by Pastor Don Mackenzie
Rabbi Ted Falcon, Pastor Don Mackenzie, and Sheikh Jamal Rahman, known collectively as the"Interfaith Amigos," have been learning and teaching together since 2001. They blog weekly for YES! Magazine.
The inner work we need requires every bit of the cooperation, imagination, discipline, and hope present in that first step onto the moon.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong is 80 this year. Forty-one years ago he took that famous step and said the words that moved us: “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” Even Walter Cronkite had tears. Many of us remember where we were when the news came.
Ironically and sadly, I don’t think that leap for humankind was a giant one after all. While the example of cooperation and hope still stands, and medicine has benefited from the research at NASA, the most dramatic consequences of the trip have been improvements in the ability of the United States military to inflict pain and death on our enemies.
But on the occasion of Neil Armstrong’s birthday and in honor of his courage, it seems appropriate to ask what a giant leap for humankind might actually look like?
As I ponder the troubles, the difficulty, the pain, suffering, and violence all over our world, I come back again and again to the reality that we—yes, I am talking about myself, too—consistently behave as if evil is somehow “out there.” If we can just somehow eliminate it, we would all be better off. But never has an attempt to kill a person or persons understood to be evil ever succeeded in eliminating that evil. That is because evil exists in a potential state in each one of us. We each have a shadow side, and even though we are tempted to look elsewhere for the source of our troubles, much of the time that source sits within us. But we must not feel guilty about this, for guilt has no power to redeem. We must instead recognize this as a feature of what it means to be human.
And here’s another feature: We have been given a spirit capable of transcending that potential for evil. But for the capability to be realized, we must do what my friend Jamal calls the “inner work”—spiritual practices that strengthen our spirits and prepare us to combat our evil potentials. And in doing so, we must find ways to release ourselves from what my friend Ted calls our“stuckness,” our imprisonments. That is a prerequisite for being in community—a state where the preciousness of relationships can nurture the growth that each of us needs.
This process might be the greatest moral need present on our planet. It’s also what a giant step for humankind would look like today.
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Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. ~ Paulo Freire
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