They Will Kill You

Starts Off with her and a little girl in a convenience store, running away from a white man who claims they are family. The man claims to be the father and she kills him. They seem to be getting abused by him. They are trying to get to NYC.

Zazie Beats – Isabelle Davidson/Asia Reeves arrived in NYC to a strange apt. Building saying she’s a maid, 10 years after she kills the man in the parking lot. She went to jail and was separated from her sister. She got a tip that she was at this sketchy building. She’s ambushed by masked assailants. Her sisters name is Maria.

Lilly – The head maid who seems to be trying to recruit Asia. All of the assailants get resurrected if killed or regenerate limbs if they are lost.

Plot – The apartment building is a site for satan worshipers. Victims are lured into the building and forced to pledge their lives to working for Satan or be killed. Once you become apart of the cult, you must sacrifice someone to gain eternal life. Things get interesting once Zazie Beats arrives at the building

To know you is not enough. I want to be lost in you.

The topography of her I was not meant To leave.

Oh, to climb the Mountains and hills Of she... Not as a pilgrim, But as something Hungry.

To take shelter In the dales and valleys, And name them mine By breath, By touch, By the slow claiming Of presence.

I would map her Not in lines, But in memory— Every rise learned By mouth, Every hollow By need.

A continent of wonder, Yes... But also of ruin, Where I lose myself And do not ask To be found.

Till I am no longer A wanderer, But something rooted, Buried deep In the quiet Of her terrain.

The Fool — Here I am. With so many hopes and dreams. Renewed. Re-energised. I am a Fool. I begin again. I have so much potential for growth. I have so much to learn. I will shed what I must in order to grow through life and be where I need to be. There is hope because I have faith

The Prince — There are no limits. I have the passion. I need to remember to rest and be able to sustain this creative fire to get me through. This is not a limitless energy. It is finite. I must put it into the right moment and the right effort. Trust in my unlimited creative potential. Go for it. There is impatience here so I must seize the moment!

The Princess — What are my next steps? I need to be brave and bold to move all of this forward and enact creative change. There are a few things going on but I can handle them with all this energy as long as I am mindful and not overly carefree. There’s the house maintenance stuff. Current work stuff. Future work stuff and all the other future-building I need to complete.

Focus now and dare to dream.

Church 3/29/2026

Today I got my hair double bleached. But before that, I went to church. The reason I go to this church is because every week, I feel like God is speaking to me through the sermon. Today’s sermon was titled “Stephen’s All-In”, from Acts 7:54-60. The passage was about when Stephen was stoned to death by Jews.

A couple pithy quotes today that I found good:

• A life where you accept God as your creator, your master
• Is life a journey in which we are heading towards meeting Jesus our creator again?
• Seek God’s face in harsh times
• Don’t be the servant that didn’t use their talents to serve God. Don’t hesitate to participate in God’s good work.

The main topic I found relevant to my life today was about God’s silence. When the topic came up, I realized that God was being silent in my life despite my mental sufferings. I wrote in my sermon notebook

“Sometimes it all feels like a sick joke! I don’t understand why any of it has to be like this.”

The pastor spoke of Stephen “obeying God to death” in the passage. In response to that, I wrote in my notebook

“Would it really be as miserable as I think it would be (to obey God to death)? If I stop bitching while I do it, probably not. I need to stop bitching and stop looking at the negatives while forcing myself to do something I don’t want to do. I might as well force myself to look at the bright side of things, and do it with a cheerful heart.”

More about God’s silence. God is silent multiple times in the Bible. He is silent when Stephen dies for his sake, He is silent when Jesus dies on the cross (the ultimate silence). It’s hard to understand in the moment why, but we know that God is good. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done but simply endure the suffering without reprieve. In fact, we may actually deserve silence. What we did not deserve is Jesus’s saving work on the cross. The Samarian woman understood on some level that she was unworthy, but she didn’t care, and she came to Jesus because she trusted that He could save her. To this I wrote in my notebook

“I have too big of an ego. I should kill it. I’m so frustrated that God won’t give me what I want that I don’t want anything to do with Him sometimes. Even if I obey, I want to do it sullenly and tell Him – look, I did what you wanted. Happy? Now kill me.”

But I did decide that I would not complain, and act like a petulant child that pouts and stamps their feet when they aren’t given what they want. I will obey. I will find joy in God, and learn how to be grateful in every situation. I will not bitch and moan about every little thing that did not go my way. I am not important.

I love it when I get an excuse to fall down a new cryptid rabbit hole. My recent trip to Mexico, along with the fact that I'm using a few cryptids from the area in my current novel-in-progress, has given me just the justification I need to do a deep dive into some of the country's legends and monsters—and there are a lot of very fun ones to be found, especially when you include creatures from Aztec and Maya mythology.

Most people have heard of Mexico's most famous cryptid, the infamous chupacabra, a spined and hairless bloodsucking canine (or lizard, depending on which version of the legend you listen to) accused of draining the blood from livestock. There is also a Mexican version of Bigfoot, the sisimite, which I included in my squatch around the world round-up a few months back. Here are a few other creatures from south of the border that haven't yet gotten quite that level of PR outside the country. 

Ahuitzotl

Aquatic mammals are a relatively rare category of cryptid, and this one is a particularly fun version. The Ahuitzotl is the size of a small dog, and has roughly the same build, though with small ears and a long tail that has a hand at the end of it. It lives in remote, swampy areas, where it submerges itself in a lake or river then makes a sound like a terrified woman or crying child. When somebody rushes in to help, it grabs them with its tail-hand, pulls them under, and strangles them. Then it eats their eyes, teeth, and fingernails and tosses the body on the shore. 

The Ahuitzotl was one of the first cryptids documented by Europeans in Mexico. Hernán Cortés' claimed one of his men was killed by this creature in an official report. There were similar creatures in both Maya and Aztec myths, as well as in the myths from people further north like the Hopi and Shasta, which has led some scientists to speculate the legends originated from encounters with a now-extinct species of otter. Another fun fact: the creature shares its name with the 8th Aztec ruler, who was in charge during the peak of the empire (1486-1502).

Alux/Chaneque

A lot of cultures around the world have a legendary creature that looks like a little human, and the Maya and Aztec had similar iterations of this theme. 

The Alux (plural Aluxes or Aluxob) is the Maya version, a knee-high person wearing traditional Maya garb that's usually invisible, though it can show itself to interact with people. Aluxob are protective spirits and guardians of the land, believed to be as old as the land itself, even older than the sun. Farmers can harness the powers of an Alux by building a shrine on their land, which either attracts one or creates one, depending on the legend. Once the Alux moves into the shrine, it spends the next seven years protecting the fields, bringing good weather, and otherwise helping the crops grow. After seven years, the farmer has to seal the Alux inside the shrine, or else it'll turn into a trickster, hiding the farmer's tools, spreading disease, or running off into the jungle to lead travelers astray. You can stop these tricks by leaving offerings to the Aluxob at the ancient sites where they live.

The Aztec version is called a Chaneque or Chanekeh, and looks like a child with an old face. Like Aluxob, they live in forests or near rivers, but they don't have the same farm helper reputation—they're just straight tricksters. Sometimes they just cause mild mischief, but they're also said to kidnap people and take them to the underworld through a dry kapok tree, or to attack people who intrude on their land with such intensity that their soul leaves their body. They can also communicate with animals or bring rain and thunder. They're also partially invisible, though it's usually said that children can see them but adults often can't.

Cihuateteo

In Aztec mythology, women who died in childbirth were said to become Cihuateteo, powerful spirits seen as equivalent to the spirits of warriors who died in battle. The Cihuateteo worked with warriors' spirits to get the sun through the sky, taking it west from noon to sunset (in some versions also carrying it through the underworld) after the warriors carried it across the morning. 

Usually the Cihuateteo live in a place called Cihuatlampa, the “place of women” that was west with the setting sun, but on certain days of the calendar they'd come to the mortal realm to mingle with humans. When they did, they'd take the form of crossroads demons and get up to the usual array of bad behavior like stealing children, causing madness, or luring men to commit adultery. When on Earth, they have claw-like hands and are usually shown wearing skirts fastened with snake belts.

Huay Chivo

This one comes primarily from the Yucatán peninsula, and is also found in adjacent countries like Belize and northern Guatemala. It's essentially the Maya iteration of a goatman, which is another common trope in folklore around the world, though Huay Chivo is distinct from creatures like satyrs or the Pope Lick Monster in that he's said to be a shape-shifting sorcerer, not a full-time goatman. The current legend is likely a melding of Maya and Spanish folklore, which is reflected in its name: Huay, from Waay, the Yucatec word for “sorecrer”, and Chivo, a Spanish word for goat. 

Huay Chivo can only turn into his goat for at night, and to do it he has to take off his head first and leave it at home. A goat's or bull's head grows in its place, and he also gets horse or goat legs, with a human torso in between, all of it covered in thick, black hair. He has glowing red eyes and anyone who stares into them is frozen with fear, then suffers delerium and fever that lasts for days. Some versions also bleed from the mouth whenever they talk. The only way to kill him is to carve a cross into a bullet and shoot it into the sorcerer's abandoned, disembodied head (though you can also keep it away by leaving a cross sprinkled with holy water by the door). 

There are a few origin legends for Huay Chivo. The core idea is usually that a young man loves a woman and wants to get closer to her. In one version, that woman tends his family's goat herd, and he asks the Maya death god Kisin (“the flatulent one”) to change him into a goat so he can always be near her, but the spell goes awry and he gains the ability to transform into a goat instead. In another version, the young man asks the devil to get him close to his crush and doesn't know he'll be turned into a goat until it happens, at which point he starts slaughtering livestock at night because he's so angry about it. The legend of the creature's existence persists to the modern day, and there have been sightings as recently as 2015.

Xtabay

Another one from the Yucatán peninsula, the Xtabay fits another well-represented archetype: beautiful women who are actually terrifying monsters. In this case, she's dressed all in white with black hair down to her ankles. Xtabay waits behind ceiba trees combing her hair with the spines of a tzacam cactus until an unsuspecting male traveler happens along (though in some versions of the legend she only attacks criminals and drunks). What happens at that point depends on the legend. In some versions she turns into a venomous snake and devours him. In others, she rips out his heart, eats it, then throws the body into a cenote. In a version written by ethnologist Antonio Mediz Bolio, she makes the men her slaves, keeping them in caverns around the ceiba tree's roots. 

Some scholars believe the legend of Xtabay started as a personified spirit of the ceiba tree, but was twisted into an evil being by the Spanish as part of their campaign to demonize indigenous beliefs. As far as her legendary origins, there are a few versions. In one, she starts as Xkeban, a beautiful woman who had many suitors but rejected all of them. They got jealous and started spreading rumors to ruin her reputation. When she was walking in the woods, a sorceress offered her the chance to escape the ridicule of her town by transforming into an immortal creature, the Xtabay. In another version, Xtabay is Xkeban's sister, Utz-Colel, who was chaste and proper in life but nonetheless had spiky tzacam cacti grow from her grave when she died, while her loose sister Xkeban's grave sprouted beautiful flowers. Utz-Colel comes back to life as Xtabay to punish the type of men her sister used to sleep with. 

See similar posts:

#Cryptids #Folklore #Mythology

I wasn’t planning to stay out last night. Just a pack of cigarettes, maybe two. The type you’d light out of habit. Not desire. Something to keep your hand busy while your mind runs in circles. The cafe was quiet enough to make me think, which was the first mistake. suit still on, tie a little loose, like I almost had my life together. Almost always feels like enough until it isn’t.

And Oh love. I kept thinking about you, in a very stubborn way, you’d say that if you were here. It surely was the kind that doesn’t ask for permission before showing up and sitting across from you like it owns the place. I came home with that feeling still stuck to me like always for the past couple of days. Poured a drink like it would translate anything in my head into something simpler. But it didn’t. It just made everything louder. And you mostly.

I almost texted you, you know? That was where it would’ve ended for me. Not the drinking. Not the thinking. It’s almost the moment your fingers hover, and for a second, you believe there’s an ending to this if you just press send. like there’s a version of the world where you answer, and it fixes something.

There isn’t. So I didn’t send anything. Instead, that’s where it gets all funny. I wrote this. Or whatever this is. It doesn’t even make sense now, reading it back. Half of it feels like someone else wrote it.

“ I think i figured it out not you just this no wait that’s a lie i had something to say like two seconds ago it sounded important too which is rare for me so that’s unfortunate You’re in my head again congratulations you win i don’t remember what the prize was but it’s probably me losing. I almost texted you i know shocking write that down somewhere “he almost did it” historic moment I kept thinking if i say the right thing it’ll fix it like there’s a correct sentance. a secret code and suddenly you’re back and im not whatever this is but every sentance i start ends wrong or it doesn’t end at all kind of like us that was good actually i should keep that i dont know why you still here in my head i mean i didn’t ask for this pretty sure i would’ve declinded politely anyway i miss no i dont i mean i do but that’s not the point there is no point i should stop writing now that was supposed to make sense it doesn’t you’re stil here that’s it thats the note” “

Well. I could barely read it. Half the words were stepping on each other like they were in a rush to mean something before I sobered up. The other half looked like I gave up mid thought, which, to be fair, sounds like me. I don’t remember writing most of it. I remember the feeling, the weight of it, specifically. Like something sitting on your chest pretending it belongs there.

Apparently, drunk me thinks he’s insightful. He’s not. He’s just louder. Less filtered. A little more honest than I’d like to admit, which is probably why I don’t let him speak often.

He wrote about you. Of course, he did. He has repeated your name more than once. More than I’m willing to admit, actually. It won’t be showing here. Not because it wasn’t there, if anything, it was the only thing that was there, but because it doesn’t read well. It doesn’t sound like something a person in control would write. It looks obsessive. Unnecessary. A little embarrassing, if I’m being honest, which I’m trying not to be.

Drunk me seemed to think writing your name over and over would lead somewhere. Like if he said it enough, it would turn into an answer. Or a response. Or at least something that felt less like silence. It didn’t

It just turned into a page that looked like it forgot how to move on. So no, I won’t be showing that part. You’ll just have to trust me when I say you were mentioned more than once. More than what I hear daily.

There’s a line there. I think it was a line, or maybe I imagined it, that almost made sense. Something about ending. Or how I can’t seem to find one when it comes to you.

Iconic. Sober me isn’t doing much better. I don’t know why I kept it. It’s not even good or makes sense. It’s just evidence. That no matter how composed I look in a suit, or how quiet I keep things during the day, there’s still a version of me that sits down, pours a drink, and loses to you without even trying.

I’d say i won’t read it again, But i probably will. Just to see if it ever starts making sense.

It probably never will.

Sincerely, whoever I was last night.

Somewhere between the press releases and the product demos, something went quietly wrong with explainable AI. What began as a serious academic and civil liberties concern about algorithmic opacity has been repackaged, polished, and slotted neatly into enterprise software brochures. The question of whether people deserve to understand why a machine denied them healthcare, flagged them as a fraud risk, or recommended a longer prison sentence has been quietly reframed. It is no longer about rights. It is about features.

The global explainable AI market was valued at approximately 7.79 billion US dollars in 2024, according to Grand View Research, and is projected to reach 21.06 billion dollars by 2030. These are not the figures of a civil liberties movement. This is a growth industry. And the distinction matters enormously, because the people building these tools and the people most harmed by opaque algorithms are almost never the same people. The explainability that corporations are selling is designed for boardrooms and compliance departments, not for the individuals whose lives hang in the balance of an algorithmic output.

When the Algorithm Decides Your Future

To understand why explainability matters, you need only look at what happens when it is absent. In Australia, the Robodebt scheme ran from 2016 to 2019, deploying an automated data-matching algorithm to calculate welfare debts by averaging annual income across fortnights. The method was mathematically crude and, as a 2019 Federal Court ruling determined, legally invalid. No warrant existed in social security law that entitled the administering agency to use income averaging as a proxy for actual income in fortnightly measurement periods. This was known internally because of legal advice received by the Department of Social Security as early as 2014. Yet the algorithm asserted 1.7 billion Australian dollars in debts against 453,000 people. A total of 746 million Australian dollars was wrongfully recovered from 381,000 individuals before the scheme was finally dismantled. The Royal Commission, established in August 2022 under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, heard testimony from families of young people who had died by suicide after receiving algorithmically generated debt notices they could not understand or contest.

At the height of the scheme in 2017, 20,000 debt notices were being issued per week. None of them came with a meaningful explanation of how the debt had been calculated. The University of Melbourne described the core flaw plainly: averaging a year's worth of earnings across each fortnight is no way to accurately calculate fortnightly pay, particularly for casual workers whose income fluctuates. Yet the system operated for years, with human oversight progressively removed from the process. The Oxford University Blavatnik School of Government described Robodebt as “a tragic case of public policy failure,” one in which the efficiency benefits of automation were pursued without regard for legal authority, ethical safeguards, or the basic dignity of the people affected. In September 2024, the Australian Public Service Commission concluded its investigation, resulting in fines and demotions for several officials, though notably no one was dismissed from their role.

The Netherlands offers another instructive case. The Dutch childcare benefits scandal, which ultimately forced the government's resignation in January 2021, involved an algorithmic system that flagged benefit claims as potentially fraudulent. A report by the Dutch Data Protection Authority revealed that the system used a self-learning algorithm where dual nationality and foreign-sounding names functioned as indicators of fraud risk. Tens of thousands of parents, predominantly from ethnic minority and low-income backgrounds, were falsely accused and forced to repay legally obtained benefits. Amnesty International's 2021 report, titled “Xenophobic Machines,” described the outcome as a “black box system” that created “a black hole of accountability.” The Dutch government publicly acknowledged in May 2022 that institutional racism within the Tax and Customs Administration was a root cause.

These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are documented failures with named victims, legal findings, and parliamentary consequences. And in every case, the absence of explainability was not a minor technical limitation. It was the mechanism through which harm was inflicted and accountability was evaded.

The Quiet Rebranding of a Democratic Demand

The academic roots of explainable AI are firmly planted in concerns about justice, accountability, and democratic governance. Cathy O'Neil's 2016 book “Weapons of Math Destruction” identified three defining characteristics of harmful algorithmic systems: opacity, scale, and damage. O'Neil, who holds a PhD in mathematics from Harvard University and founded the algorithmic auditing company ORCAA, argued that mathematical models encoding human prejudice were being deployed at scale without any mechanism for those affected to understand or challenge the decisions made about them. As she wrote, “the math-powered applications powering the data economy were based on choices made by fallible human beings,” and many of those choices “encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into the software systems that increasingly managed their lives.”

That argument was fundamentally about power. It asked who gets to know, who gets to question, and who gets to change the systems that shape lives. But somewhere in the translation from academic critique to enterprise software, the language shifted. Explainability stopped being a demand made by citizens and became a capability offered by vendors.

IBM now markets AI Explainability 360 as an open-source toolkit, and its watsonx.governance platform promises to “accelerate responsible and explainable AI workflows.” Microsoft offers InterpretML and Fairlearn as part of its Responsible AI toolkit. Google's Vertex AI platform includes explainability features as standard enterprise offerings. These are not trivial contributions. The technical work behind SHAP values, LIME interpretations, and attention visualisations represents genuine scientific progress. But the framing has fundamentally changed. Explainability is positioned as a competitive advantage for organisations, not as a right belonging to the individuals whose lives are affected by algorithmic decisions.

The Stanford AI Index Report 2024 found that 44 per cent of surveyed organisations identified transparency and explainability as key concerns regarding AI adoption. But look at that statistic carefully. It measures corporate concern about adoption barriers, not citizen concern about algorithmic justice. The worry is that unexplainable AI might slow enterprise deployment, not that it might harm people. Meanwhile, the same report noted that 233 documented AI-related incidents occurred in 2024, a figure that represents not merely a statistical increase but what Stanford described as “a fundamental shift in the threat landscape facing organisations that deploy AI systems.”

Healthcare Algorithms and the 90 Per Cent Error Rate

Perhaps nowhere is the tension between corporate explainability-as-feature and citizen explainability-as-right more acute than in healthcare. In November 2023, a class action lawsuit was filed against UnitedHealth Group alleging that its subsidiary NaviHealth used an AI algorithm called nH Predict to deny elderly patients medically necessary post-acute care. The lawsuit claimed the algorithm had a 90 per cent error rate, based on the proportion of denials that were reversed on appeal, and that UnitedHealth pressured clinical employees to keep patient rehabilitation stays within one per cent of the algorithm's projections. Internal documents revealed that managers set explicit targets for clinical staff to adhere to the algorithm's output, creating a system in which machine-generated projections effectively overruled physician judgment.

UnitedHealth responded that nH Predict was not used to make coverage decisions but rather served as “a guide to help us inform providers, families and other caregivers about what sort of assistance and care the patient may need.” As of February 2025, a federal court denied UnitedHealth's motion to dismiss, allowing breach of contract and good faith claims to proceed. The case remains in pretrial discovery. According to STAT News, the nH Predict algorithm is not limited to UnitedHealth; Humana and several regional health plans also use it, making the implications of this case far broader than a single insurer.

In a separate case filed in July 2023, patients sued Cigna alleging that its PXDX algorithm enabled doctors to automatically deny claims without opening patient files. The lawsuit claimed that Cigna denied more than 300,000 claims in a two-month period, a rate that works out to roughly 1.2 seconds per claim for physician review.

These lawsuits raise a pointed question. If a corporation offers explainable AI as a product feature while simultaneously deploying opaque algorithms to deny healthcare coverage, what exactly is being explained, and to whom? The enterprise customer gets a dashboard and a transparency report. The elderly patient in a nursing home gets a denial letter.

In February 2024, the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued guidance clarifying that while algorithms can assist in predicting patient needs, they cannot solely dictate coverage decisions. That guidance implicitly acknowledged what the lawsuits alleged explicitly: that the line between algorithmic recommendation and algorithmic decision had been deliberately blurred. California subsequently enacted SB1120 in September 2024, effective January 2025, regulating how AI-enabled tools can be used for processing healthcare claims, with several other states including New York, Pennsylvania, and Georgia considering similar legislation.

Credit Scoring and the Invisible Architecture of Algorithmic Lending

The financial services sector presents another domain where the gap between corporate explainability and citizen understanding is widening. A 2024 Urban Institute analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data found that Black and Brown borrowers were more than twice as likely to be denied a loan as white borrowers. A 2022 study from UC Berkeley on fintech lending found that African American and Latinx borrowers were charged nearly five basis points in higher interest rates than their credit-equivalent white counterparts, amounting to an estimated 450 million dollars in excess interest payments annually.

Research from Lehigh University tested leading large language models on loan applications and found that LLMs consistently recommended denying more loans and charging higher interest rates to Black applicants compared to otherwise identical white applicants. White applicants were 8.5 per cent more likely to be approved. For applicants with lower credit scores of 640, the gap was even starker: white applicants were approved 95 per cent of the time, while Black applicants with the same financial profile were approved less than 80 per cent of the time.

Stanford's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence programme identified a deeper structural problem. Their research revealed substantially more “noise” or misleading data in the credit scores of people from minority and low-income households. Scores for minorities were approximately five per cent less accurate in predicting default risk, and scores for those in the bottom fifth of income were roughly 10 per cent less predictive than those for higher-income borrowers. The implication is profound: even a technically perfect explainable AI system, one that faithfully reports why a particular decision was made, would be explaining decisions based on fundamentally flawed data. Fairer algorithms, the Stanford researchers argued, cannot fix a problem rooted in the quality and completeness of the underlying information.

In October 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Apple 25 million dollars and Goldman Sachs 45 million dollars for failures related to the Apple Card, demonstrating that algorithmic transparency issues in financial services carry real regulatory consequences. The CFPB made its position explicit in an August 2024 comment to the Treasury Department: “There are no exceptions to the federal consumer financial protection laws for new technologies.”

Criminal Justice and the Fairness Paradox

The COMPAS algorithm, developed by Northpointe (now Equivant), has been used across US courts to assess the likelihood that a defendant will reoffend. In 2016, ProPublica published an investigation based on analysis of risk scores assigned to 7,000 people arrested in Broward County, Florida. The findings were stark. Black defendants were 77 per cent more likely to be flagged as higher risk of committing a future violent crime and 45 per cent more likely to be predicted to commit any future crime, even after controlling for criminal history, age, and gender. Black defendants were also almost twice as likely as white defendants to be labelled higher risk but not actually reoffend, while white defendants were much more likely to be labelled lower risk but subsequently commit other crimes.

Northpointe countered that the algorithm's accuracy rate of approximately 60 per cent was the same for Black and white defendants, arguing that equal predictive accuracy constitutes fairness. This claim prompted researchers at Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Chicago, and Google to investigate. They discovered what has since become known as the fairness paradox: when two groups have different base rates of arrest, an algorithm calibrated for equal predictive accuracy will inevitably produce disparities in false positive rates. Mathematical fairness, they concluded, cannot satisfy all definitions of fairness simultaneously.

Tim Brennan, one of the COMPAS creators, acknowledged the difficulty publicly, noting that omitting factors correlated with race, such as poverty, joblessness, and social marginalisation, reduces accuracy. The system, in other words, is accurate precisely because it encodes structural inequality. Explaining how COMPAS works does not make it fair. It simply makes the unfairness more visible, assuming anyone is looking. In Kentucky, legislators responded to these concerns by enacting H.B. 366 in 2024, limiting how algorithm or risk assessment tool scores may be used in criminal justice proceedings.

This is the deeper problem with treating explainability as a feature. A fully explainable system that faithfully reproduces discriminatory patterns is not a just system. It is a transparent injustice. And selling transparency tools without addressing the underlying fairness problem is, at best, incomplete and, at worst, a form of sophisticated misdirection.

The Regulatory Patchwork and Its Widening Gaps

Europe has made the most ambitious attempt to legislate algorithmic explainability. The EU AI Act, which entered into force in stages beginning in 2024, establishes a risk-based framework categorising AI systems from minimal to unacceptable risk. Article 13 requires that high-risk AI systems be “designed and developed in such a way as to ensure that their operation is sufficiently transparent to enable deployers to interpret a system's output and use it appropriately.” Article 86 creates an individual right to explanation for decisions made by high-risk AI systems that significantly affect health, safety, or fundamental rights.

The General Data Protection Regulation, in force since 2018, already contained the seeds of this approach. Article 22 of the GDPR establishes a general prohibition on decisions based solely on automated processing that produce legal effects or similarly significant impacts. Articles 13 through 15 require organisations to provide “meaningful information about the logic involved” in automated decision-making. The UK Information Commissioner's Office has issued detailed guidance on these provisions, emphasising that a superficial or rubber-stamp human review does not satisfy the requirement for meaningful human involvement.

In the United States, the legislative approach has been markedly slower. The Algorithmic Accountability Act, first introduced in 2019 by Senator Ron Wyden, Senator Cory Booker, and Representative Yvette Clarke, has been reintroduced in each subsequent Congress, most recently in 2025 as both S.2164 in the Senate and H.R.5511 in the House. The bill would require large companies to conduct impact assessments of automated decision systems used in high-stakes domains including housing, employment, credit, and education. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and other civil society organisations have endorsed the 2025 version. Yet the bill has never received a floor vote. The statistical reality is sobering: only about 11 per cent of bills introduced in Congress make it past committee, and approximately two per cent are enacted into law.

Yet even the European framework has practical limitations. The EU AI Act's explainability requirements remain, as several legal scholars have noted, abstract. They do not specify precise metrics, testing protocols, or minimum standards for what constitutes a sufficient explanation. A corporation can comply with the letter of Article 13 by providing technical documentation that is impenetrable to the average person whose loan application was rejected or whose benefit claim was denied. The right to explanation exists on paper, but the explanation itself may be functionally useless to the person who needs it most.

The Dutch SyRI case illustrates both the promise and limits of legal intervention. In February 2020, the District Court of The Hague ruled that the System Risk Indication, a government fraud-detection system that had been cross-referencing citizens' personal data across multiple databases since 2014, failed to strike a fair balance between fraud detection and the human right to privacy. The Dutch government did not appeal, and SyRI was banned. But as investigative outlet Lighthouse Reports subsequently discovered, a slightly adapted version of the same algorithm quietly continued operating in some of the country's most vulnerable neighbourhoods.

Legal rights, it turns out, are only as strong as the enforcement mechanisms behind them. And when the entities deploying opaque algorithms are also among the most powerful institutions in society, whether governments or multinational corporations, enforcement becomes a question of political will rather than legal architecture.

The Corporate Incentive Structure Problem

There is a fundamental misalignment between what corporations mean when they say “explainable AI” and what citizens need when an algorithm makes a decision about their life. For corporations, explainability serves several functions: regulatory compliance, risk management, debugging efficiency, and marketing differentiation. IBM's watsonx.governance platform explicitly positions itself as helping enterprises “accelerate responsible and explainable AI workflows.” Microsoft's Responsible AI Standard is marketed as giving organisations “trust from highly regulated industries.” Google's Vertex AI emphasises seamless integration with existing enterprise data infrastructure.

None of this is inherently dishonest. These tools do real technical work. But they are designed to serve the interests of the organisation deploying the AI, not the individual subjected to its decisions. The enterprise customer receives model interpretability dashboards, feature importance rankings, and compliance documentation. The person whose mortgage application was declined, whose insurance claim was denied, or whose parole was refused receives, at most, a letter stating that a decision has been made.

The Stanford AI Index Report 2024 found that the number of AI-related regulations in the United States rose from just one in 2016 to 25 in 2023. Globally, the regulatory landscape is expanding rapidly. Yet the same report noted that leading AI developers still lack transparency, with scores on the Foundation Model Transparency Index averaging just 58 per cent in May 2024, and then declining back to approximately 41 per cent in 2025, effectively reversing the previous year's progress.

The market responds to incentives. When explainability is primarily valued as a compliance tool and a market differentiator, the incentive is to produce the minimum viable explanation, one that satisfies regulators and reassures enterprise buyers, rather than the maximum useful explanation, one that genuinely empowers the affected individual to understand and challenge the decision.

Silenced Voices and Structural Resistance

The people best positioned to challenge this dynamic from within the technology industry have often faced significant consequences for doing so. In December 2020, Timnit Gebru, the technical co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team, announced that she had been forced out of the company. The dispute centred on a research paper she co-authored, titled “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?“, which examined the risks of large language models, including the reproduction of biased and discriminatory language from training data and the environmental costs of massive computational resources.

Gebru, who holds a PhD from Stanford and co-founded Black in AI, had previously co-authored landmark research with Joy Buolamwini at MIT demonstrating that facial recognition systems from IBM and Microsoft exhibited significantly higher error rates when identifying darker-skinned individuals. That 2018 paper, “Gender Shades,” published at the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, found that facial recognition misidentified Black women at rates up to 35 per cent higher than white men. The research played a direct role in Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft subsequently pulling facial recognition technology from law enforcement use during the 2020 protests following the killing of George Floyd.

Google's head of AI research at the time, Jeff Dean, stated that Gebru's paper “didn't meet our bar for publication.” More than 1,200 Google employees signed an open letter calling the incident “unprecedented research censorship.” An additional 4,500 people, including researchers at DeepMind, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, signed a letter demanding transparency. Two Google employees subsequently resigned over the matter. As the Brookings Institution noted, because AI systems are typically built with proprietary data and are often accessible only to employees of large technology companies, internal ethicists sometimes represent the only check on whether these systems are being responsibly deployed.

Gebru went on to found the Distributed AI Research Institute, an independent laboratory free from corporate influence. But her departure highlighted a structural problem that no amount of enterprise explainability tooling can address. When the organisations building AI systems also control the research agenda, the funding pipelines, and the publication processes, internal accountability becomes fragile. And when that fragile accountability breaks down, the people who suffer are not the shareholders or the enterprise customers. They are the individuals and communities at the sharp end of algorithmic decision-making.

What Genuine Algorithmic Accountability Would Require

If explainability is to function as a genuine safeguard rather than a marketing feature, several structural changes would be necessary. First, the right to explanation must be defined in terms that are meaningful to the person receiving the explanation, not merely to the organisation providing it. A compliance document written in technical jargon for a regulatory filing is not an explanation in any meaningful democratic sense. The EU AI Act's Article 86 gestures towards this principle by requiring “clear and meaningful explanations,” but without specific standards for clarity and meaning, the provision risks becoming another box to tick.

Second, independent algorithmic auditing needs to become routine, mandatory, and publicly transparent. Cathy O'Neil's ORCAA represents one model, but algorithmic auditing remains largely voluntary and commercially driven. The entities most in need of scrutiny, those deploying AI in healthcare, criminal justice, welfare administration, and financial services, should be subject to mandatory external audits with publicly published results, much as financial institutions are subject to independent accounting audits.

Third, the technical capacity for explainability must be matched by institutional capacity for contestability. An explanation is only useful if the person receiving it has a realistic mechanism to challenge the decision. The UnitedHealth nH Predict lawsuit revealed that the company allegedly operated with the knowledge that only 0.2 per cent of denied patients would file appeals. When the appeals process is sufficiently onerous, the right to contest becomes theoretical rather than practical.

Fourth, the conversation about explainability must be reconnected to the conversation about fairness. The COMPAS fairness paradox demonstrated that transparency alone does not resolve structural discrimination. A perfectly explainable system that reproduces racial disparities is not a success story. It is a more legible failure. Explainability without fairness is surveillance dressed in democratic clothing. And the Stanford research on credit scoring noise demonstrates that even perfectly transparent systems produce misleading outputs when the underlying data is itself corrupted by historical discrimination.

Finally, the research community working on these questions needs structural independence from the corporations whose systems they are evaluating. The departure of Timnit Gebru from Google, and the subsequent departures of other ethics researchers from major technology companies, revealed the tension between corporate interests and independent scrutiny. Public funding for independent AI research, housed in universities and civil society organisations rather than corporate laboratories, is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for credible accountability.

The Trust Deficit That Technology Cannot Solve

The Ipsos survey cited in the Stanford AI Index Report 2024 found that 52 per cent of people globally express nervousness about AI products and services, a 13 percentage point increase from 2022. Pew Research data from the same period showed that 52 per cent of Americans feel more concerned than excited about AI, up from 37 per cent in 2022. Trust in AI companies to protect personal data fell from 50 per cent in 2023 to 47 per cent in 2024.

These numbers reflect something that no amount of explainability tooling can fix on its own. The trust deficit is not primarily a technical problem. It is a political and institutional problem. People do not distrust AI because they lack access to SHAP values and feature importance plots. They distrust AI because they have watched algorithms falsely accuse thousands of Australian welfare recipients of fraud, discriminate against ethnic minorities in Dutch benefit assessments, deny elderly Americans medically necessary care, charge Black and Latino borrowers higher interest rates on identical loan profiles, and assign higher risk scores to Black defendants in American courts.

Trust is not a product feature. It is not something that can be engineered into a dashboard or bundled into an enterprise software licence. Trust is earned through demonstrated accountability, genuine transparency, meaningful contestability, and consistent consequences when systems cause harm. Until the conversation about explainable AI shifts from what corporations can sell to what citizens are owed, the transparency will remain largely illusory, a well-lit window into a process that nobody with real power intends to change.

The XAI market will continue growing towards its projected 21 billion dollars by 2030. The enterprise dashboards will become more sophisticated. The compliance documentation will become more thorough. But unless explainability is treated as a fundamental democratic right rather than a premium product feature, the people who most need to understand why an algorithm changed their life will remain the last to know.

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References and Sources

1. Grand View Research, “Explainable AI Market Size and Share Report, 2030,” grandviewresearch.com, 2024.

2. Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, Commonwealth of Australia, Letters Patent issued 25 August 2022, published 2023.

3. University of Melbourne, “The Flawed Algorithm at the Heart of Robodebt,” pursuit.unimelb.edu.au, 2023.

4. Oxford University Blavatnik School of Government, “Australia's Robodebt Scheme: A Tragic Case of Public Policy Failure,” bsg.ox.ac.uk, 2023.

5. Australian Public Service Commission, Investigation Findings on Robodebt Officials, September 2024.

6. Amnesty International, “Xenophobic Machines: Discrimination Through Unregulated Use of Algorithms in the Dutch Childcare Benefits Scandal,” amnesty.org, October 2021.

7. Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens), investigation report on the childcare benefits algorithm, 2020.

8. Cathy O'Neil, “Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy,” Crown Publishing, 2016.

9. Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, “AI Index Report 2024” and Foundation Model Transparency Index v1.1, hai.stanford.edu, 2024.

10. STAT News, “UnitedHealth Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Algorithmic Care Denials in Medicare Advantage Plans,” statnews.com, November 2023.

11. Healthcare Finance News, “Class Action Lawsuit Against UnitedHealth's AI Claim Denials Advances,” healthcarefinancenews.com, February 2025.

12. ProPublica, “Machine Bias: There's Software Used Across the Country to Predict Future Criminals. And It's Biased Against Blacks,” and “Bias in Criminal Risk Scores Is Mathematically Inevitable, Researchers Say,” propublica.org, 2016.

13. European Parliament and Council of the European Union, “Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 Laying Down Harmonised Rules on Artificial Intelligence (AI Act),” Official Journal of the European Union, 2024.

14. European Parliament and Council of the European Union, “General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),” Regulation (EU) 2016/679, 2016.

15. UK Information Commissioner's Office, “Rights Related to Automated Decision Making Including Profiling,” ico.org.uk, 2024.

16. District Court of The Hague, SyRI ruling, ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2020:1878, 5 February 2020.

17. Lighthouse Reports, “The Algorithm Addiction,” lighthousereports.com, 2023.

18. MIT Technology Review, “We Read the Paper That Forced Timnit Gebru Out of Google. Here's What It Says,” technologyreview.com, December 2020.

19. Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2018.

20. Brookings Institution, “If Not AI Ethicists Like Timnit Gebru, Who Will Hold Big Tech Accountable?” brookings.edu, 2021.

21. Pew Research Center, “Growing Public Concern About the Role of Artificial Intelligence,” pewresearch.org, 2023.

22. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Guidance on AI Use in Medicare Advantage Coverage Determinations, February 2024.

23. Urban Institute, Analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Data, 2024.

24. Adair Morse and Robert Bartlett, UC Berkeley, “Consumer-Lending Discrimination in the FinTech Era,” Journal of Financial Economics, 2022.

25. Lehigh University, “AI Exhibits Racial Bias in Mortgage Underwriting Decisions,” news.lehigh.edu, 2024.

26. Stanford HAI, “How Flawed Data Aggravates Inequality in Credit,” hai.stanford.edu, 2021.

27. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Apple Card Enforcement Action against Apple and Goldman Sachs, and Comment to US Treasury Department on AI in Financial Services, 2024.

28. US Congress, Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2025, S.2164 and H.R.5511, 119th Congress, 2025.

29. Kentucky General Assembly, H.B. 366, Limiting Use of Risk Assessment Tool Scores in Criminal Justice, enacted 2024.

30. California Legislature, SB1120, Regulation of AI in Healthcare Claims Processing, enacted September 2024, effective January 2025.

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

In Summary: * It was good to see Caitlin Clark tonight with the Pregame Show analysts on the Sunday Night NBA on NBC, Basketball Night in America Show. I'm tempted to watch at least the first game of tonight's double-header, but it's more important for me to relax and focus on the night prayers. So I'll switch off the TV and get to that. Tomorrow's another Monday and I'll want to be up early to help the wife get off to work.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 228.73 lbs. * bp= 142/86 (62)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:10 – 2 cookies, 1 banana * 06:45 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 08:00 – crispy oatmeal cookies * 09:45 – cheese and crackers * 12:45 – garden salad, cooked meat and vegetables, white rice * 16:20 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:15 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:45 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials. * 07:15 – prayerfully read the Mass Proper for Palm Sunday according to the 1960 Rubrics * 12:00 – listening to the Rangers Pregame Show for this afternoon's Game vs the Phillies * 15:23 – And the Rangers win 8 to 3. * 15:30 – now watching PGA Tour Golf on Peacock TV, because I couldn't bring in the local NBC station OTA * 17:30 – watching the NBA on NBC Pregame Show. Hoping to see Caitlin Clark with the cast. I think I see her standing off on the side. Hoping she joins the crew. Okay, they just announced Caitlin is coming on the show.

Chess: * 13:50 – moved in all pending CC games

Entering my 61st Year

I turned 61 on Wednesday. I keep being told that I look 15 years younger, and I often feel much younger. But when I think about all I've gone thorough it sometimes feels much longer than 60 years.

I tend to think in decades. Nice, round tens. No idea why, I just do. So, in the last ten years, I've had the following happen:

Two children move out of my house and move hours away My husband lost his job in the ministry. My husband was diagnosed with early-onset Frontal Lobe Dementia Having to become the breadwinner and full-time caregiver to my husband Having to move my husband to a facility when I could no longer care for him Going back to the workforce after many years away as a pastor's wife and homeschool mom. Living as a widow while still being married

Some things I've found joy in:

A rekindled love of reading Starting a book club Finding my voice as I became confident in my job in a church Becoming the dog mom to a cute lab who totally owns me

And, finally, I'm beginning to dream again. Of what life looks life without Tom. Who I want to be. Where I want to go. And, serving Jesus and people in a way that uses my gifts and nourishes my soul.

Welcome, sixth decade. I'm grateful for this gift that not everyone receives. Amen.

… or: How to Stop Letting Language Mug the Absolute

First, the premise.

There is no second thing.

Not “you and the world.” Not “mind and matter.” Not “subject and object.” Not “awareness over here watching stuff over there.” That split is the original scam. The primordial accounting error. The cosmic typo from which all spiritual bureaucracy descends.

The self is all there is.

Not the personality. Not the résumé creature. Not the bundle of preferences that likes one song and hates another and worries about its taxes. That little manager is a paper mask taped onto infinity. By “self” we mean the one reality before division, before naming, before the mental customs office starts stamping everything as “me,” “not me,” “good,” “bad,” “past,” “future,” “problem,” “path.”

This self is not elsewhere. It is not hidden in a cave behind the forehead. It is not waiting at the end of ten thousand hours of posture correction.

It is the here and now.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The immediacy of experience before commentary. The raw fact of what is, prior to the mind’s hysterical subtitling. The hum of the room. The pressure in the feet. The flash of color. The breath before anyone calls it “breath.” The whole field, undivided. That is it. That is the gate, the kingdom, the treasure, the face before your parents were born. Old mystics wrote libraries around this because apparently nobody trusts what is this obvious.

Now the bad news.

The mind does not experience reality directly and leave it alone. It lags. It trails behind the living moment like a drunk court stenographer, trying to turn the ungraspable into sentences. Experience happens, and then language arrives a split second later and says, “Ah yes, let me explain what that was.”

This is the fall.

Not sin. Syntax.

Words are useful tools, but in this domain they behave like a counterfeit map that keeps redrawing the territory just after it has already moved. The real is immediate. Language is delayed. The real is whole. Language cuts. The real is present. Language packages the present as an object and ships it to a fictional observer.

That is how it takes you out.

At first, only a little. A faint labeling: “birdsong,” “annoyance,” “I am distracted.” Then a little more: “Why am I distracted?” Then the empire strikes back: “I used to be better at meditation. Maybe I’m regressing. Maybe this says something about my unresolved conditioning.” At this point you are no longer in reality. You are in a fan-fiction adaptation of reality, written by an anxious intern.

This exile happens by degrees.

That matters.

The mind rarely kidnaps you all at once. It escorts you politely. One label. Then one comparison. Then one memory. Then one self-reference. Then a whole scaffold appears: a center, a knower, an object known, a problem, a strategy, a future solution. Within seconds the seamless field has been diced into metaphysical lunch meat.

The farther language goes, the farther “you” seem to go.

But the “you” traveling away is made of the same language doing the traveling.

This is why the remedy is not philosophical sophistication. It is not building a better conceptual machine. It is not replacing bad words with holy words and pretending the cage became liberation because the bars are now Sanskrit.

The remedy is interruption.

You have to whack that shit down.

Not with hatred. Not with strain. But with ruthless clarity.

Every time language begins manufacturing separation, cut it.

A thought says, “I am not there yet.” Cut. There is only this. A thought says, “I need to stabilize the state.” Cut. This is not a state. A thought says, “I am observing awareness.” Cut. That sentence already split the indivisible. A thought says, “But how do I…” Cut. Too late. Back here.

Do not negotiate with mental narration. It is a very smooth talker. It will offer to help you transcend itself. It will bring charts. It will reinvent itself as “witnessing,” “integration,” “practice optimization,” or “subtle discernment.” Lovely costumes. Same smuggler.

Your job is simpler and more savage: refuse extra moves.

Stay with the bare fact before words.

Before “I am here,” there is here. Before “I am aware,” there is aware. Before “this moment,” there is this.

Do you see the trick? Language always inserts distance. Even sacred language. Especially sacred language, because people bow to it while being robbed.

So the discipline is not to produce the right statement, but to catch the moment before statement coagulates.

This does not mean becoming brain-dead. It means seeing thought as a tool instead of a throne. Use it when needed. Drop it when not. The problem is not that thoughts arise. The problem is that they are believed to report reality, when in fact they arrive after reality, waving clipboards.

When you notice you are lost in words, do not create a second story about being lost. That is just the snake growing another head. Return immediately to the untransmitted fact of the moment. Sound. Sight. sensation. Space. The whole undivided display. No commentator required.

Eventually something strange becomes obvious.

The here and now is not happening to you.

It is you.

Not your private possession, but your actual nature: boundless, centerless, already complete. The field and the knower of the field are one event. The seer and the seen are made of the same seeing. The self is not in experience like a pearl hidden in sludge. Experience is the self, prior to the mind’s habit of slicing it into witnesses and objects.

This is realization—not acquiring something new, but ceasing to translate reality into exile.

And because the habit of translation is ancient, the work is repetitive. Fine. Then be repetitive. Every time the mind manufactures distance, close the shop. Every time it spins a narrative, cut the wire. Every time it tries to build a tiny landlord called “me” inside the infinite, evict him.

No ceremony required.

Just this mercilessly simple recognition:

Only the self is. The self is this. Words trail behind. Their spell deepens by increments. See them. Stop them. Return.

Again. Again. Again.

Until even “return” is too much, because there was never anywhere else to go.

Photo by Lucas Alexander on Unsplash

You believe America was founded as a Christian nation. You believe God has a special plan for this country. You believe the Bible should inform our laws, that marriage has one definition, that the border needs to be sealed, and that somewhere along the way, we lost our values and need to get them back. You believe Donald Trump, for all his flaws, was the man God raised up to fight for those values. You'd never openly call yourself a Christian Nationalist. In your own mind you're just a Christian. Here's the reality, if you believe the points mentioned above, you are by definition and Christian Nationalist.

So what is Christian Nationalism? It is the belief that a nation's identity, laws, and culture should be defined by and organized around a specific expression of Christianity, and that this faith should hold a privileged position in public life over all other religions and over secularism. It is not simply being a Christian who loves their country. It is the insistence that the country itself belongs to Christians, was made for Christians, and should be governed according to Christian principles as interpreted by a specific political movement.

According to PRRI's 2025 American Values Atlas, a survey of more than 22,000 adults across all 50 states, one-third of Americans qualify as Christian Nationalism Adherents or Sympathizers. Among Republicans, that number is 56%. Among white evangelicals, 67%, the only major religious group where a clear majority holds Christian Nationalist beliefs. Christian Nationalism Adherents score overwhelmingly high on PRRI's Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale, 79% score high or very high, and 30% agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.”

And this is not a new idea. The 20th century is full of nations that tried it.

In South Africa, the Afrikaner National Party built the entire apartheid system on what they explicitly called “Christian Nationalism.” The Dutch Reformed Church provided the theological justification for racial hierarchy, arguing that God had created separate nations and intended them to remain separate. Future Prime Minister B.J. Vorster declared in 1942 that Christian Nationalism was an ally of fascism — what he called “an anti-democratic principle.” To be clear, the anti-democratic principle Vorster was refering to was liberal democracy. Specifically its emphasis on individual rights, universal suffrage, and the equality of all citizens. Through Christian Nationalism Vorster was in favor of an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist state. He wasn't confused about what he was building. He was naming it.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán's party won a supermajority in 2010 and used it to pass a new constitution anchoring Hungarian identity in Christianity, a framework he has used to consolidate authoritarian control, crack down on immigration, and suppress LGBTQ+ rights under the banner of defending “Christian civilization.” Between the World Wars, Hungary's earlier governments had pursued a nearly identical “nationalist Christian” policy, exalting heroism and faith while despising liberal and socialist thought. That experiment ended with fascists in power by 1944.

The pattern is consistent: Christian Nationalism fuses faith with state power, positions one ethnic or cultural group as God's chosen people within that nation, and treats everyone outside that group, whether by race, religion, or politics, as a threat to the divine order. It always promises to protect the faithful. It always ends up serving the powerful.

This is not a fringe position. It is the dominant theology of one of America's two political parties. And most of the people who hold these beliefs have never examined where they come from — or what they require you to accept.

But what if the Christ you're following isn't Jesus of Nazareth — the Jewish peasant who told a rich man to sell everything, healed on the Sabbath to make a point, and got executed by the state for threatening the social order? What if the Christ you're following is a Christ built by empire, refined by colonizers, and sold back to you by billionaires and politicians who need your faith to function as a voter turnout machine?

This piece is a mirror. If the beliefs below sound like yours, I'm not here to insult you. I'm here to show you where they actually come from — because it's not the Sermon on the Mount.

God Gave Us This Land

If you believe America was created for Christians, the next belief follows naturally: God gave us this land. The settlers weren't invaders, they were fulfilling a divine mandate. The westward expansion wasn't conquest, it was providence. The land was promised, and the people who were already on it were simply in the way.

This is Manifest Destiny, and it didn't die in the 19th century. It just stopped announcing itself by name.

The theological scaffolding for this belief predates the American founding by centuries. In 1452 and 1455, Pope Nicholas V issued a series of papal bulls, the Doctrine of Discovery, that declared any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be claimed, conquered, and exploited by European powers. The church didn't bless colonization after the fact. It authorized it in advance. When Columbus made landfall in 1492, he carried that authorization with him.

The cross and the sword traveled together because theologically, they were the same instrument.

In North America, this logic produced the Indian boarding school system — institutions funded by the federal government and run predominantly by Christian denominations, explicitly designed, in the words of architect Richard Henry Pratt, to “kill the Indian and save the man.” To be saved meant to be made white, English-speaking, and Christian. The three were functionally synonymous. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz documented in An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, the missionary impulse and the colonial impulse were never separate projects. They were the same project with two names.

That theology is still breathing. PRRI found that many Christian Nationalism Adherents believe America was founded as a “Promised Land” for white European Christians. Think about what that belief requires.

If God promised you this land, then the genocide of indigenous peoples wasn't a crime — it was a cost of fulfilling the covenant.

If God gave this continent to European Christians, then everyone who was here before them was a squatter on God's property. That's not history. That's theology in service of erasure.

And it doesn't stop at the founding. The same logic that justified taking land from indigenous peoples now justifies sealing the border. If America is God's gift to a specific group of people, then anyone who doesn't belong to that group is a trespasser — not just legally, but spiritually. PRRI's data bears this out: 67% of Christian Nationalism Adherents believe that immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” That's not immigration policy. That's Promised Land theology applied to the southern border.

The divine right of settlers didn't expire. It just evolved.

God Protects America

There's a belief that runs through American Christianity like a load-bearing wall: the idea that the United States has a special covenant with God. That divine favor explains American power. That God has blessed this nation above all others, and that as long as we remain faithful, as long as we hold the line on the right values, that blessing will continue.

Within the Bible belt its common to see homes with yard signs of 2 Chronicles 7:14,

if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

This is American exceptionalism as theology. And it does more political work than almost any other belief in the Christian Nationalist toolkit.

If God protects America, then American military power is righteous by definition. It’s God’s will for the military industrial complex to exist. It’s even God’s desire that America has an unhealthy obsession with guns and military might.

Every war becomes a holy war, or at least a justified one. Every foreign intervention is providence in action. You don't need to wrestle with the morality of drone strikes or the civilian body count of a twenty-year occupation if you believe the nation conducting it is operating under divine mandate. The flag and the cross fuse into a single symbol, and questioning one feels like betraying the other.

But the real damage this belief does is economic, not military.

If God blesses America, then America's economic system must be part of that blessing. Capitalism becomes sacred — not just a way of organizing markets but a reflection of divine order. The rich are rich because God favored them. The poor are poor because something went wrong in their relationship with God — not enough faith, not enough discipline, not enough bootstraps. Prosperity theology is just “God protects America” applied to your bank account.

I've written about this before. In Why I'm Anti-Capitalist and The Master, The Lord, The Boss, I traced how capitalism requires an exploited underclass — how the master became the lord became the boss, but the fundamental relationship between owners and workers never changed. Christian Nationalism provides the theological cover for that relationship. It sanctifies the hierarchy. If God ordained this nation and blessed its systems, then the systems must be good — and anyone who challenges them isn't just wrong, they're ungodly.

This is why Christian Nationalism and class politics are inseparable. The belief that God protects America functions as the invisible fence around economic critique. You can't question capitalism if you believe God built it. You can't challenge the billionaire class if you believe wealth is a sign of divine favor. You can't demand a living wage if you believe poverty is a spiritual problem rather than a structural one.

And the data confirms how tightly these beliefs cluster together. Christian Nationalism Adherents don't just score high on authoritarianism and support political violence — they are overwhelmingly aligned with the political party that fights minimum wage increases, guts labor protections, and hands tax cuts to corporations while telling working people to pray harder. The theology and the economics aren't separate. They never were. “God protects America” is the story the ruling class tells so you'll protect them instead.

Christian Values Should Be Embedded in Government

Of all the beliefs on this list, this one sounds the most reasonable. Who wouldn't want values in government? Who wouldn't want leaders guided by something deeper than poll numbers and donor lists?

But “Christian values in government” is doing a very specific kind of work. It doesn't mean love your neighbor. It doesn't mean welcome the stranger. It doesn't mean blessed are the poor. It means one expression of one religion gets to write the rules for everyone else. For adherents to that religion it also means anyone who resists is an enemy of the state and God.

In practice, “Christian values in government” means banning books from school libraries. It means posting the Ten Commandments in public classrooms. It means criminalizing reproductive healthcare. It means defining marriage for people whose marriages are none of your business. It means building a legal architecture that privileges a conservative Protestant worldview while calling it “freedom.”

And none of this is happening by accident. It's being organized, funded, and scaled.

Kyle Spencer documented this machinery in Raising Them Right. What she found was a tightly organized, heavily funded ultraconservative initiative to transform American culture from the ground up — not through grassroots belief but through billionaire-backed organizations using social media, celebrity influencers, and campus activism to radicalize young people into the far-right fold. Figures like Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA, started with economics and small government but evolved into full-throated Christian Nationalism — opposing reproductive rights, rejecting marriage equality, championing “traditional values,” and insisting Christianity should lead the country.

Spencer found that conservative donors spend more than three times as much on youth activism and education every year as their liberal counterparts.

This isn't a movement rising organically from the pews. It's propaganda disguised in Bible verses being spewed from the pulpit.

The beliefs get preached in churches. The funding comes from billionaires. The legislation gets written by think tanks. And the voters who carry it to the ballot box believe they’re doing good Christian work.

PRRI's data shows what this machinery produces. Christian Nationalism Adherents don't just hold theological beliefs — they hold political ones that cluster together with striking consistency. Majorities believe immigrants are “invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Majorities support deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without due process. Majorities support stripping U.S. citizens of their citizenship if they're “determined to be a threat.” Nearly 80% score high on right-wing authoritarianism scales. These aren't prayer requests. They're policy positions — ones that would be at home in Orbán's Hungary or apartheid South Africa.

“Christian values in government” is the most dangerous belief on this list because it's the one that sounds the most like common sense. But when you trace what it actually produces — who funds it, who benefits from it, and what it does to the people on the wrong side of it — it's not values at all. It's a theocratic project dressed in the language of faith, and the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount would not recognize a single thing about it.

A Faith Made for Power, Not People

Every belief examined in this piece follows the same pattern. “America was created for Christians” serves the myth of a chosen people. “God gave us this land” sanctifies conquest. “God protects America” baptizes capitalism. “Christian values should be embedded in government” builds the theocratic infrastructure to enforce it all. Each belief sounds like faith. Each one functions as politics. And none of them — not a single one — comes from the mouth of the Jewish peasant who said blessed are the poor, who told his followers to sell their possessions and give to the needy.

If these are your beliefs, your religion is rooted in empire, capitalism, and whiteness, not Jesus. To be fair, Christianity is a religion of empire, America didn’t create Christian Nationalism, we simply remade it in our image. We wrapped it in stadium-style worship, energetic preaching, and a call to biblical fidelity.

This isn't a conclusion I reached from the outside. I spent fifteen years as an evangelical pastor. I preached these systems. I built my life inside them. I defended the Christ of empire because I didn't know there was another one. When I finally couldn't reconcile what I was preaching with what I was reading in the Gospels, I didn't just leave a church. I left the entire tradition.

And here's the irony that still hits me: to actually live the values of the Sermon on the Mount — nonviolence, radical generosity, suspicion of wealth and power, solidarity with the marginalized — I had to walk away from Christianity altogether. I found those values in Zen, which teaches direct experience over doctrine and has no interest in converting anyone. I found them in Taoism, which distrusts hierarchy and institutional authority by design. I found them in anarchism, which insists that no one — no state, no church, no ruling class — has the right to dominate another person's life. Every one of these traditions is anti-dogma, anti-hierarchy, and opposed to the logic of conquest. The Sermon on the Mount would fit comfortably in any of them. It has never fit comfortably in the Christianity of church history.

Christian Nationalism is not a corruption of the faith. As I argued in From Constantine to Trump, it is the faith, the one that was actually built, not the one that Christianity likes to advertise. The revolutionary Jesus was always the cover story. The institution was always the product.

The question isn't whether you're a Christian Nationalist. The data suggests that if you're an evangelical in America, you have conformed and are most comfortable in white culture, you vote Republican, and your treatment of any outside group shows your fidelity to ‘make America great again.’

The question is whether you're willing to look at the beliefs you hold, trace where they actually come from, and decide if the Christ you're following is the one who taught the Sermon on the Mount, or the one the empire built to make sure no one ever took that sermon seriously.

Det var i en skov i Brøndby at det første gang stod klart for mig at jeg var syg i hovedet. Jeg forstod aldrig hvorfor man havde lagt et Psykiatrisk Center et så ufremkommeligt sted, men måske tænkte man at psykisk syge mennesker har bil – eller måske bare at der bor mange af dem på Vestegnen. Når jeg stod af S-toget med min cykel på Brøndbyøster, prøvede jeg altid at ligge mærke til om der var andre der cyklede samme vej sydpå, ned til skoven. Det var der aldrig.

1.

At jeg var sindssyg, gik op for mig på et bestemt tidspunkt i samtalen med den psykolog der skulle udrede mig. Han var på min egen alder, og det var lidt underligt i sig selv, men han havde en lidt kejtet intellektuel alvor som gjorde ham troværdig. Måske var det noget han tillagde sig overfor mig for at have lidt etos. Vi kunne have været venner hvis vi havde mødtes på en højskole eller noget lignende, tænkte jeg. Bygningerne var i ét plan, og de lignede næsten en feriekoloni eller måske et kursuscenter da de lå i skovbrynet med træer omkring sig. Psykologen hentede mig altid nede i receptionen, og vi gik ad en ret lang gang ned til hans kontor, og det var ofte lidt akavet at skulle smalltalke her, men det gik fint når vi så kom ind på kontoret. Eller det var fint for mig i hvert fald, han måtte tit fortælle mig at jeg skulle tale højt og ikke bare tænke over hans spørgsmål. Han gik rundt i Birkenstock, og jeg kunne ikke få øje på hans normale sko. Måske kørte han derud i bil i sine Birkenstock, tænkte jeg. 

Jeg husker ikke rigtigt detaljerne fra disse samtaler, med undtagelse af visse øjeblikke der står helt klart for mig. Det første er hvordan han med alvorlig mine spurgte mig om jeg blev svimmel hvis jeg rejste mig op. Jeg svarede at jeg da godt kendte til det at blive svimmel hvis man rejste sig for hurtigt, men at jeg ikke ligefrem ville sige at det var noget som karakteriserede mig. Jeg gik ud fra at det handlede om at udelukke en eller anden fysiologisk forklaring på tingene, men jeg har aldrig rigtig kunnet finde ud af det. Et andet øjeblik er den dag det altså gik op for mig at jeg nok var syg i hovedet. Han nævnte mens jeg næsten var på vej ud af døren, at de overvejede „skizotypisk sindslidelse“ hvilket jeg ikke vidste hvad var, men som jeg ligesom kunne forstå på den måde han sagde det på, at jeg var. 

Bagefter kørte jeg ud for at læse på universitetet, mest fordi jeg ikke rigtig vidste hvad jeg ellers skulle gøre. Jeg kørte forbi den muslimske gravplads der ligger klemt inde mellem Psykiatrisk Center Hvidovre og Ring 2-motorvejen, og så videre ind langs Folehaven. Det var sent på foråret og varmt, og jeg havde tit for meget tøj på i den periode, måske havde jeg endda halstørklæde på – jeg svedte i hvert fald. Så kørte jeg videre hen over broen ved Fisketorvet og ud på universitetet på Amager. Jeg gik direkte ind og købte frokost i kantinen, satte mig ned, googlede „skizotypi“ og begyndte at græde. Jeg kan huske at jeg i virkeligheden ønskede at der kom nogen forbi og så mig, både fordi jeg var ked af det og ønskede at der var nogen omkring mig, men mest alt fordi jeg ønskede et vidne. Jeg ønskede at mine indre problemer var noget man kunne se. 

2.

En måneds tid senere var det så officielt. Jeg var diagnosticeret. Til den afsluttende samtale sagde psykologen noget som jeg har tænkt meget over siden. Han lykønskede mig på en måde, og fortalte at jeg skulle være glad, for med netop denne diagnose ville jeg være berettiget til langt mere hjælpe end bare en almindelig depression eller hvis jeg havde Aspergers, som jeg selv havde nævnt. Det har han ret i, og København er nok et af de bedste steder i verden at få en psykose på grund af de behandlingstilbud der findes her.

Jeg havde, indtil det øjeblik, forstået „diagnose“ som noget næsten mystisk. Jeg kan huske hvordan der engang var snak på gymnasiet om at en af pigerne i parallelklassen havde „fået“ en diagnose, og alle historier jeg siden har hørt om nogen der har været diagnosticeret er blevet fortalt med dæmpet stemme og lidt indforstået mine. Det har altid forvirret mig – som om at ord som „diagnose“ eller „psykose“ bare var noget man skulle vide hvad var. I dag forstår jeg at det skyldes at folk ikke rigtig ved hvad de taler om.  

I det øjeblik jeg selv blev diagnosticeret var det som om jeg forstod hvad det ord egentlig betyder: en administrativ afgørelse i velfærdssystemet. Nu havde jeg i et par måneder gået ét sted med en reception, nogle lange gange, kontorer, linoleumsgulve og en scanner til mit sygesikringskort for at blive udredt, og i fremtiden skulle jeg så møde på en anden adresse, i en anden bygning med en reception, nogle lange gange, kontorer, linoleumsgulve og en scanner til sygesikringskortet. Diagnosen er i sin essens ikke så meget en sandhed om hjernen eller psyken, men i stedet en anvisning om en bestemt behandling. At blive diagnosticeret med en sindssygdom i psykosespektret havde for mig – strengt taget – ikke noget at gøre med hvad der sker oppe i hovedet på mig, men handlede om at jeg nu kunne komme om tirsdagen og snakke med en sygeplejerske i OPUS ude på Lersø Parkallé. 

Jeg skriver det fordi det forekommer mig at den erkendelse ikke er gjort af dem som kritiserer „diagnosesamfundet“: at diagnosen er en tildeling af en behandling, af hjælp. Den slags „kritikere“ begræder som regel hvordan alle nu til dags „får“ en diagnose, og de synes det er forkert uden helt at gøre sig det klart at hvis man synes at færre bør diagnosticeres, så betyder det praktisk talt at færre bør modtage behandling. Det kan man selvfølgelig godt mene, men så må man bare sige det.

Problemet er i virkeligheden at diagnosen skal opfylde to formål i det offentlige sundhedssystem, og det udgør derfor et problem som aldrig rigtig går op: På den ene side er diagnosen en videskabelig klassificering af forskellige symptomer under en fællesbetegnelse, lidt ligesom når en fællesmængde af forskellige dyr bliver klassificeret som den samme art. På den anden side er diagnosen en tildeling af rettigheder i form af politisk bestemte behandlingstilbud. Jeg har selv i længere tid haft en ulmende mistanke mod den her tendens til at gøre behandling til en særrettighed hvor man tildeler rettigheder baseret på en diagnose. Det fungerer sådan fordi det er en måde politikere kan købe stemmer på. Stem på mig og så sørger jeg for at du får ret til en behandling indenfor en måned hvis du har kræft i røven, eksempelvis. Den med kræft er selvfølgelig en der sælger godt, mens de psykiatriske diagnoser ikke gør. Men det er vist ved at ændre sig, heldigvis, fordi ressourcestærke forældre lader sig købe for behandlingsgarantier til deres børn. For mig betyder det forskellen mellem at have ret til et par eftermiddage på et slags kursus hvis nu jeg var diagnosticeret med Aspergers og to års specialiseret psykosocial behandling da jeg blev diagnosticeret med skizotypi. Sådan et dilemma står mange i da de symptomer der kendetegner de to diagnoser nogle gange kan forveksles. Jeg er skeptisk overfor den her måde at give specielle rettigheder på fordi man rent principielt kun bør anerkende én ret, nemlig alle menneskers ret til at blive behandlet. 

3.

Da jeg i efteråret, her flere år efter at jeg fik denne diagnose, var til lægen med noget udslæt, så kom jeg ind til en ung turnuslæge – igen en mand på min egen alder – og idet jeg gik ind ad døren fik jeg et glimt af hans computerskærm. Her stod „skizotypisk sindslidelse“ med store bogstaver henover skærmen. En slags advarsel fra systemet, tænkte jeg. Det fik mig til at tvivle på mig selv, for det havde taget så længe at få en tid hos lægen at udslættet var faldet igen, og der var ikke rigtig noget at se længere. Jeg havde taget nogle billeder på min telefon hvilket jeg nævnte for ligesom at forsvare mig selv selvom billederne faktisk var blevet ret dårlige og ikke rigtig havde kunnet fange udslættet særligt godt. Han sagde heldigvis at det ikke var nødvendigt. I stedet skulle jeg bare smøre fugtighedscreme på. Det var en anden af mine laster han nævnte som årsag, heldigvis: Vi mænd glemmer at bruge creme sagde han med en vis indforståethed, og det skal man huske når det bliver koldt. 

Jeg skriver det fordi der i den foregående folketingsperiode blev stemt om hvorvidt man skulle kunne „fjerne“ sin diagnose. Det ville på overfladen være at tage en rettighed fra os diagnosticerede, en rettighed vi godt nok selv skulle benytte os af fordi det er en selv der ville skulle bede om at blive revurderet. Men tænker man lidt videre over det, så ville forslaget reelt set give en rettighed mere til folk: nemlig retten til at blive vurderet af en fagperson som kunne erklære én „rask“. Efterfølgende tænkte jeg meget over om jeg ville tage imod tilbuddet. Jeg er en relativt oplagt kandidat til at benytte mig af det da jeg i det store hele er symptomfri i dag. Men jeg er kommet frem til at det ville jeg ikke. Til dels kan jeg mærke et lille stænk af ængstelighed ved tanken om at give afkald på en rettighed, for som jeg allerede har skrevet, så er det at blive diagnosticeret også at få tildelt en rettighed til behandling. Men den afgørende grund er at det er lige meget. Eller i hvert faldt for mig, for jeg er så priviligeret at jeg nu arbejder som fuldmægtig i staten og også ligner en der gør det, og jeg går i skjorte og pullover, og derfor møder jeg ikke samme mistro fra de læger der bliver advaret om min diagnose når jeg går til lægen.

Men jeg tror at de flestes interesse i at blive „fri“ for deres diagnose hviler på en misforståelse. For nyligt blev jeg tildelt en personlighedstype – den slags der består af nogle bogstavkombinationer – af en „certificeret coach“ på mit arbejde. Jeg lagde mærke til at en af mine kollegaer fik den slags personlighedstype som ikke er kreativ. Hun bekræftede sig selv i at hun altså ikke var kreativ selv om hun ville ønske det var anderledes. „Jeg ville ønske jeg var sådan én, men det er jeg bare ikke,“ sagde hun. Jeg var lige ved at græde, for det var så synd for hende at blive bekræftet af sådan en spade i stramme jeans og lort i hovedet i at hun skulle holde sig fra at prøve sig selv af med en kreativ hobby som hun ellers egentlig gerne ville.

Min pointe er at både diagnoser og personlighedstyper er tveæggede sværd der både kan hjælpe og det modsatte, og derfor skal man lære at håndtere det. Det er mit indtryk at selv diagnosticerede misforstår diagnosen og tror at det er en eller anden sandhed om dem selv, lidt som stjernetegn eller de her Jungianske typeindex-profiler som coacher laver. Selvfølgelig kan jeg godt forstå hvor folk kommer fra – jeg troede også selv at det ville være en nøgle som fik mit liv til at give mening at blive diagnosticeret med en sindsygdom, men det er ikke sket. Det har ikke løst noget problem at blive diagnosticeret. Det er selvfølgelig fordi det ikke er diagnosen som er årsagen til ens problemer, i stedet er problemerne årsag til diagnosen. Det samme kan man i øvrigt sige om personlighedstyper – de er ikke årsagen til, men resultatet af ens handlinger. Det har selvfølgeligt hjulpet at være i behandling, og en hel del endda, men det har – lidt skuffende – ikke fået mit selvbillede til at give mening. Det er derfor at jeg foretrækker at kalde mig selv for syg i hovedet, som jeg indleder denne tekst med, for det er mit eget sprog. Jeg synes at man skal lade systemet om at have sit eget sprog og sine ord for det her, og det skal man lade være med at lægge for meget i. I stedet skal man lade dem om at gå op i det, lægerne, sygeplejerskerne, psykologerne, coacherne og cheferne. Man skal lade lægerne om diagnosen og så i virkeligheden glemme den og i stedet prøve at indgå konstruktivt i den samtaleterapi de strukturer. (Ligesom man skal lade chefen om at spilde penge på at få lavet personlighedstyper, og så bare tage det som en halv fridag, når man skal på kursus med coachen.) For deres ord er tomme indeni, ordenes mening findes ikke i hvad de er, men i hvilke ting de får til at ske.

4.

Jeg skal ikke gøre mig selv for god. For jeg havde et begær efter at blive diagnosticeret. Et begær jeg tror at jeg deler med mange, både fordi jeg kan genkende den måde man taler om det, og fordi man kan konstatere det i tallene at flere bliver diagnosticeret, og det er svært at forestille sig den store stigning hvis de fleste rent faktisk satte sig imod at blive diagnosticeret. Det var til dels et begær efter at være speciel eller være interessant, at kunne bære dette mærke og at være en som folk taler om i et vigtig og indforstået toneleje. Desværre er det min erfaring at det ikke rigtigt fungerer på den måde, og det har ikke gjort mig hverken sej eller at jeg har følt mig glamourøs.

Min egen historie er den at jeg fik min debut – som det hedder på systemets sprog – i slutningen af gymnasiet.  Jeg har derfor levet med symptomer i større og mindre grad i omkring 10 år. Samtidig var jeg på denne forårsdag i Brøndbyøster, som jeg indledte med at beskrive, allerede i bedring og relativt velfungerende, i hvert fald i forhold til mine dårlige perioder. Fordi jeg havde levet med symptomerne i lang tid – og fordi mine symptomer trods alt var i den milde ende –, så havde jeg netop lært at leve med det, og mit formål var derfor heller ikke kun at få hjælp, men også netop det her begær efter diagnosen som en forklaringsramme for mit liv. Jeg troede at det ville gøre mig i stand til at forstå mig selv, og forstå hvorfor jeg havde levet mit liv som jeg havde, og hvorfor jeg havde opført mig som jeg havde. I lang tid troede jeg derfor at det handlede om at forstå. Det gjorde jeg også fordi det er noget jeg har hørt fra mange andre, særligt dem der bliver diagnosticeret som voksne. At det handler om at man er interesseret i at forstå og lære om sig selv.

Det er en løgn. Det er en løgn vi fortæller hinanden, og det er en løgn vi fortæller os selv. Det skyldes simpelthen at det ikke er muligt at være interesseret i sig selv på den måde. Der er ingen som er interesseret i sig selv på en afkoblet måde, som om det var et eller andet fænomen ude i rummet man kiggede på i sin kikkert eller funktionerne på ens ovn man uinteresseret googler sig frem til. Det har taget mig lang tid at forstå, og endnu længere tid at indrømme – begge dele er først lykkedes her lang tid efter – men min primære motivation for at blive diagnosticeret var at blive tilgivet. Jeg har i lang tid ikke levet mit liv på en måde der lever op til mine egne værdier. Jeg havde i lang tid ikke særligt mange penge og ikke særlig meget succes, og det ville sådan set være fint nok hvis jeg kunne sige at jeg gjorde hvad der gjorde mig lykkelig og fulgte mine egne interesser i livet, men det har jeg ikke gjort. Det har jeg ikke af den årsag at jeg aldrig har haft nogen klar ide om hvad de bestod af – noget som i øvrigt kan være et symptom på personlighedsforstyrrelse. Jeg har droppet ud af en uddannelse fordi jeg ikke kunne finde ud af det. Jeg arbejdede i to år på deltid til minimumsløn fordi jeg ikke kunne overskue at ændre på den situation. Jeg har ikke kunnet finde ud af at få en kæreste, ikke fordi muligheden aldrig var der men fordi jeg ikke var i stand til hverken at føle eller gøre noget. Men værst af alt er at jeg har forsømt at være lykkelig. Jeg har ellers haft alle forudsætningerne: opvokset i verdens lykkeligste by i en god familie der elsker mig, og jeg har kunnet få hjælp økonomisk hvis jeg var på røven. Men jeg har i mange år ikke kunnet nyde det, og har i stedet gået rundt og været nedtrykt. Det er den egentlige grund til at jeg ville diagnosticeres: jeg ville tilgives af en anden, af en stor autoritet. Jeg er ikke religiøs, men jeg misunder de kristnes ritual for tilgivelse, og måske kan man sige at jeg ville finde det i den sekulære autoritet: videnskaben. Jeg ved det ikke, måske er det for søgt, men det er også ligemeget, det var tilgivelse jeg ville have.

Det hjalp ikke, kan jeg så fortælle. Det skyldes at man i min situation bliver tvunget ud i et dilemma: Enten har man selv handlet som et normalt og raskt menneske eller også har man været sindssyg og er derfor ikke ansvarlig. Det kan måske hjælpe i kriminalsager at insistere på denne skelnen, men det duer ikke som personlig fortælling. Dette dilemma hjælper en i en periode, det gjorde det i hvert fald for mig. Jeg kunne sige til mig selv „du var jo psykisk syg i den periode,“ og så lindrer det lidt når man står og bliver ked af det over at man ikke har børn eller opsparing som sine jævnaldrende og føler sig fem-ti år bagude i det hele. Men det hjælper ikke i længden, for hvis man vælger den vej – vælger at sige man var sindssyg i den periode, og derfor ikke rigtig var sig selv, så afsværger man også friheden, fordi man siger at man ikke var ansvarlig for sine følelser og handlinger. Problemet med det er at det er uautentisk, og det kommer der ikke noget godt ud af. Det bliver en flugt, for jeg har jo levet mit liv, og det kan jeg ikke gøre om. Det må jeg acceptere. I stedet fandt jeg ud af at jeg kunne opløse dilemmaet ved at identificere mig med sindssygen: jeg var fri selv da jeg var vanvittig, fri selv da jeg var melankolsk, fri da jeg måtte gå hjem fra supermarkedet fordi de havde for mange pastavarianter at vælge mellem, fri da jeg smed indholdet i køkkenskabet ud fordi jeg bildte mig selv ind at der var små dyr i det, fri til i glimt at ønske mig min egen død frem for at leve videre. Det var da jeg forstod det her at jeg blev rask. For jeg forstod at jeg også kunne bruge min frihed til at tilgive mig selv, og det gjorde jeg så. Bagefter det brugte jeg så min frihed til at vælge at være lykkelig, og nu er jeg det.

There are seasons in life when a person stops needing polished words and starts needing something real. That shift does not happen because they have become careless. It happens because life has pressed on them hard enough to strip away performance. There comes a point when a person is no longer interested in sounding impressive, no longer interested in appearing strong, and no longer interested in pretending that everything inside them is calm when it is not. They just want to be honest. They want to be heard. They want to know that when the soul is carrying more than it can explain, heaven is not far away. That is where these words begin. Dear Heaven is not the language of someone trying to sound spiritual. It is the language of someone who has reached the place where honesty matters more than polish and where need has become too deep to hide behind appearances anymore.

A lot of people are carrying things that do not show on the outside. They are still getting up in the morning. They are still handling responsibilities. They are still answering messages, making decisions, paying bills, driving places, keeping appointments, and doing their best to be present for the people around them. On the surface, they may even look steady. But underneath all of that, there is another story. There is pressure in them. There is disappointment in them. There is fear that has been sitting quietly in the background. There is weariness that has moved deeper than the body and into the mind and heart. There are people who are tired in a way that sleep does not fix because what is wearing them down is not just physical. It is emotional. It is spiritual. It is the strain of carrying burdens that never fully leave the room.

That kind of tiredness changes the way a person moves through the day. It does not always make them fall apart in public. Sometimes it makes them more quiet. Sometimes it makes them look fine while something inside them is asking how much longer they can keep doing this. Sometimes it makes them more withdrawn, more thoughtful, more easily overwhelmed by things that once felt manageable. Sometimes it makes them wonder whether they are losing strength or losing faith when really they are just carrying too much for too long. That is one of the cruel things about private exhaustion. It can make a person question themselves when the real problem is the weight they have been under. It can make them feel weak when in truth they have been fighting harder than anyone knows.

That is why those two words matter so much. Dear Heaven. They are simple, but they carry something deep. They carry the sound of a heart turning upward. They carry the confession that the soul cannot hold itself together by itself forever. They carry the longing to be met by Someone greater than the problem, greater than the fear, greater than the silence, greater than the confusion, and greater than the present moment. Some people think prayer begins when the language becomes beautiful, but prayer often begins long before that. Prayer begins when a heart becomes real. Prayer begins when pride cracks. Prayer begins when a person finally stops acting like they are fine and lets the truth come out. Sometimes the truest prayer is not long. Sometimes it is not polished. Sometimes it is simply the soul looking up and saying, Dear Heaven, because that is all it has left.

There is something beautiful about the fact that God does not require performance before He listens. Human beings are often impressed by appearances. They are often moved by confidence, polish, and presentation. They tend to respond to people who look certain and sound composed. But God has never been fooled by surfaces, and He has never depended on them. He sees beneath them. He sees what a person is carrying before they know how to describe it. He sees the private ache before it becomes public language. He sees the part of someone that is trying to stay strong for everybody else while secretly wondering who is going to help hold them up. When a person says Dear Heaven, they are not trying to break through to a distant God who may or may not care. They are turning toward the One who already sees, already knows, and already understands more than they can put into sentences.

The Gospels make this plain in the way Jesus moved through the world. He did not build His ministry around polished people who had everything under control. He moved toward the weary. He moved toward the sick. He moved toward the grieving. He moved toward the ashamed. He moved toward those who were broken, confused, desperate, or tired of carrying what they could not carry alone. He did not recoil from weakness. He did not shame people for needing help. He did not tell suffering people to come back when they could present themselves better. He met them where they were. That matters because it tells us something about the heart of God. It tells us heaven is not cold toward human pain. It tells us the Lord is not offended by honest need. It tells us that people do not have to become impressive before they can come close.

Many people spend years thinking they must approach God with the right tone, the right certainty, the right emotional state, or the right amount of faith. They imagine prayer almost like an entrance exam, as though only those who speak well enough get heard. But Scripture keeps shattering that idea. Again and again, people cry out from weakness, and God receives them. Again and again, people come to Him with mixed emotions, imperfect understanding, and trembling hope, and He does not send them away. The Bible is filled with people who loved God and still wrestled deeply. It is filled with people who believed and still hurt. It is filled with people who trusted and still asked hard questions. That honesty is not a flaw in the story. It is part of what makes the story true to life. God did not give humanity a book full of polished spiritual actors. He gave us a record full of real people whose hearts were often bruised, confused, frightened, repentant, longing, and dependent.

That is one reason the Psalms have stayed alive in the hearts of people for so long. They do not pretend the life of faith is emotionally clean. They do not pretend that every believer walks through the world with unbroken calm and perfect clarity. They show tears. They show fear. They show confusion. They show longing. They show praise that rises out of pain and trust that survives in the middle of unanswered questions. The Psalms understand that a soul can be devoted to God and still feel deeply unsettled. They understand that a person can know truth and still need comfort. They understand that faith does not erase the human condition. It transforms the direction of it. It teaches the heart where to turn while it is still hurting. It teaches the soul to look up and say Dear Heaven, not because everything is fine, but because God is still God even when everything is not.

Some of the people reading this know exactly what that feels like. They know what it is to live in the gap between what they hoped life would be and what life has actually become. They know what it is to carry disappointment that did not arrive all at once but built slowly over time. They know what it is to pray for one thing and watch something else happen. They know what it is to wait for relief and instead find themselves in a longer season than they expected. They know what it is to keep functioning while feeling as though something inside them is getting more tired with each passing week. There are disappointments that do not just wound a person once. They wear on them. They settle into the imagination. They teach the heart to brace itself. They tempt the soul to expect less from life because hoping has started to feel expensive.

That kind of disappointment can quietly change a person. It can make them guarded without realizing it. It can make them emotionally careful in ways that feel wise but are really just protective. It can make them pull back from hope because hope no longer feels simple. It can make them lower their expectations, not because they have found peace, but because they are tired of getting hurt. That is one of the sadder forms of pain because it does not always look dramatic from the outside. It often looks like calm. It often sounds like maturity. But underneath, it is a heart trying to spare itself from another blow. A person in that place does not always need a lecture. They need healing. They need someone to understand that the guarded places in them were not built out of rebellion. They were built out of accumulated disappointment.

This is where the language of Dear Heaven becomes more than poetic. It becomes necessary. It becomes the cry of a person who does not know how to carry disappointment well anymore and needs the Lord to touch the places that life has hardened. There are wounds that no human reassurance can fully reach because the wound is not just in the mind. It is in the inner posture of the heart. It has affected the way a person anticipates life. It has affected the way they pray. It has affected the way they trust. Only God knows how to heal a person deeply enough that they do not just function again but live again. Only God knows how to restore tenderness without making someone fragile. Only God knows how to revive hope without turning it into shallow positivity. Only God knows how to speak to the exhausted parts of a person in a way that does not feel forced or fake.

Then there is anxiety, which has become a constant companion for many people. Not always dramatic anxiety. Not always panic in the visible sense. Sometimes it is the quieter kind that sits in the background and never fully leaves. It is the mind that does not easily rest. It is the heart that keeps preparing for the next disappointment before the current one is even finished. It is the inward posture of bracing. It is the body sitting in one moment while the mind races ahead to all the things that could go wrong. It is the inability to fully exhale because something inside keeps insisting there is more to control, more to predict, more to solve, and more to fear. A person can look completely functional and still be living inside that kind of internal pressure every day.

When anxiety becomes familiar, it starts to feel normal, and that is part of what makes it so heavy. The person living with it often stops expecting peace. They begin to think this is just how life is going to feel now. They become used to carrying tension into ordinary moments. They become used to scanning for problems before they arrive. They become used to a restless interior world. Yet the soul was not made to live bowed under constant mental strain. Human beings were not designed to carry the whole future in their heads. They were not built to survive on fear and call it wisdom. They were made to depend on God. They were made to live from a deeper center than dread. They were made to receive peace from the One who sees tomorrow without being threatened by it.

That peace is not the same thing as denial. It is not pretending problems do not exist. It is not avoiding responsibility. It is not becoming careless. The peace of God is something stronger and better than that. It is the settling of the heart in the presence of a God who is not panicked by what panics us. It is the quieting of the soul beneath the noise. It is the ability to know that uncertainty exists without letting uncertainty rule the whole inner life. It is the grace to handle what is in front of us without trying to carry all of tomorrow at once. It is the slow relearning of trust. When a person says Dear Heaven from a place of anxiety, they are not just saying words. They are reaching for another center. They are moving away from fear as the master voice and toward God as the source of steadiness.

Loneliness is another burden many people carry without knowing how to explain it. Sometimes loneliness comes from physical isolation, but often it does not. Sometimes it happens in a crowded room. Sometimes it happens inside relationships. Sometimes it happens because a person has been through things they do not know how to put into language, and after a while they stop trying. They begin to live with the quiet assumption that nobody fully gets it, nobody fully sees it, and nobody really knows what has been happening in them. That kind of loneliness is heavy because it is not simply the absence of people. It is the feeling of being unknown, or of being seen only in partial ways, or of being understood only at the surface.

The ache of that kind of loneliness can cut deeply because human beings were not made merely to function. They were made to be known. They were made to be loved. They were made to live with connection, care, and meaningful presence. When those things are thin or absent, the heart feels it. A person may continue doing all the right things externally while internally carrying the sadness of not feeling fully met. That sadness often stays quiet. It does not always announce itself loudly. It can become part of the background of daily life. Yet God sees it. He sees the person who feels surrounded and still alone. He sees the one who has been strong for so long that they no longer know how to say they need comfort. He sees the one who keeps showing up while carrying the secret ache of not feeling understood.

That matters because being unseen by people does not mean being unseen by God. Being misunderstood does not mean being unknown. There are places in human experience that words fail to carry well, but God does not need our language in order to know us. He sees below language. He sees below behavior. He sees the heart before the heart can explain itself. He knows the history that shaped the pain. He knows the disappointments that taught the person to go quiet. He knows the losses that changed the way they move through the world. He knows the fatigue that has become part of the atmosphere of their life. He knows. That does not instantly erase loneliness, but it means loneliness is not the whole truth. There is still a God who knows us fully, and that changes the meaning of the silence.

Some people are especially tired because they have become the strong one in their world. They are the one others lean on. They are the one who keeps things moving. They are the one who shows up, handles details, absorbs pressure, keeps order, and carries more than most people realize. From the outside, they may even be admired for their strength. But there is a hidden cost to always being the one who holds things together. Strength can become lonely when a person never feels they have permission to set their own burden down. Strength can become exhausting when it is expected rather than supported. Strength can become a prison when a person starts believing they must never be the needy one.

There are people who do not know how to rest because they have been in survival mode for so long. There are people who do not know how to ask for help because asking feels unfamiliar or unsafe. There are people who are tired of being the one everybody assumes will be fine. Those are often the people who most need to hear that weakness brought honestly before God is not failure. It is not shameful. It is not spiritual weakness. It is the doorway into grace. The person who has been strong for everybody else may need to hear with fresh clarity that God is not asking them to keep performing strength in His presence. He is inviting them to be held. He is inviting them to stop pretending they can carry it all alone. He is inviting them to come exactly as they are.

This is one of the turning points in real faith. At some point, a person stops treating prayer like presentation and starts treating prayer like surrender. They stop thinking they need to impress God with language and start handing Him what they were never meant to hold by themselves. That is what makes prayer living and necessary. It is not a speech. It is an act of release. It is not the art of sounding spiritual. It is the act of becoming honest. It is the movement of the soul toward the One who is steadier than we are. It is the moment when a person says, in whatever words they have, I cannot hold this well on my own anymore. I need help. I need peace. I need mercy. I need strength. I need You here.

Dear Heaven becomes sacred in that moment because it contains both honesty and hope. It admits need, but it also turns toward God instead of shutting down in despair. It is not the language of someone who has given up. It is the language of someone who still believes there is a place higher to look. That matters. The enemy wants pain to trap people inside themselves. God keeps calling people upward. Fear wants the heart to circle endlessly around its own worst thoughts. Prayer interrupts that cycle. Prayer lifts what fear tries to trap. Prayer does not always erase pain immediately, but it changes the direction of the soul. It places the burden before a Father instead of forcing the heart to carry it in isolation.

That change of direction is not small. It is often the beginning of healing. Not healing in the shallow sense where every problem vanishes at once, but healing in the deeper sense where the heart starts breathing again. The person who has been closing inward begins to open upward. The person who has been silently drowning in thought begins to release those thoughts into the presence of God. The person who has been interpreting every delay as rejection begins to remember that God still works in hidden places. The person who has been convinced they are alone begins to sense that Heaven has not been absent. Prayer is powerful partly because it reminds the soul it is not self-contained. It was never meant to be.

The Scriptures are full of moments where the people of God had to learn that again. They had to learn it in deserts. They had to learn it in storms. They had to learn it in prisons, in caves, in long waits, and in moments when the silence felt heavy. Again and again, God met people in places that did not look impressive. Again and again, He proved He was not limited by the fact that the moment felt barren, confusing, or unfinished. That is deeply important for anyone living in a slow season now. A slow season is not proof of divine neglect. A hidden season is not proof that nothing is happening. A quiet season is not proof that God walked away. Very often, the opposite is true. God is doing roots work. He is forming something below the surface that will matter later.

Human beings are often impatient with anything that does not show results quickly. We want visible movement. We want immediate relief. We want something we can point to and say there, now I know God is doing something. But God is not limited to visible methods. Some of His best work happens in the hidden places of a person. He deepens trust there. He exposes false supports there. He teaches dependence there. He heals motives there. He steadies identity there. He shows a person that peace must be rooted in something deeper than changing circumstances. That hidden work may not feel dramatic while it is happening, but it is not empty. It is holy work. It is preparation. It is transformation that lasts longer because it was formed more deeply.

All of this matters because many people judge their season by their feelings alone. If they feel strong, they assume God is near. If they feel weak, they assume they are failing. If they feel peace, they think heaven is close. If they feel numb or troubled, they fear heaven has gone silent. But feelings, while real, do not always tell the whole truth. A person can feel overwhelmed and still be held by God. A person can feel tired and still be growing. A person can feel emotionally flat and still be deeply loved. A person can feel uncertain and still be guided. The presence of God is not fragile. It does not come and go with emotional weather. That is good news for the soul that does not feel much except pressure right now.

There is comfort in knowing that Jesus Himself entered the full weight of human sorrow. He was not untouched by grief. He was not distant from suffering. He did not save humanity from a safe emotional distance. He came near. He walked through rejection, weariness, misunderstanding, and pain. He prayed in anguish. He wept. He carried the full weight of a fallen world all the way to the cross. That means when a suffering person says Dear Heaven through Jesus Christ, they are not speaking into a cold silence. They are speaking through the One who knows suffering from the inside. They are speaking toward a God who has already come close in the most costly way possible.

That changes how we understand our weakness. Weakness is not always a sign that something is spiritually wrong. Sometimes weakness is simply the truth of being human in a hard world. Sometimes it is what happens when a person has carried too much too long. Sometimes it is the natural result of grief, fear, disappointment, or long waiting. The question is not whether weakness exists. The question is where weakness turns. Does it shut down into despair, or does it turn upward toward God. Dear Heaven is the answer of the soul that chooses to turn upward. It may not feel like a dramatic answer, but it is a holy one. It is the beginning of refusing despair the final word.

When that turn happens, courage can begin to rise again. Not loud courage that makes a show of itself. Not the kind that denies pain. Real courage. Quiet courage. The courage to keep walking with God one day at a time. The courage to keep the heart open when disappointment has tempted it to close. The courage to keep praying when the words feel small. The courage to keep believing that this chapter, however heavy, is not the whole story. Quiet courage is one of the most beautiful things God builds in a person because it is not based on appearance. It is based on rootedness. It comes from knowing where help comes from.

That courage often arrives gently. It may not flood a person all at once. It may appear in small ways. A little more steadiness than yesterday. A little more willingness to breathe. A little more space between fearful thoughts. A little more openness to hope. A little more ability to hand the burden over instead of gripping it so tightly. That kind of change matters. It may look small from the outside, but inside a life it can be the beginning of restoration. The soul that once only knew how to brace itself begins to learn how to rest. The heart that once only knew how to survive begins to remember what it feels like to trust again.

This is why honest prayer matters so much. It matters because it gives the burden somewhere to go. It matters because it places the soul in truth. It matters because it teaches the heart it was never meant to be self-sustaining. It matters because it reminds us that peace is received, not manufactured. It matters because it tells fear that it does not get to be the final voice. It matters because the act of looking up and saying Dear Heaven is itself an act of resistance against despair. It is the refusal to let pain become ultimate. It is the refusal to let silence become the same thing as abandonment. It is the refusal to let the present moment rewrite the character of God.

And for many people, that is exactly where they need to begin again. Not with a grand speech. Not with forced certainty. Not with some version of faith that sounds impressive but is disconnected from real life. They need to begin with honesty. They need to begin with the quiet truth of what hurts, what is heavy, what feels uncertain, and what they can no longer carry alone. They need to begin where the heart actually is. That is where God meets people. He does not begin with the false version. He begins with the real one.

So if you have been tired, be honest about it. If you have been afraid, be honest about it. If you have been disappointed, guarded, lonely, or worn down, be honest about it. Do not confuse honesty with lack of faith. Honest faith is often the strongest kind because it is no longer trying to protect its image. It is simply turning toward God with the truth. The person who can look up and say Dear Heaven from the middle of real life has already begun to move in the right direction. That prayer may sound small to the world, but heaven does not despise it. Heaven hears it.

And maybe that is the deepest comfort of all. You do not have to become someone else before you can come near to God. You do not have to stop being tired before you are loved. You do not have to understand everything before you are held. You do not have to force your heart into a polished spiritual shape before heaven pays attention. You can come as you are. You can come with the weight. You can come with the questions. You can come with the disappointment. You can come with the fatigue, the confusion, the loneliness, and the ache. You can come with two words if that is all you have left. Dear Heaven.

If there is anything this world has taught many people, it is how to keep going while quietly falling apart. It teaches people how to answer with “I’m fine” when they are not. It teaches them how to keep their schedule while their spirit feels heavy. It teaches them how to move through rooms with composure while carrying private storms that never get mentioned. After a while, a person can become so practiced at surviving that they no longer remember what peace used to feel like. They begin to think pressure is normal. They begin to think constant heaviness is just adulthood. They begin to think living tense is wisdom. But there is a difference between functioning and being whole. There is a difference between getting through the day and living with a settled soul. There is a difference between surviving life and walking with God through it. That is why the heart eventually reaches a place where it does not want another trick for coping. It wants relief that is deeper than management. It wants the kind of help only Heaven can give.

Some people have been trying to fix with logic what can only be healed in the presence of God. They have analyzed their thoughts, replayed their disappointments, examined their wounds, questioned their reactions, and tried to reason their way back into peace. There is nothing wrong with reflection, and there is wisdom in understanding what is happening inside us, but there comes a point when the soul needs more than self-examination. It needs mercy. It needs rest. It needs to be held by Someone who is not confused by its confusion. Human understanding can only take a person so far. Eventually the heart reaches the edge of itself. Eventually the mind runs out of answers. Eventually the person who has tried to keep all the pieces organized realizes they cannot think themselves into being unhurt. That realization is not failure. It is often the beginning of surrender, and surrender is one of the most important places a human being can reach.

Surrender is often misunderstood because people hear the word and assume weakness, passivity, or defeat. But biblical surrender is not collapse into meaninglessness. It is the holy release of what was crushing us into the hands of the One strong enough to hold it. It is the moment when a person stops gripping pain like they were built to master it. It is the moment when they stop acting as if every outcome depends on their emotional endurance, their mental clarity, or their perfect spiritual performance. Surrender says I am not the savior of my own life. Surrender says I cannot carry what belongs in God’s hands. Surrender says I need a strength greater than my own. That is not defeat. That is truth. It is the kind of truth that finally creates room for grace to move.

Many people delay surrender because they fear what it might mean. They fear it will mean losing control, and they have built so much of their inner life around trying to maintain control that letting go feels dangerous. They fear it will mean disappointment if God does not answer the way they want. They fear it will mean vulnerability, and vulnerability feels costly after pain. But the control they are clinging to is often the very thing exhausting them. The pressure to hold it together, predict the future, secure every outcome, and keep the heart protected at all times is not freedom. It is bondage with a respectable face. God never asked us to become miniature gods over our own stories. He asked us to trust Him. He asked us to walk with Him. He asked us to cast our cares on Him because He cares for us. Those words only make sense if we admit there are things we were never meant to keep carrying ourselves.

That is why prayer can become so life-giving when it stops being ceremonial and becomes real. When prayer is reduced to language without surrender, it may still sound spiritual, but it does not always free the heart. Real prayer is not just speech directed upward. It is burden released upward. It is fear brought into the light. It is the private ache brought before a God who already sees it. It is the refusal to live sealed inside ourselves. That is why a simple prayer can carry so much power. Dear Heaven may sound small, but if it rises from a sincere heart, it contains the whole movement of dependence. It is the soul refusing self-sufficiency. It is the inner turning that says I cannot be my own refuge anymore. It is the beginning of coming home.

Coming home is one of the deepest longings in the human soul, and not just in the physical sense. People long for the place where they do not have to perform. They long for the place where they can set the burden down. They long for the presence where they do not have to explain every bruise before they are loved. They long for rest that is more than a pause in activity. They long for rest in the deepest part of themselves. The Gospel speaks directly to that longing because in Jesus Christ, God did not wait for humanity to climb up toward Him through strength or religious perfection. He came near. He entered the human condition. He brought the heart of Heaven close enough to touch grief, weakness, fear, shame, sickness, betrayal, and death itself. That means home is not just a far-off promise for later. Through Christ, the nearness of God has already broken into the human story.

This is why it matters that Jesus said, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” That invitation is not small. It is not ornamental. It is one of the most compassionate statements ever spoken into human history. He did not say come to me once you have recovered. He did not say come to me when you have mastered your emotions. He did not say come to me when your faith feels impressive. He said come while you are burdened. Come while you are tired. Come while you are carrying what you cannot carry. The invitation of Christ is not aimed at the already untroubled. It is aimed at the weary. It is aimed at the people who know they need rest but do not know how to make it for themselves. That invitation still stands, and many people need to hear it again with fresh ears.

Rest, in the biblical sense, is not laziness and it is not escape. It is the restoration of a soul that has been living under strain. It is the inward relief that comes from trusting God enough to stop trying to be ultimate in our own story. It is the quietness that grows when the heart begins to believe it is truly held. That kind of rest is hard for some people to receive because they have lived under tension for so long that peace feels unfamiliar. When peace starts to come, they almost distrust it. They keep waiting for the next blow. They keep watching for the next disappointment. Their nervous system has learned vigilance. Their imagination has learned threat. Their heart has learned caution. So when God begins teaching them rest, it can feel like a slow re-education of the soul. It can feel like learning to breathe again in a way they had forgotten.

There is no shame in that slowness. In fact, slowness is often where the tenderness of God becomes most visible. He is not irritated by process. He is not impatient with healing. He is not standing over wounded people demanding instant emotional transformation. He is patient. He is faithful. He is gentle with bruised hearts. He knows the difference between rebellion and injury. He knows the difference between indifference and exhaustion. He knows when a person is not resisting Him, but simply tired from the fight. That is one reason Scripture says a bruised reed He will not break. God does not crush the fragile. He cares for them. He strengthens them without despising their weakness. He restores them without mocking the fact that restoration takes time.

That truth is so important for people who are tired of themselves. Many hurting people are not only carrying pain. They are also carrying frustration about the fact that they are still affected by it. They are disappointed in their own slowness. They feel ashamed that they are still struggling. They compare their current strength to who they think they should be by now. They judge themselves for being overwhelmed, fearful, or weary. In some cases they are harsher with themselves than anyone else has been. But shame is a terrible healer. Shame does not restore the heart. It drives the wound deeper. Grace is what heals. Truth spoken with mercy is what heals. The patient presence of God is what heals. The person who has become angry at their own weakness may need to hear that God is not standing over them with the disgust they fear. He is drawing near with compassion.

When the heart begins to believe that, something starts to soften. The person who has been fighting themselves can begin to receive help instead. The person who has been endlessly judging their emotions can begin to bring those emotions honestly before God. The person who has been exhausted by trying to be stronger can begin to discover that God’s strength does not arrive through self-hatred. It arrives through dependence. It arrives through abiding. It arrives through surrender. This does not mean discipline stops mattering or choices stop mattering, but it does mean grace comes first. The Christian life is not built on our ability to generate enough inner power to impress God. It is built on Christ. It is built on receiving what God gives. It is built on the Spirit strengthening what we could not keep alive by ourselves.

This is also where hope begins to change shape. At first, many people think hope means getting the exact outcome they asked for. They tie hope tightly to one resolution, one answered prayer, one open door, one change in circumstances. There is nothing wrong with longing for those things. Scripture is full of real requests and real desires. But over time, if a person walks with God long enough, hope begins to deepen. It becomes larger than one outcome. It becomes confidence in the character of God. It becomes trust that even when the path is not what we expected, we are not abandoned on it. It becomes the quiet conviction that the Lord can still redeem, still guide, still sustain, still form, and still bring good out of what looked like only loss. That deeper hope cannot be shattered as easily because it is no longer resting on one narrow possibility. It is resting on God Himself.

That kind of hope is powerful in slow seasons because slow seasons try to convince a person that nothing meaningful is happening. They whisper that because there is no dramatic breakthrough, nothing is changing. They whisper that because relief has not come quickly, relief is not coming. They whisper that because the burden is still felt, Heaven must not be near. But those whispers are lies. God does not measure progress only through sudden visible change. Often the most important changes are hidden at first. A heart that once would have collapsed begins to endure with greater steadiness. A mind once ruled by panic begins to find moments of calm. A person who once sealed themselves off begins to open again in prayer. A wounded soul that once only knew how to brace begins to learn how to trust. These changes may not announce themselves with spectacle, but they are real. They are evidence that grace is at work.

Sometimes the best thing God gives in a hard season is not immediate escape from it, but a different way of standing in it. That may sound smaller than what we want, but it is not small at all. To stand in a hard place with a steadier heart, with cleaner vision, with less panic, with more faith, with deeper peace, and with a greater sense of God’s nearness is no tiny gift. It is profound. It can change the whole inner experience of the season. The burden may still be real, but it no longer rules the soul in the same way. The questions may still exist, but they no longer devour peace as easily. The road may still be hard, but the person is no longer walking it as though abandoned. That is part of how God sustains His people. He does not always remove the valley immediately. Often He meets them in it and teaches them what they could not have learned on easier ground.

That does not mean believers must glorify pain or pretend suffering is beautiful in itself. Pain is pain. Grief is grief. Disappointment hurts. Anxiety wears on the mind. Loneliness cuts deeply. Hard seasons are hard. We do not need to romanticize them in order to be faithful. But we can say this with confidence: none of those things has the right to become greater than God in our interpretation of reality. They are real, but they are not ultimate. They are weighty, but they are not the throne. God remains God in the middle of them. His character is not rewritten by the chapter we are in. His mercy is not undone by our exhaustion. His presence is not erased by our numbness. His faithfulness is not canceled by our disappointment. That is why even a bruised soul can still say Dear Heaven with sincerity. It still knows, however faintly, where help comes from.

And once a person remembers where help comes from, they begin to lift their eyes differently. They may still be tired, but they are not only looking inward anymore. They may still have questions, but they are not circling endlessly inside themselves. They may still feel weak, but weakness is no longer the whole definition of the moment. They are turning. They are lifting. They are bringing their real life before God. That movement matters. It matters more than people realize because despair thrives when the soul remains folded in on itself. Despair grows in sealed rooms. Prayer opens a window. Worship opens a window. Scripture opens a window. Honest surrender opens a window. Suddenly there is air again. Suddenly the person is not trapped entirely inside the echo of their own fear.

This is also why community matters, though many tired people resist it. They have often been hurt, disappointed, or simply too weary to explain themselves, so they pull back. Sometimes they tell themselves it is easier that way, and sometimes in the short term it is. But isolation can deepen what grace is trying to heal. God often brings comfort through His presence directly, but He also brings it through people, through wise words, through compassionate presence, through the body of Christ, through those who know how to sit beside another person without trying to rush their healing. The heart that says Dear Heaven may also need to let God answer some of that cry through human vessels of love and support. There is humility in that too. There is surrender in allowing ourselves to be helped.

Yet even when human help is thin, the soul is not left without hope. One of the most important truths a person can learn is that the Lord is able to sustain them even in places where other support feels scarce. He can keep a person alive inwardly through seasons that would have crushed them if they were left only to themselves. He can preserve a flame when everything around it feels cold. He can renew strength in ways that are almost quiet enough to miss if we are not paying attention. Many people look back later and realize God carried them through days they never would have survived by their own resources. At the time, all they knew was that they kept getting up. They kept breathing. They kept moving. Later they see it more clearly. Mercy was there. Strength was there. Bread was there for that day. God was not absent at all. He was holding them in ways they were too tired to recognize at the time.

This is why gratitude becomes possible even before the season fully changes. Not shallow gratitude that denies reality, but deeper gratitude that notices grace inside reality. Gratitude for the fact that God is still listening. Gratitude for the fact that Christ is still near to the weary. Gratitude for the fact that the heart can still turn upward at all. Gratitude for the moments of peace that do break through. Gratitude for the people who do stay. Gratitude for the strength to keep taking the next step. Gratitude for the truth that what feels unfinished is not the same as hopeless. In this way, gratitude becomes part of how the soul resists despair. It reminds the heart that darkness has not swallowed everything. There is still mercy. There is still goodness. There is still God.

As all of this deepens, the words Dear Heaven begin to mean even more. At first they may be mainly the cry of a tired heart. Later they become the language of trust. Later they become the reflex of a soul that has learned where to go first. Later they become a way of living with open dependence on God. The person who once only whispered them in desperation begins to speak them in surrender, in worship, in gratitude, and in expectation. The same words remain, but the life inside them grows richer. That is part of spiritual maturity. It is not moving beyond dependence. It is growing more at home in it. It is not learning how to need God less. It is learning how to come to Him more quickly, more honestly, and more fully.

So if this season has left you tired, do not despise the simplicity of your prayer. Do not think it is too small because it is not polished. Do not assume Heaven hears less just because your words are plain. God has always known how to hear the cries that come from the deepest places. He knows how to hear what breaks before it becomes beautiful. He knows how to hear a soul that cannot make a speech but can still turn toward Him. He knows how to receive the exhausted, the frightened, the disappointed, the grieving, and the guarded. He knows how to gather what life has scattered. He knows how to heal what shame kept hidden. He knows how to strengthen what feels too weak to keep pretending.

And if you are reading this from the middle of a season that still hurts, let this settle into you. You do not have to become less human in order to walk closely with God. You do not have to erase your ache before you can come near. You do not have to wait until your emotions improve before you are worthy of mercy. The Lord meets people in the truth of where they are. He meets them in ordinary rooms, in late-night thoughts, in tearful prayers, in tired mornings, in the quiet drive, in the moment after disappointment, in the loneliness no one else can name, and in the deep places where the soul finally admits it needs Him. That is where grace comes close. That is where Heaven leans near.

So let your heart turn upward again. Let the pressure be named. Let the disappointment be surrendered. Let the fear be carried into the presence of God instead of endlessly carried inside yourself. Let the guarded places be touched by mercy. Let the tired mind hear again that peace is still possible. Let the strong one admit they also need holding. Let the lonely one remember they are known. Let the anxious one remember tomorrow has not escaped God’s hands. Let the disappointed one remember that delay is not the same thing as abandonment. Let the weary one remember Christ still says come to me. And if all you have left is two words, then let those two words be enough to begin again. Dear Heaven.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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I’ve not had many opportunities to shoot on-field sports photos, so when Old Glory DC, our local Major League Rugby franchise, announced an open practice in nearby Fairfax, Virginia, I jumped at the chance.

Rugby is a predecessor to American football, played with a fatter ball and in most cases with 15 on a side. It’s also played without helmets and pads, which gives the sport much of its mystique. Back in my checkered youth, I played six seasons — each spring and fall for three years — with the George Washington University rugby club.

The word “scrum” comes from rugby, which in today’s parlance has come to mean a disorganized mob. In rugby, however, a scrum requires intense and extraordinary teamwork; see for example Old Glory DC’s forwards in a real rugby scrum:

I tried to capture in these photos the high level of skill and teamwork required of rugby players at the professional level. See the whole gallery in our TechNewsLit collection on Smugmug.

You will note that all of the images in the gallery carries a Creative Commons – Attribution license.

Copyright © Technology News and Literature. All rights reserved.

#fiction #films #SF

Warning: Contains spoilers

A man wakes up, alone, aboard a spaceship near a strange star. The man does not remember who he is, how he got here, or most crucially, what has happened to him. He soon discovers however, that the survival of mankind rests on his shoulders. Project Hail Mary is the story of how he responds.

Project Hail Mary the movie is based on the eponymous book by Andy Weir, known from previous novel-made-movie The Martian, which similarly tells the story of a lone man surviving against the odds. It continues a venerable tradition of movies about cosmic calamities that require a brave few to boldly go where no man has gone before to blow up an asteroid (Armageddon, Deep Impact), rekindle the sun (Sunshine), or find a new home for humanity (Interstellar). This time, our reluctant hero is Dr Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), disgraced microbiologist, who is sent to Tau Ceti to find a cure for an interstellar infection that is dimming the Sun. At Tau Ceti he joins forces with an alien astronaut, baptised ‘Rocky’, from 40 Eridani, who was sent to Tau Ceti on a similar rescue mission.

Project Hail Mary works on two levels, the macro and the micro, the cosmic and the personal. And despite its stunning visuals evoking the vastness of space, it is decidedly stronger at its smaller scales, in no small part to strong acting by Ryan Gosling, who must carry much of the movie on his own. As I noted in my previous review, good sci-fi doesn’t predict the future, but holds up a mirror to the present day. Project Hail Mary works convincingly as a story about hope, friendship, and collaboration, but it does require a fair amount of willing suspension of disbelief to get there.

The unavoidable question confronting both audience and Dr Grace himself is why he finds himself alone on a mission to save humanity. A series of flashbacks gradually reveals a backstory that withstands critical scrutiny about as well as a human withstands the vacuum of space. It takes an unreasonable number of accidental and unexplained deaths, combined with an astonishing lack of redundancy planning, to result in our lonely spacefarer, who then by a stroke of luck the size of Jupiter finds himself in Tau Ceti at the exact same time and place as Rocky. It is probably more plausible than the universe making me a cheese sandwich out of quantum fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, but not by much.

All of this is set in motion by an existentially threatening reduction in the output of the Sun, caused by the presence of a cosmic bacterium labelled the Astrophage. The Astrophage absorbs radiation at all wavelengths apart from infrared (not unlike chlorophyll, then) and is breeding on CO2 rich Venus while presumably covering the entire Sun in a shell of radiation eating bacteria. It is rather like that alien goo in Prometheus in possessing precisely the properties the plot demands: seeming faster-than-light spread, consuming the energy output of a star which is 1.5 million times larger than the planet on which it procreates, and then biochemically storing the output of a small fusion reaction in a petridish so that it can be easily harnessed as a stardrive to send our hero on his mission in the titular ‘Hail Mary’.

After Grace’s arrival at Tau Ceti the physics are fortunately grounded back in reality, enabling Project Hail Mary to elegantly interweave it with its narrative. The relativistic speeds attained by the Hail Mary have resulted in measurable time dilation, which means Ryland Grace is over 10 lightyears from Earth, yet has only aged 4 years since departure. Gravity on board is only available when under thrust or through an ingenious centrifuge mode, and the movie cleverly uses the presence or absence of gravity to telegraph what is going on. Orbital manoeuvres and the interior of the spaceship also feel authentic and produce some spectacular visuals, making it easy to see why the movie was filmed with IMAX in mind.

Dr Grace’s alien counterpart Rocky is also intriguingly and profoundly alien. Here we do not have some humanoid with pointy ears or purple skin, but a five-legged rock-based species (splendidly operated and voiced by James Ortiz), that has mastered the atomic level manipulation of xenon to construct vast structures, including the spaceship on which they traveled to Tau Ceti. It makes for a brilliant contrast between the messy complexity of humanity and the monolithic elegance of the Eridians, but it leaves the viewer with a lot of questions that the movie doesn’t so much not answer, as never even ask. I’m not an eminent exobiologist, but am nonetheless curious how Rocky’s species nervous system and metabolism function. Or how technology based seemingly on the manipulation of a single element produces the complex artefacts necessary for manned spaceflight. It is therefore somewhat of a shame that despite his putative past interest in alien life, Ryland Grace is astonishingly uninterested in Rocky and the world he hails from. We get an excessive number of scenes where Rocky and Grace bond over footage of Earth on the Hail Mary’s rudimentary holodeck, but there is barely any reciprocal interest in Rocky’s planet, culture or technology, and it takes until the end of the movie before Grace even visits Rocky’s spaceship.

Maybe Ryland Grace’s lack of interest is explained by how surprisingly human Rocky is, despite being an animated rock with a sensory apparatus based on echolocation. Although Grace has to construct his own universal translator to interpret Rocky’s vocalisations, it transpires that Rocky’s language is surprisingly amenable to English grammar and syntax, not to mention implausibly compatible with a human conceptual framework. Excepting a few recurring mistranslations that serve to remind the audience of the underlying language barrier, as well as for comic effect, Rocky passes seamlessly as American. Contrast this with Arrival, where the attempt to understand aliens who have a fundamentally different conception of reality is the point of the entire movie, rather than the work of a five minute montage.

Most of this can be forgiven because without the rapid establishment of common ground, the relationship between Rocky and Grace would never lift off, and it is here where the movie really shines. Ryan Gosling puts in an excellent performance, managing to strike the precarious balance between comedy and pathos in both the Hail Mary scenes and the pre-launch flashbacks. Gosling easily persuades us to emotionally connect with Rocky, an animated object with even fewer humanoid features than WALL-E, but who nonetheless evokes endearment and sympathy. This investment pays off across several moving moments when our heroes have to overcome the inevitable challenges and risks imposed by the harsh nature of space and the demands of the plot. In the scenes on Earth, Gosling plays the more familiar ‘outsider turned insider’ scientist, but without falling back too strongly onto one-dimensional stereotypes.

The flashback scenes back on Earth are also the ones infused with an almost surreal optimism, presenting us with a world where in the face of an existential threat, humanity does actually manage to band together to try and face it off. The international nature of the Hail Mary project is reinforced at every turn, showing us a global scientific community, Chinese cosmonauts, German administrators and Russian ground control all working together. The prominent shots of an American aircraft carrier are maybe a tad unfortunate at this particular point in time, but it would be unfair to hold that against the movie.

Drawing both strands together, Project Hail Mary is suffused with a profound optimism that acts as a welcome antidote to our present times. It wholeheartedly affirms that forging connections across boundaries, whether cultural, linguistic or technological, is possible, and that people will make the right decisions when it comes down to it, even if they sometimes need a little push to do so. The multinational cooperation to remove the Astrophage threat draws from a poorer cinematic tradition than the disaster movie elements of Project Hail Mary, but nonetheless recalls movies like Arrival or Pacific Rim, series like Stargate Atlantis, or videogames like X-COM and Mass Effect, all keeping a hope alive that we can work together across boundaries and borders to further the common good. At a time when a declining US empire seems intent on disrupting any attempt at global cooperation, reminders that another approach is possible are an unalloyed positive.

On the whole, Project Hail Mary is an eminently enjoyable movie with stunning visuals, a potent mix of comedy and scientific seriousness, and a heartfelt relationship at its core. Given its committed message of hope, it feels unkind to hold its basic premise of the sole, vaguely antiheroic man saving the world, against it. Nonetheless, it remained a discordant note for me throughout, diminishing the effectiveness of its emotional appeal through the sheer amount of contrivance deployed to fabricate a situation where this man – and as always it is a white, American man – must single-handedly save the world. If I was qualified to psychoanalyse, I might speculate that the movie is indicative of a profound anxiety afflicting affluent white American men who fear that even they no longer have any agency in our increasingly out-of-control world. The message of hope is thus tinged with a hint of frightened wish-fulfillment, complete with the stern Germanic mutti figure to take command and tell us that everything will be fine.

In the real world neither Germanic mutti’s nor metrosexual American men will come and save us. It will be a shared struggle, and insofar as Project Hail Mary inspires us to believe that humans can work together to overcome insurmountable odds and that every everyman will find it in them to do the right thing, while giving us some good laughs and cries along the way, it is a movie made for its time.

Notes & suggestions

• My unwillingness to accept the '‘single white male hero” trope has been sharpened recently by Ada Palmer’s writing on agency and protagonists in fiction, especially science fiction. This in itself draws on older writings, including Ursula K. le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. I have gone into this in more detail in my reviews of Mass Effect 3 and Andor.
• The theme of connection is also key to Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, and despite its more goofy superhero plot and self-referential B-movie vibes, I actually think it made the point better.
• Knowledge is power, which is why those in power so often hate science. US readers in particular may be worried about the attacks on science and scientific institutions in the US. Organisations like the Union of Concerned Scientists recognise the independence of science to democracy, and are fighting to keep scientific endeavours alive.

Mahmoud Darwish

At a bread shop, on the corner of a narrow Paris street, I sip my first coffee. The smell of bread mixes with the smell of coffee in the mornings, awakening in me the desire for a fresh life, a life just beginning, and a spontaneous peace with small things, and with pigeons who prefer strutting around among cars and passers-by to flying. I don't see anyone else sitting there with only his journals for company, but I feel I am sharing in the elderly ladies' enthusiasm for the detailed information they are relating about other people's lives, and the politely neutral responses of the pretty shop assistants and waitresses when male customers older than me flirt with them. I linger over my coffee to preserve an acquired sense of companionship with my surroundings, for a stranger has no alternative but to construct some kind of intimacy with some random place, and I have chosen this corner of the bread shop to form a daily routine, as if I have an appointment with hardworking memories that rely on themselves to grow and evolve. I abandon myself to thoughts about the history of bread: how was the first grain of wheat discovered in a green ear braided like a pigtail? And how did someone observe it ripening and turning golden? And how did it occur to him to grind it, knead it and bake it until he arrived at this miracle? I see fields far away in time and place and wonder how long this act of creation took. The smell of fresh bread rises into the air and I look at my watch, then come back from thousands of years away to a life just beginning.