Healing the Soul of America

"Within the next ten years, America will experience a renaissance or a catastrophe. Something is going to happen to take us back to who we are. We have lost our spiritual rudder, and without it we have neither individual nor collective wisdom. Our culture has lost its sense of sacred connection ..."Within the next ten years, America will experience a renaissance or a catastrophe. Something is going to happen to take us back to who we are. We have lost our spiritual rudder, and without it we have neither individual nor collective wisdom. Our culture has lost its sense of sacred connection to any power or authority higher than ourselves. Our national conscience is barely alive as we slither like snakes across a desert floor toward any hole where money lies. Nothing short of an internal awakening will heal this wounded nation.

Both major political parties now steer the discussion of what truly ails us away from that which actually does, seeking to lodge us where they are lodged: in dangerous denial. They have no context for a more psychologically or morally pertinent discussion. They are now more alike than different, and neither one of them is any longer whom to truly serious political alternatives. They have become a game unto themselves. Our political renewal will not come from our political system as it now exists. It will come from deep within us.

There is a new prophetic voice in America, saying, as do all prophets, that we must repent -- which means literally to "rethink." This new prophetic voice is not a soloist but a choir. This time it will not be possible to silence one prophet, or even a few, and thereby stymie a broad-based social impulse for decades. This time, a prophetic calling is seizing the hearts of a critical mass. It is a voice of group conscience and a redefinition of citizen activism in American democracy.

It is time once more for the average American citizen to turn to the dominant power structure of our time and say, as did our Founders over two hundred years ago, "We have a better idea."