(This weblog creates, for us all, a chance to meet at the interaction of Life and the New Spirituality. It is written by the author of Conversations with God, the worldwide best-selling series of books. The “New Spirituality” is defined by the author as “a new way to experience and express our natural impulse toward the Divine without making others wrong for the way in which they are doing it.”)

HIGHLIGHTS OF TODAY’S BLOG…
* We are at ChoicePoint here
* After Katrina, what?
* Are we willing to accept life’s invitation?
* So far the answer has been (largely), no

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Katrina, an event that shook this country to its core — and raised some very real questions about who we are as a people and a nation…and who we want to be.
Those questions have not been completely answered to this day. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are being answered largely by default.
That, of course, is no way to answer questions that cause us to explore the very future of humanity. And make no mistake about it, our identity as a species is at stake here — nothing more, nothing less.
I believe that we caused ourselves to have this experience — all of us, those who were caught up in it directly, and the great mass of the rest of us who witnessed all the events from a distance — to do just that. To decide, once again (and give ourselves the perfect conditions allowing us to decide) Who We Are as a race, as a species of sentient beings.
I know that sounds far-fetched to a lot of you…but just for the sake of discussion, let’s say that it’s true. Let’s say that at some very, very high, very, very “removed” metaphysical level, we, as the creative beings that we are, actually created Hurricane Katrina, and all the tragic death and destruction that it caused, in order to…

…give ourselves, as humans, a chance to see ourselves as we now are, and to make some decisions about how we wish to be in the future.
Do we wish to be more attentive to the environmental damage that we are causing on the earth — or do we wish to continue to assert that nothing we are doing causes such damage, and then continue to go on doing everything we were doing before?
Do we wish to be more compassionate and caring of others, whatever their race and social and financial standing, or do we wish to do less for those who have less, and more for those who have more — as we have been doing on this earth, in most of its societies and cultures, for millennia?
Do we wish to do the very best that the nation which calls itself the greatest on earth can do to put things back into place for a city and the thousands of families and individuals who live there whose lives have been utterly shattered, or do we wish to allow red tape and bureaucratic ineptitude and malaise and just general all around slowness and inability to respond to desperate need be the watchword of this entire recovery effort, while so many continue to suffer?

Who are we as a people here? Who are we?
Why do you think it is taking so long, so interminably long, to put things back together in the areas affected by Katrina — and especially New Orleans? Why do you think that the initial response was so slow to begin with? What messages are there for us to receive from all of this? Do you assess that we are willing to hear them?
I’m not talking about operational ideas…like build better dams, or have a better disaster plan, a better infrastructure, in place. I am talking about spiritual messages.
Many hundreds of people raced to New Orleans and other areas affected by Katrina to help out, to assist in the emergency, to lend a hand, to open a heart, to offer hope in a time of desperate need. So I am not saying here for one minute that humanity’s highest spiritual impulse was not expressed, was completely lacking. But I am asking: Is what we have done the best we can do? Is this the limit of humanity’s possibilities under these circumstances? Or is their a grander demonstration yet to be made?
This is a spiritual question, this is not an operational question. The answer will not be born in physicality, but in spirituality. It was show UP in physicality, but it will not be born there. We, each of us, must go within on this anniversary of Katrina and ask ourselves, “Have we as a species, have I as an individual, accepted the Invitation of Katrina? It is an invitation to move to an even higher expression of who I think I am. Have I stepped into that?
And by the way, “stepping into that” can be accomplished without becoming specifically involved in the Katrina recovery effort (although I surely hope you will, in some way, continue to do that). Stepping into the Invitation of Katrina can be accomplished at your own dining room table, in your own workplace, within your own community. For there is a hurricane going on in every human heart. The is a problem waiting to be solved in every community in the land. There is a chance for expanded awareness and greater compassion and more patience and healing what is not working in every place of employment in the world.
The chance for healing offered by Katrina, and the opportunity it provides for us to express our Next Highest Self, stands directly in front of us every moment of every day, right where we are. If the suffering that so many people have endured because of Katrina is to have any larger meaning at all, we have to put it there. Our invitation is to begin every day, by pouring more compassion, more understanding, more love without condition, from our hearts all the moments of our life.
Let’s use this anniversary of Katrina to open to its spiritual invitation. Might that have been God’s invitation all along? Given that WE are God, and God is US, I find myself concluding that the answer is yes.
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