL PERSON.
And there is something about the singularity of that movement which is almost incomprehensibly beautiful - but one only sees it when one sees what it was he laid in there. Because it is not loose values one can pick among according to taste. It is a coherent architecture of values worth sacrificing oneself for - where each layer carries the next - and it begins at the foundation.
At the bottom lies the Foundation - that each Man carries something holy in himself, before he has achieved anything at all. Not because of strength, utility or status - just because he is a Man. That is why the sick, the child and the beggar stand at the centre of the gospels and not in their margin.
On top of that lies the Direction - love God above all, and your neighbour as yourself. In that order. Because without something above Man, love of neighbour has no measure, and so it slides out into sentimentality or ideology.
Then comes the inner - that the Heart weighs more than the facade. That hypocrisy is worse than weakness. That you yourself answer for your life - the beam in your own eye, before the splinter in your brother's.
And out of the inner, Freedom then grows.
Because if faith dwells in the quiet room between the individual Man and God - and nowhere else - then there is a place in Man which no king, no priest and no state has access to. Conscience therefore becomes inviolable.
This is the seed and the cornerstone of the entire Western world's idea of freedom - not the freedom to do anything, but the freedom from anyone being able to force their way into your innermost. And Truth belongs to the same layer - your yes shall be yes. The one who lies must maintain the Lie, and the maintenance eats Freedom from within.
Above that, Power turns itself around - the faith that the greatest shall serve. And let me just unfold that, so it becomes completely clear. Because it sounds mild today, almost like a figure of speech. But feel what is actually being said. In any natural order - in Rome, in the tribe, in the animal pack, at any executive corridor level since - there, power is a reward. One fights one's way up, and from above one then gets - the right to be served, the right to take first, the right for others to carry for one.
That is how it has always been, everywhere, and that is how it still pulls in any person who gains power over others. But it is that order which is turned upside down here, which you believe in. That Power is not a reward one receives from above. It is a responsibility that turns downward - toward those one has power over. The more power, the greater duty one has to carry. It means that the one who will be greatest shall be servant of all - not as a humility theatre, but as the very definition of what greatness is.
And he did not content himself with saying it. The evening before his death - well knowing what awaited - the man, whom his followers called Lord, took a basin of water, laid himself on his knees and washed their dusty feet. Slave work. The lowest job in the house. That was the last image he left them, before he went out to die.
That is what Power looks like when it is True. And you know it well. I do not know why you do. But we all do.
Above that comes Forgiveness - no Man is his worst action. Even the enemy remains a Man - because without this faith, hatred will transform you into what you hate.
And at the top, where it all gathers, is the crown then - Love.
But not love as our time understands it. Because we have made love into a feeling - something that arises in one, something one feels or does not feel, something one can have or lose, and which no one therefore can be held to.
In Christianity's architecture, Love is something else. It is a price one pays. It is not measured by what you feel for a Man, but by what you are willing to give him. Your time. Your strength. Your convenience. Your own plans. And at the extreme, if circumstances should demand it, Life itself - greatest Love has the one who lays down his life for his friends.
It is not just a beautiful figure of speech. It is the definition. And notice how it binds the entire architecture together and leads us back to the foundation - because it only makes sense to pay that price for another Man if Man as such is holy - and therefore worth that price.
That is, simplified, what one chooses if one consciously chooses Christianity as one's way. It is not a mood one chooses, or a tradition, or a belonging. It is an architecture one places at the highest place in one's inner and outer life - the place we already agree is always occupied by something anyway.
One chooses to measure oneself by the heart rather than the facade, to serve rather than to rule, to forgive rather than to retaliate, to pay love's price rather than to wait for its feeling. Not because one can do it from day one. But because one has placed it up there, where it pulls in one - and where one will strive to move in that direction a tiny little step each day through life.
Notice at the same time what the architecture does not have -
There are no walls. No offices. No membership. Because all of it can be contained in one Man who gets up in the morning and chooses it. The Church can carry it, administer it and pass it on - and has done so for two thousand years, in both its best and its worst hours - but the gift itself is unaffected by whether one stands in a membership register or goes to church. It was laid in there, where no institution can reach it. And where no one can take it from you.
I hope with this little text to have made visible to you that the three images from the beginning are therefore not images of faith.
They are images of what happens when faith is taken out of Man again and made into external law. They are not the door. They are the guards standing before it.
And behind the door stands the question which every Man answers with his life, regardless of whether he ever asks it -
You will worship something.
The only choice you have is whether you choose it yourself.
❤️🔥🪽
It is a place to start, if you have not thought about the architecture of Christianity that way before. Then we can always move further, all the way back to the beginning, Creation and the depths hidden behind the lost word God. But that requires its own series of posts, if we are to do that. It cannot be done in one blow, the way this translation into secular modern language could.
Happy Thursday, friends ☀️
