THE WRONG ORDER

The café “Dilema” was packed. We were standing in line for coffee, both of us a little tired, at an age that no longer bothered to hide — not from others, and not from ourselves. I noticed the man in front of me absentmindedly shifting coins in his hand, as if their order mattered more than the drink he was about to order. When he realized it was his turn, he startled.

Luka, the barista, was waiting. Everyone behind him was waiting. I said nothing. After a brief pause, the man said:

“Tea with milk.”

I waited for Luka to make a fresh coffee and stared off into the distance. A few minutes later, I saw there were only two free seats left, one of them directly across from the man with the coins. I nodded; he nodded back. We sat in silence for a while, each lost in his own thoughts, until we realized they’d swapped our orders. He had my coffee. I had his tea.

“No big deal,” he said.

We laughed.

“Looks like the one up there decided to have a little joke,” he added.

“If that ‘one up there’ even exists,” I replied without thinking.

He looked at me, surprised but not offended. On the table lay a thin, worn book without a cover. It wasn’t a Bible — at least not the kind I was used to seeing — though it resembled one. It looked more like an old notebook that had lost too many pages. I tried not to stare at it, but I couldn’t help myself.

“That’s not a Bible,” he said, as if reading my mind. “Just the parts of it I agree with.”

He paused, as if deciding whether to continue, and then added in a calm voice:

“I don’t like books that claim absolute truth. I believe only in what they point toward. A lot of things don’t fit into books — or definitions.”

I’d seen that kind of calm before, mostly in movies, and usually in monks. He introduced himself. His name was Peter. He said he was a believer, but didn’t belong to any church or official religion. Nothing about the way he sat felt ceremonial. He wasn’t seeking attention, and he didn’t seem interested in imposing his faith. He held his cup steadily, and his gaze kept drifting downhill toward the main street, as if his thoughts couldn’t keep up with everything happening outside.

Coffee and tea between us — apparently just a mix-up at the counter, but really an excuse for a serious conversation. After a short silence, I asked something I’d wondered about for years.

“What does it even look like to believe in God, and not belong to any church?”

Peter didn’t seem surprised. It was as if he’d heard the question many times, and today it had been floating between us the whole time, waiting to be spoken.

“It feels like freedom,” he said. “No pressure to fit someone else’s rules. No schedule, no audience, and least of all the need to agree with people who preach dogma — or to look like the others who just nod along.”

He kept his eyes on his cup, as if checking whether it was still warm.

“Sometimes I go into a church,” he continued. “Not because I have to, but because of the silence. In there, it’s easier to hear what we usually push down. But I don’t think God is tied to walls, rituals, or hierarchies. If he exists, then he exists outside of that too.”

He paused.

“In practice, a person should work as much as he can, make mistakes as much as he must, but not hide behind rules when he does. It’s better to listen more and talk less. We don’t need all the answers in order to believe.”

I agreed almost instinctively. That unusual kind of religious freedom sounded exactly like what I’d felt too — I just hadn’t shared it with others.

“You know what really bothers me about all this?” I said. “Back where I’m from, in our hilly Balkans, you don’t choose your faith. It gets assigned.”

Peter watched me closely, without blinking.

“If you’re born in Serbia, you’re automatically a Serbian Orthodox Christian. In Croatia, you’re a Croat and Catholic. As if, along with your birth certificate, they hand you a religious affiliation.”

I paused, searching for the right tone.

“A baby is born and gets baptized right away. That’s just how it goes. And there you have it — a child who can’t even speak becomes a believer in a specific denomination. Nobody asks: what if that child grows up and wants to be Buddhist? Or join a Protestant church? Or not believe at all?”

Peter smiled gently — not ironically, more like with sadness.

“I’ve been to an Orthodox church in Phoenix,” he said. “And to a monastery in Safford. Beautiful place. The frescoes kept me there longer than I planned.”

It was as if he took the long way around before returning to the point.

“You know,” he continued, “that tradition is close to me. Icons, silence, the smell of incense. But that’s culture. Faith is something else.”

He turned his cup slowly in his hands.

“I agree with you,” he said. “Faith should be a decision. Not a label. Not an inheritance, not something written into you before you’re capable of choosing.”

He looked up.

“But don’t think it’s only a Balkan problem. In most of the world, people are born into religion the way they’re born into a language. Here in America people say: ‘I was raised in an Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant family.’ That at least suggests the possibility of choice later on.”

A wise way to put it — faith as a mother tongue, something you absorb before you understand what the words mean. And having the option to choose is good, even when it’s built on language.

Peter was quiet for a few seconds. Then he looked straight at me, suddenly.

“And you?” he asked.

The question caught me off guard. It’s easy to talk about global patterns, social norms, religious communities. Now I had to talk about myself. I realized I didn’t have the words, or a ready answer. I said I disliked groupthink and rigidity most of all — especially the moment when well-crafted stories start turning into rules for living. I meant, above all, Christian denominations: systems that impose rules, priests whose role has been hollowed out and monetized. God gets reduced to a symbol, while faith somehow slips into the background.

“The Christian story of the creation of the world seems naïve and illogical to me,” I said. “But it’s beautiful. And it’s mostly built on goodness and positive moral values. Like a fairy tale that doesn’t try to explain everything — only to make a person better.”

I told Peter I’d noticed something: people who truly believe rarely talk about religion without a reason. They talk when someone asks — and sometimes not even then. They don’t lecture. They don’t try to convince others to think the same way.

Peter listened without interrupting, and when I finished, he nodded slightly, as if he’d just heard something unexpected — but not unfamiliar.

“Alright,” he said. “So do you believe, or don’t you?”

I gave a sour smile, looked him in the eyes, and tried to explain.

“I don’t believe in Jesus Christ, or in other gods,” I said. “But I respect everyone’s right to consider themselves Christian, Muslim, Buddhist… What makes me angry is the insult to human intelligence — when the origin of the world is reduced to something fit for preschool, and the hardest moral dilemmas are explained away with a higher power.”

“So you’re an atheist?” he asked.

“On the contrary, my friend,” I said. “More than naïve believers in dogmatic fairy tales, what really gets under my skin are the all-knowing atheists.”

Peter’s face lit up. He took a sip of tea and waited, curious.

I explained that believers I know often don’t hide their confusion. They believe what they were taught, but admit they don’t understand much of it. Self-assured atheists, on the other hand, speak of science as if it were a closed story — final answers, no room for doubt, no room for further questions. I said it bothered me, that new kind of groupthink where a theory turns into absolute truth. Where everything has supposedly been “explained long ago,” and any doubt is met as ignorance, malice, or conspiracy.

Peter laughed, and I went on.

“Imagine,” I said, “a journalist, an actor, or a math professor speaking with complete certainty about facts that are billions of years old. And God forbid you ask how they know. Then you’re no longer a conversation partner — you’re a problem.”

I paused, then added more quietly:

“To me, that looks more like blind belief than science.”

Peter listened and answered without hurry. He didn’t defend religion, and he didn’t argue with what I’d said. It felt like understanding mattered more to him than agreement.

“You know,” he said, “faith and science begin the same way. With a question. The problem starts when people act as if they’ve reached the end — the final answer.”

“In your language,” I said, “ignorance isn’t the sin — absolute truth is.”

He stared into his empty cup, as if searching for a scientific explanation for the residue at the bottom.

“In faith,” he said, “what scares me most is the moment doubt disappears. And in science, the moment questions vanish. In both cases, the conversation ends.”

I didn’t want to contradict him. At that point, what mattered more to me was that the conversation was calm — no need to end in someone’s victory. Peter stood up, put on his jacket, and picked up his worn book. He hesitated for a moment, as if weighing whether there was something else he should say.

“Maybe the biggest problem,” he said, “is that people reach for certainty too quickly — in rules, in explanations, in other people’s answers.”

Then he looked at me briefly and continued.

“If none of us chose where we’d be born, what faith we’d be ‘enrolled’ into, or what would be explained to us first, then it’s clear how much our earliest view of the world is shaped by circumstance, not personal insight. The first words we hear, the fears we learn early, the rules we absorb — all of it comes before we’ve learned how to ask questions. So many beliefs we carry as inheritance, not as choice.”

I didn’t answer. I tried to feel the depth of his words. I liked this kind of conversation.

He held out his hand.

“Let’s continue another time,” he said. “We obviously aren’t finished.”

We exchanged numbers, with that brief, slightly awkward smile of people who have suddenly realized they’ve found someone to talk to about a subject that matters to them — and that they rarely discuss. As he walked away, I savored my coffee and thought:

“Maybe this is the beginning of a strange intellectual friendship between two grumblers who disagree about almost everything — except the one thing that matters most: that questions are worth more than ready-made answers.”

And for a first meeting, that was more than enough.