I WAS INVITED TO PREACH last Sunday at Wembley Downs Uniting Church in Perth, Australia.

Revd Neville Watson leads the community. He is worthy of a blog himself as an octogenarian peace activist (he was in Baghdad for the US `Shock and Awe` invasion). Neville and his wife, Margaret, purchased a home in order to give refugees a place to live while they get on their feet. They also made one of their homes available for a couple of Canadian refugees to take a sabbatical in their fair city.

Neville opened worship by lighting a candle with the words: `The light came into the darkness, and this is the judgment, that the world preferred the darkness.` It hit me like a ton of bricks — the mystery of what Indian mystic, Sri Aurobindo, calls ignorance. Why, in a cosmos shot through with the divine Heart and Mind, and nowhere more so than in the human species, do qualities of unconsciousness, wilful ignorance, passive acquiescence to fate, and all manner of evil, continue to thrive? Why do we prefer darkness to light?

Later in the service Neville told a story that he found in a column of a prominent US newspaper with the header Miracle on the Hudson, referring to the successful landing of the passenger plane on the Hudson River. When it was clear that the plane was going down, apparently throughout the aircraft could be heard the cries: `My God, we’re going to die. God help us.` After the pilot successfully landed the plane with no casualties it was generally agreed that God had indeed saved them. It was a miracle.

Neville was having none of it! Why would God save this plane and not the one two weeks ago? And if God was in the business of performing supernatural miracles, why not simply move the flock of birds that got sucked into the engines out of the line of flight? No, the real miracle lay elsewhere.

After the birds shut down both engines, the pilot called in the emergency, saying that they would find him in the Hudson River. His last words to the comptrollers were Airplane Mine. This is pilot code for: The fate of the plane and these passengers is now on my shoulders. Landing a plane on a river requires that the wings be absolutely level or the plane will be simply torn apart. The pilot landed it perfectly.

Neville told us that the real miracle was the pilot’s willingness to step up and take full responsibility. Airplane mine! One way to interpret the evolutionary impulse is that it is moving the cosmos in the direction of increasing capacity for taking responsibility for our lives and our future.

PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH is marked by a refusal to play the victim. Spiritual health is marked by the realization that disciplined and focus intention has great power to manifest reality. The political health of a people is marked by the willingness to elect representatives and be full participants in holding those representatives accountable.

The pilot had been through a rigorous training program to enable him to take responsibility under pressure. What if our educational and religious institutions were thought of as training grounds for the assumption of personal and collective responsibility? The goal would be that everyone who came through the training would be able to step up and declare LIFE MINE!

Imagine what kind of world would emerge if we were able to see the planetary crisis we are facing and declare: EARTH MINE! This is up to me/us! We’re going to land the spaceship Earth safely.
Imagine how much precious energy could be diverted from endless personal dramas and be put to better use if we were trained to say: REACTIVITY MINE! My emotional reactivity to you is mine. I’m going to manage my feelings so that nobody gets hurt.

Imagine the quality of our relationships if were enabled to realize the truth of: RELATIONSHIP MINE! I’m responsible for the quality of this relationship. The blaming stops now.

Imagine what we could accomplish as a species if collectively we could make our rallying cry: FUTURE OURS! The quality of our future is on us, nobody else. We are absolutely responsible. (We’re not absolutely responsible for all the events and circumstances that will come our way, but how we respond to each and everyone is on us.)

It hit me that this may be the answer to the mystery of why we choose darkness over light. To follow the light of Jesus (insert your preferred spiritual leader) is to be challenged to accept responsibility for one’s own life and the life of others. Eventually, the mystic realizes that `I am the light that I am following`. At that point, paradoxically, our life doesn’t belong to us anymore. It belongs to the future that wants to emerge through us. Maybe we intuit that this is where we’re headed and so choose darkness and ignorance over personal and collective responsibility. Perhaps it strikes us as just too difficult to live this way.
This could be why there is a fair bit of resistance to evolutionary spirituality, because in the end it involves taking personal and collective responsibility for the direction of evolution itself. This is the evolution of evolution itself. Natural selection is replaced by actual selection. We grow in our capacity to select a preferred future. Jesus called this the Kin-dom or the Realm of God. The church is a gathering of souls who are learning how to live when our core assertion is: LIFE MINE! LIFE OURS!

Thanks Neville for your leadership, inspiration, and your willingness to step up and say AIRPLANE MINE! The world needs more people like you and Margaret.

For more interesting and challenging thoughts from Bruce, and to discover more about his ministry in Canada, visit:
www.brucesanguin.com
or http://ifdarwinprayed.com
or just Google Bruce Sanguin.