About

What is Caring for Common Ground?

Caring for Common Ground is a collaboration between Holy Wisdom Monastery and the Earth Partnership ecological restoration education program at the UW-Madison. Through summer workshops and year-round opportunities for restoration planning and work together, Caring for Common Ground participants engage in reflection and dialogue about the ethical and spiritual dimensions of restoration, practice skills in restoration and land care, and support one another in a spiritually-engaged community of restoration practice.

Caring for Common Ground is an interfaith (including non-faith), inclusive group. All are welcome, and participants come from a wide variety of backgrounds, religious or spiritual affiliations, and degrees of experience in ecological restoration.

The first Caring for Common Ground workshop was held in June 2018, a pilot program developed and facilitated by Greg Armstrong (Director of Land Management and Environmental Education, Holy Wisdom Monastery), Cheryl Bauer-Armstrong (Director, Earth Partnership), and Claire Bjork (Outreach Specialist, Earth Partnership). Claire also wrote her doctoral dissertation about the planning and experiences of that first cohort of participants.

Program participants meet year-round for continuing restoration education opportunities and the chance to have dialogue and fellowship around mutual environmental concerns. Many participants are developing their own restoration project at their local church, home, or community site or volunteer at various restorations and native planting sites. A second workshop cohort met in June 2019, and planning is underway for the next workshop. If you'd like to stay apprised of opportunities to participate, email us at caringforcommonground@gmail.com

Keep reading for more information about Caring for Common Ground, adapted from Claire's dissertation.

Why Spirituality and Ecological Restoration?

Holy Wisdom Monastery's history is inextricably linked to its special place overlooking Lake Mendota, and today the Sisters acknowledge "care for the earth" as one of the four main pillars of their mission. Although people come to the Monastery from a wide variety of backgrounds and traditions, it is critical to acknowledge that the Monastery sits on the ancestral lands of the Ho-Chunk people, and to consider what that history means for contemporary communities attempting to heal and protect. Restoration of native prairie, savanna, and woodland communities has been an important component of that mission since the 1990's. Today, the Sisters manage almost 200 acres of restored land that is aesthetically beautiful and also a critical component of protecting the Lake Mendota watershed from stormwater run-off and pollution. This commitment to environmental care is inspired by a Benedictine reverence for all creation. Restoration is an example of an integrative spiritual practice, involving the potential to combine contemplation and prayer with manual work.

Earth Partnership, first started at the UW-Madison Arboretum in 1991, has always had a strong philosophical and ethical component to its educational approach, drawing strongly on the shared Arboretum and southern Wisconsin legacy of Aldo Leopold and his Land Ethic. Throughout years of working with educators and youth, the spiritual import of learning how to connect with people and land through the process of restoration was often an underlying current of this work. This dimension has emerged more explicitly in recent years with the development of the Indigenous Arts and Sciences initiative, which is in large part inspired by program advisor Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer's articulation of "reciprocal restoration" (that humans give back to the land as it has given to us).

Given these compatible orientations towards land restoration, staff from Holy Wisdom Monastery and Earth Partnership worked to engage community perspectives and develop a concept for restoration education at the Monastery. What emerged was a plan to assemble an interfaith group who would learn restoration process skills, have opportunities for dialogue, and develop a community of practice that would support them in their efforts to apply their learning to projects of their own.

An Emerging Model

Contemplation as the “Heart” of Learning

In addition to the spiritual meanings that participants ascribed to restoration, there is a spiritual dimension to the learning process itself, one that is centered on the synergy between reflection/contemplation and action.

Recognizing the spiritual dimensions of experiential learning is not new. Perhaps one of the most famous recent examples is Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose work in critical pedagogy was deeply influenced by his background in liberation theology. This is the essence of developing praxis, or learning that helps one realize an ethical life. As one participant said nine months after participating in a workshop:

It’s been a miracle! It’s a magic carpet ride to do what I believe in.

Learning in Caring for Common Ground also happens through cycles of action-reflection and action-contemplation. Reflection is distinct from contemplation, the latter of which is described by Father Richard Rohr as a non-linguistic form of open prayer that transcends false thinking about the ego and sacred-secular dualism, a path to seeking wisdom.

Reverend Matthew Fox describes wisdom as inherently experiential (its etymology in both Latin and Hebrew stem from the word for taste). The emphases in the Earth Partnership program model of reflecting on ideas of place, personal histories, and environmental ethics are supported by practices of outdoor observation and reflective journaling. When those same practices were done in the Caring for Common Ground group, they may have looked the same externally. But participants speak about them in different ways, emphasizing emotional experience over intellectual understanding. They use words like “love” and speak of their “hearts” when describing their processing. They sometimes come to tears when they talk.

Emphasizing experience is fundamental to spiritually-based ecological learning because it allows for people to be opened to the possibilities of connection between ourselves and with the non-human environment. This is why Aldo Leopold’s writings feel so spiritual, even though he doesn’t use God-language or say much about religion.

When participants speak of unity and of wonder, they are describing their affective experiences of something unknowable, but something that they feel connected to. Meaning-making in the context of this project has less to do with articulating significance and more to do the process itself of searching for meaning. By emphasizing experience in the learning process, people are able to encounter the unknowable in the environment without an obligation to intellectualize or justify it, but maybe to strengthen their feelings of love for it. And nurturing loving relationships is the foundation of reciprocal restoration.

Tools: Help in Living out Our Commitments

Interfaith leader Eboo Patel asserts that the most effective interfaith projects start with hands-on activities that bring people together around shared, tangible goals. While honoring important differences in how we understand and interact with ideas about faith, spirituality, and environmental philosophy, Caring for Common Ground participants can emphasize learning tools for action. We can all understand what our literal common ground is, even if we were developing different understandings of what it meant to care for it.

Community: A Desire for Right Relationship

The concept of community is central to both ecology and theology. Ecology is essentially about interconnected relationships, and understanding the ways and extents to which living things rely on one another. Like ecology, religious community is concerned with interrelatedness, but it adds the wisdom of love to understanding these relationships. Religious communities can be a way to hold people accountable to certain beliefs and practices and to perform certain rituals together - but at the core of most is a belief about the importance of love. At its highest ideal, love is not a vacuous or easy concept. Think liberation theology, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Beloved Community, or the Great Compassion of Buddhism. In these philosophies, among many other understandings, love is about overcoming oppression or suffering and seeking righteousness and unity.

The spiritual and ecological imports of community are both important to Caring for Common Ground, and they are related. Participants often seek this space because they have a longing to love their ecological community, and because they want the love of a community to help them learn about and take action for their environment. This may be why participants at times become so overtly emotional during our meetings. People who love the earth can sometimes feel the anxiety and pain of environmental threats very acutely. Learning about and doing restoration together offers the promise of healing and hope.

A participant in the pilot workshop described it as “an uplifting, loving educational development - and even more so - spiritual development experience that prepares people to enact their values more effectively.” As this person implies, the love of the group is not just pleasant for the people that are in it, it is instrumental to our ability to take action. Love is a powerful force for both learning and doing.

In developing Caring for Common Ground, we set out to create a community of practice, but love is not typically part of how such communities are described in educational literature. This community of practice is growing into relationship with our surrounding non-human neighbors. Despite our varied religious and spiritual perspectives, we share core ethical commitments to which we want to be held accountable and supported in enacting. Our group is part of an unfolding story about how people of faith or spirituality learn, share, and take action for the environment together.

For a complete (PDF) version of Claire's dissertation, click here.

For more photos and other highlights from summer workshops and seasonal gatherings, check out the Events page.