"Practicality is central to the American genius. The capacity to apply good ideas (as well as bad ones) and materialize them in a workable way has marked American culture from the start. Like every gift, this one has its shadow, in this case the propensity for turning absolutely everything into a marketable commodity. Spiritual materialism prospers here to a degree that would stagger any European mind. Transformation, or spiritual rebirth itself, through any number of unique methods, has become a major product line, which points to how unhappy people must be with who they are already. Yet among all the marketing ploys, the need to make a buck, the personal aggrandizement, the desperate craving for anything to fill the gap in an empty life, I have found that the practical genius of America is, even so, expressing the deepest aspirations and insights of the human spirit in any number of tangible forms. These forms are determined, not so much by an organization, religious or otherwise, but by the genius of the individual for the common good.
"What is significant is that no one is in charge. I mean that no one is doing it. This other America is not a cause that you fight for, it is something at work, like a new configuration, in the collective psyche. It is something we participate in, rather than direct or control. As when the Berlin Wall came down by itself, a broader intelligence is at work — not as some external force acting on us, but from within us as a collective. In that sense, the old ideal of personal spiritual salvation through individual effort no longer holds up in the same way. It never was, anyhow, a full representation of the Christian ideal. It is deeply Christian to recognize that we are all in this together somehow, and the effort of one can only be for the whole; the transformation of the whole, in the end, is what will see us through. It is the soul of the world, the anima mundi, that is being transformed, as much as any one individual soul; and yet that transformation is happening, paradoxically, through us as individuals.
" 'We are preparing the way for a global democracy,' said Vaclav Havel, in that same Stanford speech, 'but that democracy cannot emerge until there has been a full restoration and recognition of the moral authority of the universe.' The moral authority of the universe is what is beginning to make its presence known in countless individual and collective initiatives around this country. There is no manifesto other than the small voice of conscience that the universe — the soul we all share in — uses to speak in and through us.
"This book, then, is an exploration and celebration of this other America as seen through the eyes of a foreigner; the America of the human spirit as it is emerging in its many guises throughout the country today. That spirit can rightfully be called sacred when it is in the service of something greater than itself. Just think, as you are reading these lines now, there is a group of women in Boise, Idaho, unknown to anybody, who are busy at work making their peace quilts. When they are done they send one to a senator. Over fifty senators have slept under one so far. As Brother Lawrence said, 'It is necessary to have great things to do. I turn my little omelet in the pan for God.'"
