When will we close the gap between the rich and the poor in our world…? When?
I know, I know…it’s the same old question. It’s the question all truly caring, compassionate — and, I want to say, civilized — people have been asking for decades, for centuries, for millennia. When. When???
This is, of course, not an economic problem. And it is not a political problem. This is a spiritual problem. It has to do with our most fundamental beliefs about Life, and about Who We Are, and about who we are In Relationship to Each Other.

There are those who say we are our brother’s keeper. But Conversations with God goes much further. It says, “You are more than ‘your brother’s keeper.’ You are your BROTHER. You and your Brother are One. There is no separation between you. All ideas of Separation are Illusions.”
I bring this all up today because, as you must surely know if you are not living in a cave somewhere, over 1,000 people have died in recent violence in Kenya in the wake of the re-election of its president, Mwai Kibaki. The political opposition claims that the election was stolen — but the big clashes in Kenya seem not to be about only this most recent upset, but about the long-term problem of the massive gulf between the upper and lower financial classes there.
Reuters New Services, in an analysis of Kenya’s events written by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura, reports that “Kenya is a land of stark contrast: the rich drive gleaming luxury cars, can afford to enrol their children in top British schools and in the case of one local magnate, send suits to London for dry cleaning. But most live a hand-to-mouth existence and some Kenyans believe the bloody post-election crisis that has exposed the east African country’s tribal divisions could also inflame the gulf between classes and further exacerbate instability.”
Describing what she called a “huge wealth gap,” the Reuters report said that in Kenya, 10 percent of the people control 42 percent of the economy, with the poorest 10 percent holding less than 1 percent, according to U.N. figures.
This is not news to the rest of the world — and it is certainly not news to readers of Conversations with God, which has been pointing out in book after book that a tiny percentage of the world’s people hold the largest percentage of the world’s wealth — and that this imbalance is going to lead to inevitable conflict on our planet unless and until something is done to help those billions who live in abject poverty.
In the case at hand, for instance, “almost half of Kenya’s 36 million people live on a dollar a day and most struggle to put their children through school or pay for decent health care,” Reuters reports. On the other hand, Reuters reports, “Cabinet ministers take home more than 1 million shillings ($13,820) a month.”
That’s over $13,820 per month versus $36 per month, in case you missed those numbers, or read right past them, tsk-tsking.
Small wonder there’s violence taking place. Tomorrow we’ll look more closely at the Kenyan situation. But the real question is, not just “What’s going on in Kenya?”, but rather, What’s going on in the human heart that allows anybody, or any group, to treat anyone else like that?
And, of course, this is not just a Kenyan problem. The problem of way-off-balance distribution of wealth is a problem that has affected every country in the world at one time or another — and affects most to this very day.
And the reason this is true has to do, as I’ve said, not with economics and not with politics, but with our spiritual beliefs, our most sacred, fundamental beliefs about humanity, about God, about the process we are all undergoing here that we call Life…
One day we will all “get” who we are in relationship to each other. But that day will only come when humanity as a whole embraces a new set of understandings, a new set of beliefs, about who we are as a species, and about what it means to be human.
I call these new beliefs, loosely, the New Spirituality. And it is what is going to be needed in the world today if we are going to survive, if we are going to be able to live life as we have known it on this planet (with a few improvements for a great many), and if we are going to have any kind of decent world at all to hand over to our children and our children’s children.
Oh, there is so much to say on this. So very much to say! I’ll pick up on this topic tomorrow. Meanwhile, I want you to ask God…ask the God of your understanding…what is Right and True and Good with regard to all of this? Will humanity ever graduate to the point where, in any country, humans would never allow government officials to earn almost $14,000 a month while poor people have $36 to stretch across those same 30 days?