Chaos to Collaboration
An exploration of how spiritual comfort and collective inaction helped create our current crisis, and why prayer must now become visible, shared action.
Showing Up
Two Saturdays ago, I attended a training for people who want to help keep their neighbors safe. Twice during the training, I found myself with tears in my eyes, not because of the atrocities currently taking place in our communities, but because of the response. Hundreds of people in my city are deciding that there is no more time to wait. It is time to act.
Watching my neighbors make a conscious decision about the kind of world they want to live in dissolved any lingering doubts I had about the future.
Naming the Crisis for What It Is
The injustices currently taking place against immigrants in the United States are a red alert. Being undocumented is a civil infraction, a non-criminal violation comparable to traffic violations or local ordinances. And yet, what we are witnessing is a militarized response to a low-level civil matter.
One trainer described it this way. Imagine being kidnapped by a paramilitary force and taken away in chains because your grass grew too long. The severity of the response has nothing to do with the infraction itself. It has everything to do with scapegoating.
This is not new. This country has always redirected its fear and frustration onto marginalized communities. Let’s name it plainly. This is fascism.
What is new is that many people are no longer willing to ignore it.
Black and brown communities, trans people, queer people. These groups have been sounding the alarm for decades about imbalances of power and justice. The difference now is not that these injustices suddenly appeared. The difference is that it is no longer something that can be ignored.
Chemicalization and Collective Resistance
From a New Thought perspective, there is a word for moments like this. Chemicalization.
Chemicalization occurs when a higher Truth is revealed, but old patterns of thought refuse to release their grip. When Truth moves quickly, resistance intensifies. Early metaphysicians described this not as failure, but as evidence that transformation is underway.
Emmet Fox put it this way:
“It seems as though everything begins to go wrong at once… Hold on steady, and let it rock, and when the rocking is over, the picture will have reassembled itself into something nearer to your heart’s desire.” Emmet Fox, Power Through Constructive Thinking
Chemicalization is not limited to individuals. It happens collectively. When a society begins to shift its consciousness about the inherent worth of human beings, the systems built on inequality do not quietly step aside. They fight for survival. Just at a long held subconscious pattern does not shift when we introduce a new Truth, our old beliefs fight for survival.
Consciousness Shifted, Structures Did Not
I believe the collective consciousness in the United States has already shifted in important ways. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was socially acceptable to make jokes at the expense of minorities. In earlier generations, it was acceptable, sometimes openly, to deny the humanity of Black and brown people, queer people, and trans people. Today, those conversations largely retreat behind closed doors.
The problem is that while consciousness was changing, structures were not. Generational wealth accumulated through exploitation remained intact. Power systems were never redesigned to reflect the values people claimed to hold. Old beliefs continued to fester beneath the surface.
What we are seeing now is the crisis point. The old pattern is no longer sustainable, and it knows it.
When Individual Responsibility Becomes Individualism
This is where New Thought often gets misunderstood.
Individual responsibility in metaphysics has been distorted into spiritual individualism, a belief that personal enlightenment somehow exists apart from collective wellbeing. That was never the teaching. Personal responsibility does not negate cooperation. And there is no such thing as personal salvation in any meaningful spiritual tradition.
Salvation, awakening, enlightenment, whatever word we use, has always been communal.
Emma Curtis Hopkins understood this clearly. She wrote that intellect must “subside in meekness” when Spirit is recognized as the only Reality. When we do this, she said, we recognize that the people walking the streets in restlessness are not problems to be solved, but “walking secrets of the splendor of God.” Reality itself is Mind expressing goodness, health, and life.
Hopkins was not teaching private transcendence. She was teaching participation and collaboration.
The Cost of Spiritual Inaction
This is where the real fracture occurred. A shift in belief took place, but belief was not accompanied by action. Language changed, but power did not. Those who benefitted from old systems continued to hold them. Politicians adjusted their rhetoric to match cultural shifts while continuing to legislate in favor of systems that benefit a few at the expense of the many.
The inconsistency between stated values and embodied action created the moment we are living in now.
But it is not enough to blame politicians or billionaires alone. The deeper issue is collective inaction, especially within spiritual communities that had the language, resources, and influence to respond, but chose comfort instead. Too many retreated into spiritual panic rooms, mistaking detachment for transcendence and private peace for faithfulness.
That collective inaction helped create this crisis. And it will take collective action to move us through it.
This is also what gives me hope.
A Prophetic Vision, Not Abstract Theology
Hopkins envisioned a world where caste systems were dismantled entirely, where economic structures reflected shared dignity. She said clerks should receive equal daily pay with store owners, and miners should share equally with stockholders, each contributing according to their capacity, each benefiting from the whole.
Charles Fillmore echoed this prophetic vision of prosperity with remarkable clarity in his writing. Reflecting on what he believed an emerging spiritual consciousness would make possible, he said:
“In the new era that is even now at its dawn we shall have a spirit of prosperity… Supply will be more equalized. There will not be millions of bushels of wheat stored in musty warehouses while people go hungry. There will be no overproduction or under-consumption or other inequalities of supply, for God’s substance will be recognized and used by all people.” – Charles Fillmore, Prosperity
This was not speculative idealism. It was a vision of a world reordered by spiritual principle, and it demanded participation, not passive belief.
This was not abstract theology. It was a call to action.
Prayer as Embodied Action
Prayer, as New Thought understands it, is twofold. It begins with vision, imagining the world we want to inhabit. But it must move into embodiment. Prayer without action is incomplete. Truth requires alignment and response.
Hopkins taught that if we encounter despair and do nothing to alleviate it, we have failed to live the Christ we claim to embody. The work of the Christ is not personal escape. It is the transformation of the world.
This is where personal responsibility comes in.
When Fox tells us to “hold on steady” during chemicalization, he is not advocating passivity. He is reminding us to remain aligned with the Truth we already know and to act accordingly, even when old systems rage against it.
We are being asked, right now, to choose participation over passivity.
This moment requires more than resistance. It requires vision, coordination, and sustained collective action, now and beyond this crisis. We cannot afford spiritual disengagement disguised as wisdom. The work before us is the work of prayer made visible, allowing what we envision to become embodied action, and building, together, the kind of world we want to live in.
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You may also be interested in these reflections:
This names something important. Comfort without movement quietly trains the body to stay upright when it should be bowing. Real prayer isn’t retreat, it’s alignment. You lower yourself, you relinquish the illusion of standing above the mess, and from that posture action becomes unavoidable. What you’re pointing to here is the difference between inner assent and embodied consent to reality. When surrender is practiced honestly, it doesn’t end in stillness. It rises as protection, presence, and shared responsibility. That feels less like abstraction and more like the work in front of us now.