The Common Good  

I have a confession to make. Before spending intentional time with “the common good,” this phrase always struck me as inaccessible, overly simplistic, and moralistic. Yet here I virtually stand, to make an adamant case for the common good as a calling, to us, from a saner world that is longing for our return.  

The common good is a posture, a perspective, and a range of practices that occur when we decenter ourselves as individuals in favor of taking our rightful place in the sacred web of life. This web includes you and me. It includes everyone we know, and everyone we don’t understand. It includes those on the margins and those who are oppressed. This web includes every stone, bird, and blade of grass. It includes those we will never know, living in countries we will never visit. It includes all future generations to come. The common good is what it means to live from a place that uplifts the collective flourishing of all these beings.  

Sacrifice  

Several years ago, I led my first climate change workshop at the local library. It was a great and willing group, and I felt like we’d really gotten somewhere together. At the end of our final session, one man (let’s call him John) declared that while all of the visioning towards a more healed future was great, he knew, and he suspected we all knew, that in order to right our climate-changed wrongs, every person in that room would have to sacrifice our comfort in favor of less. And he wasn’t willing to do this.  

I was grateful to John, for being honest. And it broke my heart because I knew that I, too, was going to leave that workshop in my car, to go buy non-local food that had been shipped from who-knows-where, and then go order something from Amazon that I “needed.” 

A couple of years went by, and as I deepened into my climate journey, I began to wonder if I really was so comfortable after all, or if the things I didn’t want to (and didn’t know how to) release were just those things I had grown accustomed to and reliant on.  

Then, recently, I received a puzzle piece. While at dinner, a friend off-handedly said to me: “Sacrifice is the art of exchanging something of lesser value for something of greater value.” This reframing of sacrifice begged a new question: what if this shift to serve the common good was not actually a sacrifice in the sense of a stripping away, but an opportunity to find greater spiritual and embodied wholeness again? 

A Model  

Imagine a forest. With ferns and muddy patches and trees and birds and insects and streams and wolves. Each one of these beings is simply being in the reality of their profound interconnectedness. The ferns aren’t worried about giving away some part of themselves to belong;: they are just being a fern, one small part of the forest. The fern gets to just be a fern because it is part of a larger web of mutuality and care. The forest wants to sustain itself in its entirety, and thus each individual function becomes a divine puzzle piece, blurring, not into some abstract and unfeeling anonymity, but into abundant balance.  

I uplift our more-than-human kin to exemplify the common good, because we so rarely turn to these neighbors for wisdom, and there is so much to be gleaned from the sanity of feathers, rocks, and fungi. I also want to emphasize that the work of the common good is necessarily place-based. Though serving the common good asks our awareness to stretch across generations and the globe, its embodied actualization happens alongside our physical neighbors, and within our particular localities.  

With all of this in mind, I offer here a few points for the neighborhoods that could use a little common-good zhushing. A good starting place might be:  

  1. Asking the question, “What might a ‘life in common’ (a community that favors the common good over the individual) allow us to become?” 
  1. Uplifting the values that support a healthy common life such as hospitality, equity, and compassion (and beyond!). 
  1. Turning towards each other (and by “each other,” I mean everyone on the aforementioned list of who’s included in the common good) instead of away. 
A Hopeful Benediction  

Would our lives change if we collectively embodied the common good? Yes. But not in a way that leaves a gaping hole where all the yummy comforts of modernity once were. I believe there’s a greater restoration to be had, a sanity that we’ve been missing that is longing for our return. What’s strange is that this sanity of interdependence is already a reality; we often just choose to ignore it, and whether we admit it or not, this is painful.  

Let us reconnect with the common good, not as a chore, nor an obligation, but as a sigh of deep relief. Let us seek the doorway back into right relationship. May the common good be a prayer for the better world we already belong to, that’s just waiting for us to rejoin its sacred web.  

This is post 3 of 3 focusing on our environment as part of our Hopeful Neighborhood. Read the first blog posts in the series: Building a Resilient Neighborhood in the Midst of Climate Change and Fostering Our Gifts for Climate Change.