Business is the pulse of our country’s value system. The workplace reflects the moral conscience of our post-modern world, says Matthew Fox: “It is at work more than at church that the real moral – and immoral – decisions are being rendered about the health of our planet, our bodies, our children, our very souls. Work is the adult arena for spiritual decision-making.”

In addition to efficiency experts, then, we need soul experts in the work place. All persons have soul – that innate capacity to reflect, to experience deeply, to use imagination to enlarge vision and vitality – but not every person finds it easy to access soul. Nor does every business.

Soul is not measurable like a bottom line on a spread sheet, but it colors every interaction between employer and employee, between company and client, between citizen and world. You know, just by your dealings with a business, whether the work force feels valued and included in decision-making, if environmental concerns are utilized, if there is a commitment to working with the local community for shared prosperity.

It’s not what is done, but the way it’s done that suggests soul. Soul grows along side the product or service and manifests in the interactions with the public. Consciously or unconsciously, a business creates its own theology of work, its own rituals and ethics. It manifests whether or not it values human beings, whether it honors the earth, if it is committed to conservation of resources.

I was touched by the story of the manufacturer who pre-paid his employees a full years’ salary when his factory had just burned to the ground. Is that not soul? Does that not suggest a particular theology of work or work ethic? It’s not just the generosity of his gesture, but what it said about his grasp of employer-employee relations, the importance of family, his understanding of how the emotional wellbeing of his workers has a direct relation to the wellbeing of his company.

You can tell when a business or enterprise is out of touch with its richer possibilities. Workers are drained, demoralized. All they can see is the piece of paper in their hand with the next scheduled meeting or deadline. Work becomes purely instrumental in getting what liberates them outside the workplace rather than an expression of their talent or passion. Creating more sheltered time, time to reflect and renew, is lost. The business for whom they work focuses on profit and expansion. It makes no room for shepherding the human heart.

Businesses that enhance human life, that value and work to restore and sustain the natural enviornment, are more environmentally sensitive, family friendly, worker empowering, and community oriented. It is an extension of our own soul work, when we get involved with a business, to be aware of the mission statement and business ethics it adopts. Our concern for the earth spills over into our concern for a business philosophy that reflects community wellbeing.

The first known people to work our great land, to harvest its fruits, were Native American. These peoples were grounded in a work ethic or spirituality that called for no decision-making of any kind without consideration of how it would impact their children, down to the seventh generation. How well are we who inherited this great land doing in this respect? Are we really leaving the world a better place, environmentally and spiritually, for the generations that come after us?

It’s time for us to stretch our imagination, our mental muscle-power, and our financial resources to create more person-centered technologies in order to enhance American business without starving the American soul.