Spirituality in The Financial Crisis

Organizations are created to fulfill a purpose. Corporations, small businesses, churches, schools, social clubs, and even the family, are organizations invented for a purpose. We participate in organizations for many reasons. Some are work related, some educate us, and some entertain us. The reasons are endless. Each is regulated by expectations and roles within the nature of the organization. We are all members of organizations, and we cannot be without them.

But when events in our lives take a downward turn, and the purposes of the organizations to which we belong can no longer support us, we find ourselves in disarray. For example, the expectations and roles of our financial and investment institutions and our mortgage companies collapsed causing an economical crisis. The result was unemployment, foreclosures, and loss of retirement funds. People experienced fear, depression, anger and loneliness. It also caused a breakdown of roles in the family for many causing dysfunction and resulting in pain, anger and sometimes violence.

When our organizations fail to support us, we often search for substitutes to solve the problem. Some leave the group and reach out to other organizations hoping to fill the gap. Some turn to counselors, some to self help books and groups. Others turn to their religious faith. A few of us begin to reflect on our priorities to determine what is really important in life and how we can make their lives more meaningful. Too many of us have not found a replacement for the dissolution of organizational support.

Many of us want, or demand, changes in these organizations. The banks, mortgage companies, and investment companies have mismanaged our money causing misfortune in our livelihood. We want justice for the deceptive and greedy behavior of people working in these organizations whom we hold responsible for this disaster. The amazing thing is that there appears to be no real desire within these organizations to change this blatantly unethical behavior. Most reforms will come from outside the organization, if they come at all.

There are persons, however, that have a different perspective on organizational systems. These are people who seek to change organizational behavior on the inside, as opposed to outside intervention. This individual seeks to change mission statements and organizational goals to provide a more humanly oriented system. She seeks to bring spirit into the fabric of the organization where we can interact with each other in a collective and mindful way so that all can contribute to its purpose.

The organizational spirit is one of nine universal spiritual archetypes that occupy our planet. Her calling is to transform the very nature of our interactions within the organizational framework. She focuses on tearing down old boundaries and creating new space for the human spirit to express itself. New purposes, human purposes, transform the system.

Financial experts claim the housing crisis started the recession. Mortgage brokers practiced predatory lending habits with high risk borrowers. The core cause of this crisis is the immoral acts committed by persons in the mortgage industries. Now they are being investigated for fraudulent lending practices and securities fraud.

The organizational spirit does not accept the habits and practices of the established structure. She seeks to get beneath and beyond the way things are to the purposes of being fully human, not to deny her spirit, but to listen to it. She poses questions like, “Why? Who said so? Where does that come from? What is that all about?”

Most corporate organizations in our society do not speak to our fully human potential. Organizational life is despiritualized. Our corporations, schools, military establishments, religious groups focus so much on society’s institutional life and so little on the possibilities to which our human spirit calls us to do and to be.

It is important to remember that organizations are invented to serve a purpose. We are not an unmindful society. We can be mindful about our collective behavior. We can and do make choices. If our organizations do not support us, we can change them, dispose of them and invent new ones.

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