Gettin’ Through Hard Times Together

(This post and the next few posts that follow will present the Introduction to my new book, Gettin' Through Hard Times Together: Creating Prosperity Through Sharing, Service and Sacrifice)

The fundamentals of the whole economic condition are divine in nature and are associated with the world of the heart and spirit. This is fully explained in the Baha'i teaching, and without knowledge of its principles no improvement in the economic state can be realized…When the love of God is established, everything else will be realized. This is the true foundation of all economics.

(‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 238)

We live in a time of chaos and confusion, despair and degradation, and people everywhere search desperately for a way out of a darkening horizon.  Of course, this is not new in any absolute sense.  People have lived through numerous such times.  What is new is that upheaval is everywhere.  Humanity itself is threatened.  We are not just experiencing cultural exhaustion, massive civil unrest, or yet another crisis of government or economy, depending upon what land or people one is observing.  We are not just at the end of an era or even an age, but of an entire order of human life and thought.

A new way of looking at our selves and the world is necessary; a new light is required to shine within human beings that enables us to see and formulate new answers—perhaps even new kinds of answers—to urgent questions that cannot be answered in the usual way. 

Changing our view of human nature changes our understanding of everything else.  This internal paradigm-shift is difficult for many reasons, chief of which is, in my view, the misinformation we receive about ourselves.  We are victims of what Bahá’u’lláh calls “lack of a proper education”. (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 161)  There is always a connection between social crisis and new moral possibility.   Yet full response-ability cannot be achieved when one suffers under the burden of a puny form of belief in oneself or in higher and greater spiritual powers.   Because of an improper education, we believe our humanity is something less, much less, than it really is.  We say things like “We are only human”, because we want to rationalize or excuse a sorry piece of thought or stupid bit of behavior.  But we also say it because we don’t know or no longer remember that a human being is the most powerful, wonderful, and noble creature in the cosmos.  We can’t hear our inner voices, put no faith in our imagination, are no longer fired by the sacred longings of the human spirit.  We are without vision, and are left with only dreams. 

Solving our most intractable problems starts, I feel, with a new vision of humanity. The Book of Proverbs puts this truth well:  “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (The Holy Bible, The Book of Proverbs 29:18)  Vision, then, is at least as important as bread, but fear and wrong conditioning delays understanding of this truth.  No doubt vision without the means to implement it is just fine words and wonderful pictures.  Too great a gap between possibility and “reality” often ends in frustration and despair.  But, too, means without vision are destined for only short-sighted pragmatic goals.  A great vision fires the imagination which taps the energies of motivation which, in turn, generates the means to execute the vision.  This means a transfer of energy from pragmatic to idealistic purposes.  Where to find such a vision?  I find it in the Bahá’í Teachings.  The Universal House of Justice writes that the guidance that the Bahá’í teachings offer “does not comprise a series of specific answers to current problems, but rather the illumination of an entirely new way of life.  Without this way of life the problems are insoluble; with it they will either not arise or, if they arise, can be resolved.” (The Universal House of Justice, message dated July 21, 1968 to a National Spiritual Assembly.