We have changed our name to Living Spirituality Connections.

Our Steering Group has met and worked together to bring energy and life to LivingSpirituality since 2012.  The focus and purpose of LS has become clearer as a result of this process, and we now feel more established. We now see that a key need we are responding to is to connect people with another and with diverse resources, and want to communicate that aim in our name. There will be more about our future vision in our forthcoming autumn newsletter.

Posted by the Living Spirituality Connections Steering Group

Can’t find a spiritual sharing group near you?

Would you consider starting one? We have some very useful guidance notes for people wanting to start a local group. Clarifying key questions before getting underway helps the group to get off to a good start.

The notes can be found here – www.livingspirit.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/group_guidelines.pdf.

 

 

From collaboration to co-creation in Interfaith and inter-cultural work by Justine Huxley

What’s the most exciting experience you’ve had collaborating across differences in faith, culture, and ideology? Have you ever entered into collaborative relationships and been truly surprised by the result? What enabled those experiences to happen?

In a group I facilitate at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, in London, someone recently asked, “What’s the difference between collaboration and co-creation?” Here is the answer I liked the most: In collaboration, you and your associates work together. You start off with an idea of what you want to achieve, and the result is not too dissimilar from your original idea. In co-creation, you and your collaborators are inviting in an extra element – the ‘field,’ the interrelated system around and within us, the web of life, or perhaps God (insert whatever language you use for That which is beyond yourself) – and the result is something new, something none of you could have predicted.

That description echoes my experience of working with what is called Emergent Design. There is a quality of aliveness, of being in new territory, of holding a space for something beyond ourselves to bring itself into existence, of reorganizing us and our relationships, bestowing results according to a deeper wisdom that we cannot access on our own. It is a much more exciting way to work. As my fellow co-creator at St Ethelburga, Debbie Warrener, says, “It invites more humility and less attachment to particular outcomes.  It’s a way of listening to a wider deeper dimension in the creative process. Consciously bringing this in can be a powerful way to bridge differences and gently sidestep egos, competition, and more personal triggers that can come up when working closely together with others.”

Principles of creative emergence in interfaith work

How can we engage creative emergence and how can we co-create rather than simply collaborate as we do our interfaith work? What is the real importance of co-creation and emergence? Surely it must be that it enables us to create from the new now. We are at a time in human history where we cannot afford to keep endlessly damaging life. We need a new perspective, a new paradigm, rather than recreating the same problems by thinking and acting in the same way.

Emergence takes us into new, co-creative space. When we connect to the non-hierarchical patterns we find in nature, when we step outside our habitual human hubris and acknowledge what we don’t know, and when we listen deeply to the interrelated ‘field’ we live in, subtle, important change can happen. It can take us beyond our fixed and limited ideas and allow a life-force into the space that can reorganise our reality in new, sustainable ways.

Fundamentalism and barren secularism sometimes seem to trap us a world where meaning is being eroded and we are fast becoming spiritually bankrupt. The world of faith and practice needs to find ways out of the trap. And as spiritual people, these new tools ask us to surrender into the deeper trust of ‘interbeing,’ that is, supporting people to collaborate across our differences for the good of the whole. My hope for the interfaith world is that we allow ourselves to open up more deeply, be reorganised according to a greater will, and be shepherds of the new.

The principles of creative emergence and clear examples of a process that worked and another, not run along co-creative lines, that didn’t work are in the full version of this article at: www.livingspirit.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/collaboration_to_cocreation.pdf.

Justine Huxley is Director of St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation & Peace in London, where workshops are run on co-creation and emergent design.  www.stethelburgas.org

A blog post by Heather-Jane Ozanne

Sami Awad is the founder and Director of The Holy Land Trust (HLT) in Bethlehem. The Holy Land Trust has developed several main areas of work under the ‘Occupation’ which has devastating effects on their community, Bethlehem being largely surrounded by a security/separation wall. Nonviolence is at the core of their work, with leadership training using a Non-Linear leadership programme and community healing and transformation also central to their activities. Please see www.holylandtrust.org for further information.

Since I first got to know HLT through the work of Spirit of Peace as well as personal and family connections, I sensed that HLT’s work was significant not only in their own situation but also in a global context as a model for resolving community tension and creating transformation and promoting healing. Sami Awad’s recent trip to the UK was affirmation of this. Hosted by the Amos Trust, Sami travelled far and wide in England, Scotland and Wales.

Spirit of Peace was delighted to organise his time in Scotland where he spoke at a range of events on tackling sectarianism and addressing the question, ‘How can we create a future of peace from a history of pain?’ His spiritually empowered approach to deep and pressing issues facing human communities is inspiring and hopeful and provides a model for people who wish to live a socially-engaged spirituality, addressing the inequalities and conflict, locally and globally.

‘Towards Human Flourishing’

Certainly there are rich resources here for us, as we develop a section on the Living Spirituality website on the theme of ‘Towards Human Flourishing’, in order to share resources and information for those of us whose spirituality is expressed through engagement with the issues involved in working towards a fairer world where all people can live in peace.

Heather-Jane Ozanne is Founder Director of Spirit of Peace (www.spiritofpeace.co.uk) and a member of the LS Steering Group. She frequently travels to the Middle East.