​Common Ground

Common Ground is our Whole Souul Living Theme for March.  In a world that insistently divides and fragments the human community, a central proposition of our faith is that, There is a Unity that makes us One.

Rev. Victoria Safford’s wrote; We are alone yet intricately bound, inextricably connected to soil and stream and forest, to sun and corn and melting snow.  We are alone yet bound by stories we cannot get out of to ancestors and descendants we will never meet.  And all these natural conditions, these bonds we did not forge ourselves and yet cannot deny, are the strands of a theology, the seeds of faith, the beginning of re-ligion, the binding all things.

Below are some questions for personal and communal reflection:

• Relate an experience with finding/creating unexpected Common Ground with another human being.
• What conditions, context, or background allowed this to happen?
• One of the paradoxical truths of being human is the privacy, even loneliness we experience within our own thoughts, and that this is a near universal, shared experience.  How much Common Ground do you believe exists among the inner experience of people?
• One result of Common Ground awareness is compassion.  How can our community teach this?  To ourselves?  To each other?  To our children?  To the world at large?
• What are the limits of compassion?  Does compassion ever become destructive?