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July/August 2005 Spirituality
Engaging the Soul of America

by David Spangler

The Soul of a Country

The soul of a country is that active intelligence that holds the body, psyche and spirit of a country together and integrates them into a dynamic wholeness. It expresses capacities for synthesis, love, and evolution. It is the custodian of the spiritual destiny. It nurtures and develops that country’s talents. It seeks to promote the qualities and capacities that are that country’s unique powers and gifts to the world.

If we think of a country as a collective field fed by energies arising from its geography, its ecologies, its people, and its spirit, then the soul of that country tends that field. It seeks to keep it clear and unobstructed. It seeks to reduce or if possible eliminate toxicity and dysfunction within that field, particularly as manifested by violence. It seeks to enhance the flow and radiant power of love within its field. It enhances creativity and emergence. It promotes and nurtures connectedness, coherency, integrity and wholeness. It works to synthesize its various dynamic elements, such as the land and the people, into a mutually enhancing presence. It works to integrate its field with the fields of other countries and with the great collective field and presence of the planet as a whole and with the sacredness that underlies all existence.

That is the work of the soul of a country.

Inner Citizenship

Inner citizenship is what we do when we take up this work of the soul of our country. When we seek to embody and express its soul to the best of our capacities, we are being active inner citizens.

We are all familiar with outer citizenship. As citizens we seek to support the political, economic, and civic life of our country. We take on a responsibility for the physical and social wellbeing of our nation. Depending on where we live, this may entail voting, running for office, being part of volunteer organizations, supporting public education, and so forth. There are many ways in which we may be good citizens in our outer world.

Inner citizenship requires us to realize that there is more to our country than just its physical and social dimensions. The country exists as a field of energy and as a spiritual presence as well. How do we relate to these? How do we act on their behalf?

Inner citizenship takes place in the invisible realms of energy, thought, imagination, feeling, and spirit. In outer citizenship, we may vote, but in inner citizenship, we may pray or bless. In outer citizenship, we may run for public office, but in inner citizenship, we monitor the quality of mental and emotional energies that we broadcast into the collective fields of our neighborhoods, towns, our cities, or our nation. In outer citizenship, we may serve on a panel to clean up pollution in a city, but in inner citizenship, we clean up toxic energies of anger and violence that we may be holding in our own psyches or that we sense in the atmosphere around us.

Each is important. To truly be partners with the soul of our country, we need to be both outer and inner citizens.

The Soul of America

The Soul of America has all the capacities and performs all the functions of any other country’s soul, as I discussed above. But what is the spiritual destiny which it embodies and empowers? What are the gifts that the United States has to offer humanity and the world? What are its talents?

A place to start is with the "self-evident" truths presented by the Declaration of Independence: "…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These are certainly qualities which the Soul of America has a destiny to develop and offer: Equality amongst all people; liberty and freedom; the sanctity of a person’s life with all its unique potentials; the capacity of all individuals to seek their highest good and to possess happiness in their lives, particularly the happiness that comes with the opportunity to unfold their potentials and to accomplish good in their lives.

To these four qualities, I might add a generosity of spirit, a capacity for innovation, invention and discovery, and an attitude of accomplishment, that whatever needs to be done, can be done. Finally, I would add a spirit of hospitality and community.

These are all qualities that the United States, which is itself an invented nation and an immigrant nation, seeks to develop within itself and to offer to the world. You may think of others that are part of the destiny—the talents—of this country. Feel free to make your own list…

To contact the Soul of America, be the Soul of America in your own unique way… May it be a blessing and a partner in your life as a citizen, both inner and outer, of this great country.

David Spangler is one of four keynote consultants featured at the September 24, 2005 conference, Piecing Together a Better World: The Power and Practice of Collaborative, Non-Adversarial Advocacy," to be held at the Portland Convention Center on September 24, 2005. The purpose of the conference is to engage in collaborative approaches to human and planetary well-being, global peace, and environmental integrity.

In order to get the most out o the conference and to contribute most effectively to it, readers are invited to attend one of the many conference previews being held throughout the Pacific Northwest, from Vancouver, B.C. to Ashland, OR. Preview times and locations are at gbenetwork.com/previews.htm.