by Serena Bian, Commonweal Board
On Saturday, September 9th, I walked up the gravel road to the Main Building at Commonweal to join nearly a hundred old and new friends. During the year that Commonweal Co-Founder Michael Lerner turned 80 and Commonweal Executive Director Oren Slozberg turned 60, we gathered to renew our commitments to the Commonweal vision, land, and community of friends that so many of us have come to find healing and be of service, in a grieving world.
The day itself was a threshold—celebrating the past, turning towards the future. Michael Lerner began the day sharing beautiful reflections on how Commonweal’s original vision has changed since inception nearly 50 years ago, and invited us into the question: “How can each of us, whatever our age, find a way to live in these wild, wild times?” After, four pairs of intergenerational leaders concluded the day, reflecting on the changes that Commonweal has been through, while remaining true to our core.
The day was filled with meaningful exchange. After Michael’s talk, Chief Strategies Officer Adam Yukelson and I closed our notebooks and traded knowing smiles, curious to hear each other’s reflections. Dr. Cynthia Li and I shared perspectives on loneliness and the invisible forces of healing, eager to follow-up and go deeper into each other’s work. At lunch with Board member Angela Oh, Ying Ming Tu, and Dr. Erlene Chiang, we lovingly joked around with each other in the way one would with family. These small moments represent an aspect of Commonweal that is remarkable—the knowing that we are each other’s teachers. We listen deeply and humbly, because we know that each of us holds one part of the larger whole. We share our dreams aloud, because our consciousness is intertwined. We offer our gifts, learnings, and perspectives back into the broader circle. We sense-make, together, through uncertainty.
Commonweal’s collective sense-making capacity is needed more than ever. In a time with so much darkness, there is also so much opportunity to be of service. When Oren first invited me to join the Commonweal Board in April 2023, I was honored, but confused. What could a 27-year-old offer to the Board of an organization of nearly 50 decades? Yet our Board, just like every other part of Commonweal, operates unusually. We work more like a Healing Circle, creating the conditions to hold change and transformation with deep, tender hearts. The board itself is a practice of intergenerational partnership. So while I certainly am no organizational guru, by nature of simply being human, I do know how to sit in circle, listen deeply, and offer from my heart.
In my experiences working at the edges of institutions, grappling with the public health and spiritual crisis of loneliness and social isolation, pursuing questions of how we chaplain the end of extractive systems that isolate communities from themselves and each other, I do not think it is easy to be a loving presence in a world on fire. I spent my teens and early twenties longing for communities where I can learn, study, and work towards justice and healing. Places to grieve, rest, and celebrate. At Commonweal, I feel I have finally arrived home amongst elders, healers, artists, seekers.
Finding home at Commonweal has emboldened me to ask harder, more complex questions about loneliness amidst the polycrisis. To invite in dialogue and action around how migration, poverty, detention centers, and our racialized, economic systems must be healed, in order to truly address our crisis of isolation. Finding home at Commonweal has asked me to move beyond a silo-ed approach towards the public health crisis of loneliness into a multi-generational, imaginative inquiry about the transformative possibilities of our relationships amidst collapse. To ask questions like, “What does love have to do with the polycrisis? From end-of-life experiences, natural disasters, and post-apocalyptic science fiction, what can we learn from the edges of our world, to inform our relationships during the polycrisis? What kind of relational infrastructure do we need to survive these times?” These are questions that must be held across time, alongside other generations.
The intergenerational collaborations that take place at Commonweal have also deepened my understanding of the need for lineage healing amongst the Asian diaspora. Conversations with my friend Adam Horowitz, co-founder of Taproot, an intergenerational collaboration to support Jewish seekers in developing spiritual practices for healing, resilience, and liberation, helped spark my own longing to collaborate with Asian elders, teachers, and young people, to explore our ancestral rituals and medicines, as a force for change and justice. I’ll never forget what my friend and Program Director of Octavia Fund Milicent Johnson said to me at a retreat at Commonweal: “I trust that our ancestors conspired for us to meet.” No where do I feel that more alive than amongst the multi-generational, multi-lineage collective here.
As the day of celebration came to a close, I stepped away from the crowd to take in the scene of people—pioneers of the environmental health movement, Program Directors, healers, artists, activists—enjoying Chef Claire Heart’s delicious cake, joined together in song led by Rabbi Irwin Keller. We did what we came to do. We celebrated the birthdays of Michael and Oren, rejoiced in the privilege of serving together as a community, and joined hands across generations to prepare for the next fifty years of work ahead. It was balm, amidst the heaviness of our world today. As I was heading back to my car, Dr. Erlene Chiang walked over to gift me a bag of lotus-bean mooncakes for the upcoming Chinese mid-autumn festival, as an expression of friendship, abundance, and love.
With my cup overflowing by the Commonweal community, I offer a prayer back to us. As we emerge into a new season of Commonweal’s life, may more people, particularly our young ones, find home at Commonweal. As the global polycrisis increases the political, ecological, and spiritual displacement of communities in the coming decades, I pray that the infrastructure we build for the future will be sanctuary for those who come seeking. May we continue to be good hosts of sacred healing for ourselves, for one another, and for our beloved Earth.
May it be so!