Movement I — Notice: The Unease Before the Name

Across the 6 years i lived in Berlin, as a Hong Kong immigrant, my experiences here had brought many eye-opening (or eye-rolling 🙄) moments of which can be months of late night story time that will shock or horrify the bejesus out of most of you. e.g. Social experiments turned into orgies, the blank stares at a person up and down beyond the comfortable glimpse, barraged by old Germans mistook me as “vietnamese” “stealing their jobs”, blatant cat-calling while i was with a date, IN FRONT ME; and attacked my unidentifiable heritage and stereotypes when it didn’t work… Just to name a few.

I make fun of Berlin at times that Berlin is just the European version of Bali for people to “Find myself”, exploring their sexuality, their spirituality, different versions of themselves they never thought of becoming. The city so historically liberal and anarchic, so freeing and hospitable to any type of personhood, sometimes you forget what does it really mean to be. Especially for a metal music enjoyer like me, the goths, punks, queer people, political dissidents, artists, musicians, and those carrying wounds that established society prefers not to see can find some room here. This city embraces the western types of outcasts like no other. I can vibe with it so easily because I recognized i am also culturally homeless

Yet somehow, something remains. Something inside of me somehow could not really grasp the conflicts and stagnations that has been brewing inside of me.

Where I Am Looking From

A Hong Konger who possessed the grassroot spirit of local Hong Kong yet richly formed by the western populist zeigeist and the context of Christendom, while carrying a family history shaped deeply by Buddhism. My father’s side is Buddhist; her elder sister even became a Buddhist monastic. I know what it means to belong yet not at the same time - A Third Culture kid. (Yet i feel even weirder cus’ i was born and raised in Hong Kong local system and both my parents are local Cantonese…) I know when relationships and abstracts carry weight more than just it's form and formality, the spirit behind things is perhaps what I am unusually sensitive to - Because of how pragmatic and functional Hong Kong culture envelopes, and how form and subject v. object with all its confines is what western cultures love emphasising ; Christianity (Westernized) v. Buddhism with it's internal v. external contrast; how contextually dense Cantonese culture is, with all it's tendencies to condense meaning, infer from context and 'read between the lines', and how adaptive and aggressive western cultures spread with it's straight progressive formalities, hierarchies and structures.

Things here in Berlin however… Always seem a bit uh… “Performative”. Some call it “try-hard”, some call it “lack of God”, lost, patriarchal, capitalistic, chaotic, "side-questing", whatever you want to call it. The moment i set foot off the FlixBus in Berlin, I already sensed and spoke to myself, “Woaw this place is a spiritual desert.” Yet I had no idea what that even means, until much much later when the ceiling broke.

“… I had hope the attacker was a Christian white person” (“kein Kanake… eine christliche, weiße Person”) and a laughter ensued. See Berliner Zeitung⁠. This was from the memorial after a Polish woman died of a tragic vehicle-ramming onslaught into the Berlin Pride Parade CSD 2026 with dozens injured. And the attacker was a known suspect whom has a radical islamic past, tried joining ISIS, was partially monitored by the police and had been released while his sentence of 22 months was deferred. See Tagesschau’s account of the legal position. I have friends who were couple hundred meters away and still processing what had happened before their eyes.

Now I am no white nor western worshipper, I was taught by my father at very young age to discern and suspect it, “Not everything western is good, Ephraim.” Jesus was a Nazarene Aramiac Jew (clearly not white) and colonialism brought so much devastation to the world, (I learnt that enough in Chinese history lesson), the west has yet not to fail to inadequately answer to their past to both to the once-colonized and their own people. Yet a woman, who came with their adult daughter to join a public event, was flattened in front of her eyes, and the best public respond one can have is… A blatant possession of hatefulness spun from the narrative your political ideologies so deeply dogmatic you can only see some white dude as the issue? What kind of western-centric bullshit is that?

What kind of spiritual dryness so bleak that could caused a death of a mom, a wife, a friend, a co-worker, a central figure to her own community, and much more, to be transposed as an instrument, to an emotionally-charged finger-whacking to a political enemy archetype?

What kind of system fails to intensify lawful intervention around a major event that Islamist propaganda explicitly treats as a symbolic target?

What kind of judiciary structure permits a known high-risk offender to be on bail without intervention while wielding knife "under partial observation", in a known targeted event? (FYI: Weapon carrying including knife is illegal in Germany, even if you retaliate for self-dense. See [insert law here])

I cannot claim to understand the expansiveness of the situation and the complex background roots that have led to this tragic event, nor the convictions of the deceased. But one thing I know for sure: She was with her daughter beside her, with relationships extending beyond what any report can recover. Her absence entered a family, a workplace, friendships, memories, routines, and rooms that will now feel different. The eyewitnesses and their friends that also have to endure and carry the weight of this pain, and the injured likewise belong to networks of people who's weighed upon what happened.

I had to stress that twice about the relationships because this is what I accumulatively observed - I thought it was individualism, i thought it was western-imperialism, post-colonial suicidal empathy, the "left", the "right", but the spirit was missing.

But maybe… Just maybe, that is the point.

The Spirit is Missing.

The modern West has become spiritually naïve precisely while imagining itself intellectually sophisticated. It often denies that ideas have spiritual weight, then often becomes possessed by them.

A meal carries family. A language carries hierarchy, affection, memory, and obligation. A tradition carries the people who repeated it. A public gesture changes one’s relational position. A belief does not remain hidden inside the skull; it travels outward into family, community, government, and the peace or disorder of the wider world.

The West increasingly looks at the contour of things while forgetting their spirit.

And by spirit, I do not mean the Western nor English understanding of the word "Spirit" - cue modern new age, wave-length, pusedo-shamenistic, frequencies, energy, hippie guru, auascaca nor that that every little thing possesses an Anima or Animus. I mean that human, human things and human-made things inherently carry an accumulated immaterial inner weight: intention, sacrifice, history, relationship, devotion, moral direction, function, purpose, etc. ANd the Bible speaks not only of individual actions but of powers, principalities, teachings, and spirits that must be discerned [Eph. 6:12; 1 John 4:1]. Ideas are not inert. Their spirit seeks bodies through which they can act. They enter habits, slogans, music, temples, figures, laws, institutions, manners, churches, etc. What begins as a concept can eventually govern the person who thought they were merely participating or engaging within.

Spirit is not an atmosphere, metaphor, a psychedelic trip nor collective emotion. It may seem like that when humans manufacture moments with rituals. Yet there lays more of a genuine conscience, attention, devotion, desires, memories, will, and the capacity to know and seek beyond it's seeing. It's both the imbued, and the imbuer. In the Christian context, we were created, by the breath of God. He breathed life into us. [Insert Scripture Ref] Spirit is life, spirit is of which you cannot see but yet all around you.

In the western concepts, closest of it might be ethos: the accumulated intentions, sacrifices, assumptions, habits, relationships, and purposes carried through it. The relevant Greek word here is closer to ethos or pneuma than to anima, which is Latin. Human creations carry human weight because people have poured time, knowledge, devotion, conflict, and hope into them.

Christianity begins with the opposite movement.

“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” [John 1:14].

Truth did not remain an abstraction. God did not send humanity an idea detached from history, place, body, kinship, suffering, and death. Christ entered all of them. He was born a Jew within the covenantal life of Israel, in the eastern Mediterranean under Roman rule. His language, festivals, Scriptures, conflicts, and human relationships were Jewish. Christianity cannot erase this context without disembodying Christ himself.

Yet Christ was not imprisoned by that context. He fulfilled the law by revealing its heart [Matt. 5:17; 22:37–40]. He exposed the human tendency to defend the outward form of holiness after abandoning justice, mercy, and faithfulness [Matt. 23:23–28]. From within Israel, he opened the covenantal horizon to all nations [Matt. 28:19; Acts 10; 15]. He did not dissolve peoples into a universal blankness. Revelation still sees nations, tribes, peoples, and languages before God [Rev. 7:9].

Jesus was radically liberating in his historical setting, but he was not a modern liberal. He did not make autonomous choice the final good. He liberated people from sin so that they could belong to God and one another. His freedom is not the absence of every constraint; it is release from the powers that prevent human beings from becoming capable of truth, love, fidelity, mercy, worship, and communion [John 8:31–36; Gal. 5:13].

The horizon of that life is eternity.

By sustainability towards eternity, I do not mean that a government can construct heaven. I mean that every part of life should be judged by whether it forms what can endure in the presence of God. Christ tells us not to build life around what decays [Matt. 6:19–21]. Paul insists that embodied faithfulness is not wasted because of the resurrection [1 Cor. 15:42–58]. Revelation ends not with humanity escaping creation, but with God dwelling among a renewed people and creation [Rev. 21:1–5].%%