subject: Who Is Responsible for the Mess our World Is in? [print this page] The commanding officer of a U.SThe commanding officer of a U.S. Navy destroyer in World War II was having coffee with several ensigns and lieutenants on his staff when a signalman entered the room with a message in hand.
"What is it?" the captain asked.
The signalman hesitated before saying, "I should give it to you in private, sir."
The captain insisted that the signalman read the message immediately. The signalman again hesitated. But finally, with some reluctance, he said, "It's from Admiral Saunders, sir. The message is, Your seamanship in recent days is the worst I've ever seen.'"
Now, how would you react to such a reprimand? Would you experience a sinking feeling? Would you be embarrassed? Would you worry about what everyone might be thinking of you? Would you berate yourself and tell yourself that you're "no good after all?"
These are typical reactions so many of us tend to have when we make a mess of things.
Here's what the captain did. Addressing the signalman, he said, "Take the message up and have it decoded."
When we decode our mistakes, we realize that they don't mean we are horrible people. The mess our lives and our world are in doesn't mean humans aren't incredibly wonderful.
When we decode what's really happening in our lives and our world, we don't kick ourselves, we don't feel embarrassed, and we don't put ourselves down for our mistakes or our dysfunction.
Instead, we realize that dysfunction is a steppingstone on the path to divine consciousness. We realize that mistakes are tools for teaching us who we truly aretools that open our eyes to the wisdom of the mystics of both east and west, who recognize that divine consciousness is seeking to arise in our evolving humanity.
Millionsactually, billionsview their dysfunction and mistakes in a very different way from this naval captain. They think they are a bad person.
The masses believe that God created us perfect but gave us freedom, which meant taking the risk that we might make a mess of things. When we exercised our freedom and made a mess of things, in this understanding, the "scales of justice" were tipped against us and we were found wanting. Ever since, God has been angry with us, so that a sacrificeof animals in the case of the ancient Jewish tradition, and of Jesus himself in the case of Christiansbecame necessary to pacify God's anger.
I believe it trivializes the spiritual journey to regard the creation of potentially flawed humans as "a risk that God took," with God taking offence when we went astray, and animal sacrifices, culminating in the crucifixion of Jesus, as the remedy God applied when the risk backfired.
The reality is, God doesn't need to be appeased at all. The whole mess our world has been and continues to be is something God knew was necessary. It's the only way divine consciousness can evolve.
The problem is that for thousands of years, the vast majority of people haven't decoded the message of the crucifixion.
What does the cross mean to most? It's the idea that God needed a bloody sacrifice in order to be appeased. Nowhere does Scripture teach such a thingthough some statements have been distorted to imply this. But when we decode them, they say nothing of the kind.
The typical way of understanding the cross fails to see the difference between saying God is able to draw good out of our mistakes, and the more radical statement that God's love embraces our dysfunction, and the mess we make of our lives and our world, as a necessary part of our evolutionary journey toward the manifestation of divine consciousness.
The crucifixion is a symbol of God's total identification with the journey we are takingfor in the end, it is God's own journey, in which the divine is becoming incarnate in matter, especially in the form of you and me. It says to us, "I am responsible for this whole evolving mess, because there is no other way to create conscious offspring."
In the cross, God takes responsibility. What we are doing to ourselves in the mess we create as we seek to evolve into divine consciousness is mirrored in the crucifixion. And in the representative of both God and humanity, Jesus of Nazareth, God says to us, "I am guilty. Lay the guilt on me."
Of course! How could it be otherwise? For the whole enterprise is Godsince there is only God, and nothing but Godbecoming manifest through the long evolutionary journey of trial and error.
