The two faiths
There are two possible ways to take during our earthly existence. They proceed in opposite directions and generate completely different steps, choices, and human evolution.
One is the way of faith in power.
The supremacy of power is that it considers and defines itself as power. It is a kind of reverse faith. It firmly believes that it is something that it is not. Fearful men and women who need protection and guidance subject themselves naturally to power and defend it to the end because power offers to defend them and gives them a creed.
Jesus Himself describes the powerful of the earth as those who consider themselves the rulers of nations. Power is always presumed. It always derives from the firm belief of a few, a belief that is so firm that it is capable of creating an equally firm conviction in others who submit and obey, but in reality power is only in the minds of those who believe they possess it and in the fear of those who think they cannot live without it. The way of faith in power generates the religion of power with its own rites, laws, political scaffoldings, principles and worshipers. The way of faith in power creates the great ones of power, men and women who identify themselves as gods so that under the disguise of deities they are protected, honored, respected and feared by generations for thousands of years.
Behind their moral and constitutional masks, the powerful ones dominate, abuse, squeeze, rape, ravage and destroy peoples. The great ones of power exercise dominion through the force of their attraction that feeds itself with the two basic needs of humanity: the need to believe in something in order to respond to that innate, epistemic necessity of peoples to have convictions and beliefs to which submit and obey and the need to have safe, organized, planned bread.
These popular needs lead mankind not to want to perceive by itself, to think and understand reality by itself and, consequently, not to take action with its own heart and conscience. This results in a social psychological environment of ignorance and laziness which is the perfect condition for social training and the submission of nations. The fear and terror of not being defended or being rejected by power itself do the rest.
The men and women of the people fear power and sometimes condemn it, but if as they are fighting power they succeed in gaining it, they themselves immediately become its children and servants. History is full of revolutionaries who moved the masses to war and revolution to overthrow an established power and then took its place.
Once power has created this environment, it works strenuously and continuously to maintain the people's psychological and spiritual destabilization.
This effort is committed first and foremost to a capillary school system where mental training starts at an early age, then it continues in the political structures which must be permanently monitored for leaks caused by political, scientific, economic nepotism. Party constellations and political systems must be constantly and painstakingly maintained to ensure the dissemination of confusing information and global lies. It must measure and continually update the state of psychic and working prostration of the subdued through economic constraints, taxes, inflation, obsessive price increases. One of the most challenging tasks with regard to maintenance is the need to distribute ever more abundant doses of unjust justice, piloted laws, deceitful silences, distortion of reality. That is how both individuals and communities lose all possibility of independent and rational thinking.
And in this way nobody can know who, behind the mask of power, has power over whom, who obeys whom, who is subservient to whom, what is apparent, what is real.
The kings of the earth are earth and dust like all men, but faith in power turns them into credible masks that unceasingly satisfy the people's need to believe and submit. This makes the kings and rulers of the earth arrogant, swaggering, arrogant refined, irreproachable murderers of peoples and generations.
The other way is the power of faith. That is the way that Jesus offers to his disciples. The way of faith, the way of the immense power that faith has, true faith, the faith that sees and loves God for what He is, the true Lord and not that human epistemic necessity that makes god what God is not.
It is Jesus' way, the way that does not require human power, which does not require domineering, but serving. It is the way which creates servants of life and love, not slaves and subordinates. Servants without fear, without rulers, with no other protection and defense but God. Wise servants, aware of the power of love, of goodness, justice, sharing, of mankind's true well-being. Servants, not slaves; simple, not ignorant; good, not submissive; humble, not fools. Servants of God's kingdom, servants of the King of kings.
Even by following the way of the power of faith one can be great, it is in fact expected and even desired by Jesus. Jesus calls us to a greatness of the soul, an authority that comes from the truth, a "being great" because of the intrinsic utility of our person at the service of goodness and truth.
In the way offered by Jesus one can be first in the sense that one can really be important among brothers, a primacy granted to those who use the power of faith to be first in serving others.
The power of faith is to believe and love the Word of Jesus because He is the Son of God. The power of faith is also to believe and love Jesus as the Son of God through His Word. A Word that the mind and the heart can feel beyond any training or belief as the most consistent, perfect, beautiful, endless, true, word ever pronounced.
The power of faith is the power of the heart to believe in and fight for justice and true peace regardless of and beyond human power. It is the faith of the martyrs and the simple, an uncompromising but never fanatic faith, a simple faith, never stupid, a loving faith, never possessive, a faith that moves feet and hands, the heart and the soul to announce but never to colonize. It is the faith of those who feel honored to live and to have been called by God to live this earthly adventure without seeking any honor and greatness other than the glory of God and the joy of our brothers and sisters.