The Majesty
The worth beneath the work
Their friend was shot and killed in France during the Second World War.
Distraught, they carried him to a quiet local church and asked the priest if he could be buried in the churchyard. On hearing that their friend wasn’t Catholic, the priest said no.
So they did what they could, and buried him just beyond the wall.
Years later they returned for a remembrance event and made the trip to visit their fallen friend. When they couldn’t find his grave, they marched up to the church to demand answers.
A young priest met them at the door. He could feel their sorrow, their fury, their confusion, and asked: will you sit with me?
He explained that the old priest had died years ago, but had often spoken of those soldiers. Unable to live with the shame of turning them away, he had worked through the night, the sound of nearby shelling rolling across the dark.
He hadn’t moved the body. The grave remained untouched.
Instead, stone by stone, he moved the wall. So their friend could rest on sacred ground.
With that, the young priest stood and simply said: It would be my honour to show you.
The first priest knew the rules. He knew who qualified. And when he allowed his position to speak, it built a wall.
But his sense of being had something to say too. And when he gave it room to speak, it showed him what had actually mattered when that group of grieving soldiers stood before him, and what he’d missed.
In that moment, he heard the Oboe’s A.
He fell in tune with something deeper, and in response the person, not the priest, moved the wall. Same man. Same faith. Two completely different responses, depending on which part of him he let lead.
I call this Majesty.
It’s the real you, detached from your performance, your credentials, and any form of measurement. Unmoved by opinion. Not hungry for validation. It doesn’t demand to be seen. It isn’t even affected by whether you understand it. You cannot add to it, and you cannot diminish it.
You already have a relationship with it.
Some days it feels close: you move through your day with a contentment that requires no qualification. Other days it feels distant: you feel uneasy for no reason you can name.
When that happens, the instinct is to reach. For a metric that confirms, a credential that justifies, for someone to tell you you’re allowed, or to compare yourself against.
But its melody is always there, unchanged by your ability to hear it.
Think of the stars. My knowledge of how they burn does nothing to affect their Majesty in any way. Or a diamond, its worth uninterested in whether I see a lump of coal. Or a bird: it soars regardless of my opinion of it.
Like me, you may have hit some rough spots, you may have lost much, your wounds might be fresh. But how you feel about your worth does not change your worth.
In this very moment, regardless of how you feel, your Majesty remains intact: immovable. Unbreakable. Constant. It is not affected by Monday morning, the redundancy, the failed calling, the empty inbox, the metric that did not move.
If you feel powerless, it has power enough for both of you.
The question is whether we let our Majesty lead, and it’s a struggle I wrestle with every time I sit down to write.
Your mess is your qualification
There is a constant temptation to let the market dictate the words, to write for a defined niche, and to create content in a language the platforms understand. To leverage my credentials to justify my voice and prove that I deserve to be heard. To measure the quality of my work by follower counts, engagement rates, and how many people respond, rather than by how true the words actually are.
Maybe then I’d be successful. Maybe I’d create the security I seek for my family. But at what cost?
I’m still reckoning with my history of failed corporate climbs, and callings that seemed to lead nowhere. For a long time, I didn’t feel comfortable telling the whole story. If people knew I’d felt a calling to be an evangelist, would they immediately write me off?
When I look at that history, I can tell myself one of two stories. One is that I’m a failure.
Another is that I’m invited.
My Majesty is asking me to write from the rubble. It’s the only qualification I have. When I don’t, I maintain a wall that excludes the very people that need me to write for them.
I meet endless people with similar limiting beliefs. Perhaps not around a spiritual calling, but around feeling too old, too unclear, too unqualified, too ashamed, or too nervous to put themselves out there.
So we try to clean up our story, buy a library of business books, and allow internet ‘experts’ to teach us how to post and build the perfect funnels. I’ve done it. The algorithm rewards it. The industry teaches it. The guru economy depends on it.
We follow all the steps to justify our voice in the world and to help us feel more qualified to show up. The problem is we show up as someone else. And we can’t move the wall, because we can’t even find it.
The further we travel away from our Majesty, the more our limp begins to feel like a liability. The things that make us distinctive begin to feel unworthy, and the mess feels like evidence against us.
But let’s be real with one another: none of us are really qualified. The priest wasn’t qualified to turn those soldiers away, and he wasn’t qualified to move the wall either. He was just a person with a conscience and the willingness to act on it.
In a world that expects you to build a stage, project power, and curate who gets in, hear this: You are everything you need. There is nothing to add, no external validation you need, and no flaw that’s deep enough to stop you from beginning.
In fact, those very flaws are the raw materials of your practice.
As my wife Laura reminds me: nothing is wasted. So the question is not how you acquire more authority, more permission, or more justification. The question is what you will do with what you already hold.
Some of you have decades of corporate scars.
Some of you ‘don’t fit in’ because of how deeply you feel.
Some of you are generalists surviving a world that demands specialists.
Some of you live the grinding isolation of being an artist.
Some of you carry the quiet grief of a success that feels entirely hollow.
The wounds you bear don’t qualify you to declare things over the lives of others, but they do make you uniquely qualified to extend an invitation.
To move the wall. To create a campfire, not a cathedral.
They give you the strength to speak as a servant, not a saviour. And shift the tone from “Sit at my feet so I can teach you” to: “I created space for you, will you sit with me?”
“It would be my honour to show you”.
Where We Are:
This is Week 8 of a year-long practice.
Movement 1: Presence - eight weeks, eight stanzas, exploring how to show up as yourself.
The Majesty ← You are here
Don’t Worship the Outcome
Start with WHO
The Increment is the Way
Invite Like an Artist
The World is Abundant
From there we’ll explore Movement 2: Empathy - eight weeks exploring kindness and respect for self and the power genuine connection.
You are touching some really rich territory with these Dan
Ego vs identity once again defenitely resonated with me. Thanks for these words.