Years ago, I was a guest on a wonderful tele-summit on spirituality and social change with Lorna Bright. Here is a short excerpt from our interview - which later fueled the book that I wrote on New Thought and Liberation Theology.
HOST: (Lorna Bright)
What I realized is that we've been taught how to apply spiritual tools to our prosperity. We've got workshops out the wazoo for creating prosperity in our lives. We've been taught how to apply these principles to our health and well-being. Most everybody has a dog-eared copy of Louise Hayes, You Can Heal Your Life, and we get that. But for example, we don't have affirmations for political issues like, I know all my health care needs are met, or my taxes are used for the benefit of all people on the planet. When it comes to politics, or actually more precisely, our civic duty, people balk. I had someone email me not too long ago, and they said they don't want to have anything to do with politics because they only look at the positive and not at the negative. So what would you say to that?
GUEST - Rev. David Alexander:
Well, I say a lot to that. First of all, you're absolutely right. We have so many tools and resources for applying these spiritual insights to these personal aspects of our lives. And the tradition from which we do that has at its premise the concept of oneness. I find it interesting. This has just been my own awakening, really, in the last number of years as being a teacher in this tradition, I find it interesting to observe a spiritual teaching who has as its fundamental premise, the principle of oneness, and yet it refuses to take a stand or to speak on behalf of the least of these. I find that, to be quite frank, to be spiritually bankrupt behavior. I find it to just fall short of actually comprehending and understanding the concept of oneness itself. The best metaphor or relation I can give to you for it is anybody out there listening who is familiar with the 12 steps with AA would understand when I say, what I'm really talking about is the 12th step. And the 12th step is you give it away. You give it away to somebody else. So you don't really own your sobriety You don't really own your liberation and your freedom until you actively participate in somebody else achieving theirs.
That's the covenant. That's the bridge back to the heart of humanity. The 12-Step program would be vastly different if it was simply, well, focus on your own stuff, get sober, and don't worry about anybody else. That's not what the program is. The program is inherently and intricately designed to build that bridge and to reach out and to help others. I think our spirituality awakening has to be the same as If I'm going to take a prosperity class, I have to know that the principles that I'm using are the same principles that everyone has access to, including those who have systematically and quite consciously, through housing regulations, banking regulations, have been kept out of the circle of prosperity in our country. And once I awakened to my own awareness of knowing that, then I have to ask the question, What am I going to do about it? Because if the answer is, well, I just don't do that. I don't do politics. It's too divisive. I don't participate in that reality. I hear that a lot. I just don't hang out in that vibration. I don't participate in that reality. I say, Well, okay, fine. I get it.
We are all a choice, and you get to choose the atmosphere in which you want to live your life. But please understand that your ability to do so is an act of privilege. It's an act of privilege. There are others who don't have that privilege, not because the power and the spiritual principle, the wisdom, is not infinitely available as it is to all of us, but because we, as humanity, have consciously or unconsciously obviously decided that these are the folks who have access to it and these are the folks who don't. Those things, the red-lining of the suburbs in our country during growth in the '50s, banking regulations that kept African-Americans out of equal housing loans and opportunities, and we could go on and on and on, the number of ways in which, and I'm just taking one issue, right, of prosperity and breaking it down, the number of things that have taken place that have created in us and to them, and they have and have not growing gap in class in our society, all of those things are held in place by thoughts. That's it. It's just a thought. It's a thought that says this is the way it ought to be.
What I know about consciousness is that if thought can create it, then another thought can uncreate it. If mind can do it, then mind can undo it. We produce enough food in this country and in the world to end starvation, to end hunger. We can do it. There's enough food being produced, but we have thoughts, systems and structures that say, Well, but you can't take that crop that's not going to be used and ship it overseas because we don't have this and we don't have that. All of those things are thought constructs. It's only thought that's limiting us from having a more just and equal society. Just as if we come back now to the individual and say, It's only a thought that's blocking you from having more prosperity in your life or more health or the divine right partnership or whatever it is that you want. We teach this all the time. I counsel people, I teach classes, and I teach people all the time. You're only a thought away from your best life. What are the thoughts that are blocking you? Once you know the thought that's blocking you, now you have to go to work on that thought.
You have to uncover the hidden belief, you have to exercise it, you have to replace it with positive affirmations, and then start taking steps in that direction in your life. The principles work and you can do it, and people do it all the time. If that's true on the individual scale, why isn't it true on the collective scale? The answer is it is true on the collective scale, but we just have to be bold enough to do do.
Rev. David Alexander D.D. is the spiritual director of the of Spiritual Living Center of Atlanta, author of Freedom from Discord: The Promise of New Thought Liberation Theology and Recovery from the Lie of Whiteness.
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