When we flub up, do something odd, make a serious duff, or perhaps find ourselves being uncharacteristically mean, we somethings excuse such behavior with this familiar explanation, “Shit happens.” But shit never just happens. There was always some degree of Response-Ability involved in our behavior.

It is always true that our access of our Response-Ability is capable of much improvement—that is, much expansion in our ability to respond. Nevertheless, until we are dead, there is always some degree of Response Ability in play.

Simply paying closer attention to our shit is an improvement in Response-Ability. Yes, it is true that the personality patterns we constructed for our lives by age five, are still doing its original survival patterns. But we can now as adults pay closer attention to our personality’s actions. We also have a degree of power to moderate that old tool for our survival. Our personality is a friend as well as an enemy. Our personality got us here. We did survive. Our personality still has some survival potentials. But times have changed since age five. Our personality is ill adapted for many, if not most, of our contemporary challenges. And fortunately, we still have some ability to respond beyond the boundaries of our very own personality.

Perhaps we need to use whatever modicum of Response-Ability we still have to find a good therapist who can assist us to realize more of our Response-Ability. Or perhaps we just need a religious practice, or a better religious practice. Perhaps simply setting aside 20 minutes a day for some sort of solitary practice is a response of which we are still capable.

Expanding Response-Ability is a description of spirit sanctification. Each of us are indeed a very profound essence of Response-Ability that we are not realizing at this time. Our freedom, to use another word, is being restricted by many of our patterns of unrealism. To know those patterns and to unravel them is part of accessing that primal Response-Ability and putting such “primal holiness” into play.

Shit does not just happen in our lives. We are always there with an ability to respond that is potentially boundless. Reality is on the side of Response-Ability. Let Jesus be our illustration. We are all potentially able of laying down our lives for our friends, indeed making even our enemies a type of friends whom we benefit with our responses to them and everyone. But we need to be “saved” from ourselves in order to access our deep essence of being Response-Able beings.

The word “saved” has been deeply polluted with images of escape from our real down-to-Earth challenges. Some of us may even have dreamed of voyaging to another planet. More likely, we have dreamed of a trans-cosmic realm of heavenly somewhere that we pretend to hope for to escape this vale of tears.

So a “salvation” that happens here and now in the midst of our real-Earth living can seem strange to our escape-addicted mentality. We are prone to believe that in this world shit happens, but in some next world no shit happens. And in such a set up of supposed happenings, Response-Ability has nothing to do with either of these two imagined realms.

So what does a down-to-Earth Christian salvation look like? It has these three elements:
(1) owning up to our reigning bondage-producing state of living, (2) noticing the cosmic forgiveness for our particular shit, and (3) choosing the then present fresh start in Response-Ability that is released by by accepting this forgiveness.

Perhaps you remember the story in the New Testament (Luke 19:1-10) about a tax collector named Zacchaeus. He was a short man and a rich man who had become rich as a Jewish tax collector for the Roman government. The way that that tax system worked was that the collector collected what the Roman government requested, plus a bit more for his own personal support. Such a system was open to serious corruption, and all the collectors who got rich were indeed corrupt. This short, rich Jew had been robbing his fellow Jews for some time. He was perhaps shunned for being so short and hated for being so corrupt. His whole life was clearly a public and personal mess. But he was still religious enough to be curious about this holy man who was entering his village. Since he was too short to see over the crowds, he climbed up a sycamore tree to see this man.

Jesus saw him up there, intuited his state of life, and called out for all the crowd to hear, “Come down Zacchaeus I am having lunch at your house.” So Zacchaeus climbs down, and before running off to prepare lunch comes to this holy man who had expressed such a attitude of forgiveness for him and exclaimed for all to hear, “Look sir, I will give half of my property to the poor. And if I have swindled anybody, I will pay him back four times as much.” Jesus then explained to the crowd, including you and me, that “Salvation had come to this house today.”