What a Spiritual City Could Look Like

I just spent a weekend in San Francisco, a city I once lived in and really loved, and realized that urbanity no longer thrills me the way it used to. In fact, some cities seem almost unlivable now.

Admittedly, that perception may be related to my (advancing) age. When you’re young, cities feel like lively, high-energy, happening places. You’re around a lot of other young people, and that’s fun and exciting. But as you age and your family expands and your need for peaceful space increases, it gets harder for many people to put up with the costs, compromises, and complexities city living demands. 

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San Francisco, in its setting of great natural beauty on a hilly peninsula surrounded by the sea and a massive bay, still has enormous charm and cultural bounty — but its problems sometimes seem to overwhelm its positive aspects. Despite what the song says, you might not want to leave your heart there.

Many of those entrenched problems aren’t confined to San Francisco, of course — they’re distinctly American and even global in nature, and they afflict urban areas everywhere. However, within the boundaries of the relatively small geographic area San Francisco occupies, they seem magnified and even more problematic than they might be elsewhere.

The issues there in the city by the bay — a great gulf between the ultra-rich and the abject poor, the overcrowding inherent in high-density, land-restricted urban areas, the problems of sanitation, crime, drug abuse, homelessness, mental illness, and just the unaffordability and stress of living so closely among so many other people — can feel insurmountable.

Hardscape dominates everywhere, constantly reminding everyone that, as Joni Mitchell sang, “they’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” All of that concrete and stone make the city a foreboding, unwelcoming place for so many people, especially those without means.

So what’s the Baha’i solution for these urban woes, not only in San Francisco but in urban areas in general? 

Cities, the Baha’i teachings say, need to strive for equity and equality. In a speech he gave at the Brotherhood Church in New Jersey in 1912, Abdu’l-Baha spelled out the Baha’i remedy:

Through the manifestation of God’s great equity the poor of the world will be rewarded and assisted fully, and there will be a readjustment in the economic conditions of mankind so that in the future there will not be the abnormally rich nor the abject poor. The rich will enjoy the privilege of this new economic condition as well as the poor, for owing to certain provisions and restrictions they will not be able to accumulate so much as to be burdened by its management, while the poor will be relieved from the stress of want and misery. The rich will enjoy his palace, and the poor will have his comfortable cottage.

The Baha’i teachings, then, call for a new global order that no longer allows for the accumulation of massive wealth or the continuing existence of dire poverty and homelessness.

In his Tablet to the Hague, written to the Executive Committee of the Central Organization for a Durable Peace, Abdu’l-Baha, Baha’u’llah’s son and successor, wrote:

Material civilization is like a lamp-glass. Divine civilization is the lamp itself and the glass without the light is dark. Material civilization is like the body. No matter how infinitely graceful, elegant and beautiful it may be, it is dead. Divine civilization is like the spirit, and the body gets its life from the spirit, otherwise it becomes a corpse.

Our civilizations, the Baha’i teachings point out, aren’t just made up of buildings, streets, and business enterprises — instead, they’re animated by ineffable spiritual bonds of cooperation, connection, unified purpose, care for one another, and ultimately, love. That may sound a bit ephemeral, but it’s not. Instead, those qualities, which the Baha’i writings compare to light itself, illuminate the dark corners of our cities and towns and villages with good intentions, with a desire for unity, with a sense of shared humanity. 

In the world’s greatest villages, towns, and cities, you can see the results of that sense of shared humanity. Those places treat people fairly and compassionately. Dire poverty, homelessness, and afflictions like addiction and mental illness are attended to in humane ways rather than left to fester in public. Cities that prioritize equity are usually clean, safe, and inviting. In places where the spiritual values prevail, where we take care of one another and respect the rights of each person regardless of their societal status, everyone can truly feel like they’re part of one human family.

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More than a century ago, in 1911, during his first trip to England, Abdu’l-Baha spent a few autumn days at the Clifton Guest House at Clifton, Bristol. Here’s an account, from the book Abdu’l-Baha in London, of what he saw there and how it affected him:

On the first afternoon, while driving, he expressed much interest in rural England, marvelling at the century-old trees, and the vivid green of the woods and downs, so unlike the arid East. “Though it is autumn it seems like spring,” he said. The houses with their little plots of ground, suggested a quotation which Abdu’l-Baha gave from Baha’u’llah’s writings in which the latter alludes to each family having a house with a piece of land. Abdu’l-Baha likened the country to the soul and the city to the body of man, saying, “The body without the soul cannot live. It is good,” he remarked, “to live under the sky, in the sunshine and fresh air. … the world has entered upon the path of progress into the arena of development, where the power of the spirit surpasses that of the body. Soon the spirit will have dominion over the world of humanity.”

When that occurs — when the spirit has dominion over the world of humanity — our cities will be transformed into welcoming centers of culture and creativity.