If ever we wondered if the physical stuff we can touch is affected by spiritual realities in our heart, the economic storm that Wall Street launched on the world is all the proof we need.

Leadership deficit, consumption, greed, and lying infuse this crisis. We've followed the Pied Piper of our human nature right into economic disaster. The day of reckoning is upon us; Washington's congressional hearings are a quasi-judgment seat.

"The economy is in a state of crisis, yet you get to bring home $480 million," ripped U.S. congressman Henry Waxman, speaking to Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. The multiple homes Fuld owned, the millions spent on a lavish lifestyle, all burned under the scrutiny of many who wondered, as the committee did, "how he sleeps at night." In my grumpiest judgment, I think jail is the safest place for Fuld and his ilk.

But the moral lines aren't that simple. Trace the kindly moves of U.S. administrations, both Democratic and Republican, that mandated home mortgages for those without enough income to qualify for credit. With hindsight to our benefit, we now know the benevolent housing mindset got hijacked by greed.

The power of credit

The power of credit first hit me when I interviewed an enterprising man in Sierra Leone. Both his arms had been brutally amputated by a machete in that country's civil war. He made an effort to find me privately after our exchange and asked if I could pay him for the interview with a few bags of cement. He was building his family a house, brick by brick as he could afford to make them, individually. No credit available to him, the house, like any developing world economy, would never be constructed. He needed the productive purpose that North America first used credit for.

Credit, and its system of improving net worth, is a great gift for all of our lives, but from the most complex to the simplest of lending situations, we're going to need renewed moral ideas to manage it. For this to work, there will need to be a faceoff between the advertising industry and our souls.

The world of media supports itself by training us en masse to consume more. They don't care that your life is improved; the ad industry buys content to sell soap, or whatever product the brand writing the cheque is pitching. They know the power of story will shape your ideas, even if it's just a story about how nice life would be if you only had different stuff.

This is where the spiritual story has a major marketing problem. It can be branded by the Christian cross, but understanding what the brand means, well, it's tough to market that depth into a consumer mindset.

The true reality

This week, the Pope tried to entice people into that discovery, saying, "we see it now in the fall of the great banks, this money disappears; it is nothing - the Word of God is the basis of everything, it is the true reality."

Trouble is, the Word of God is the Bible. It is the bestseller of all time, but a tough read, let alone sound bite to package for sale. Collecting dust on most shelves, it is a framework for ideas that will help extricate my soul from financial turmoil and the motivations that brought this on. Just as it takes time to invest in big screen TVs, properties, and toys, this discovery is also about consumption. I need to roll out of bed on a day off and invest in spiritual realities like learning at church. I need to cultivate an appetite to risk investing my mind and time in faith community, where the assets are about sharing a story for a better way.

I hope the church can cash in on our turmoil. At this time, our pulpits must cry out what Jesus spoke about money because we've made a fine mess of doing it without that insight. Whether it's from the Protestant teachings of Calvin's institutes that explore economics, or the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, spiritual theories of why we have private property and how to consume it are available to be discovered.

Such teaching won't stop the recession; in fact, we would all spend much less and give far more to the poor if we did radicalize our economy with spiritual truths. I'm not holding my breath for any widespread shift, though. Only a handful will shout: to hell with this marketing madness, I'm looking for something else to define my identity.

But, in that protest, we begin to have the openness to shape an identity that prospers our soul.