Fall Letter from Michael Lerner

November 1, 2024

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Dear Commonweal Friends:

I hope this letter finds you as well as you can be in these difficult times.

I write above all to ask you to continue to support our work. I’ll come back to that at the end.

At one level this is an impossible letter to write. I write before the election but you won’t receive it until afterward. This election could signal the beginning of the end of the American democratic experiment. Or democracy in America may survive. We may not know the true outcome for months. This is what our polycrisis resilience work is all about. I’ll write more about this the next time I write to you.

‍A Change

After 50 years guiding Commonweal, I will step down as Board Chair and as a member of the Commonweal Board of Directors on the Winter Solstice, December 22. Commonweal’s 50th anniversary is in 2026. But I began full time work on Commonweal in 1975. The Winter Solstice marks the 50th anniversary of my work at Commonweal.

I am not leaving Commonweal. I remain fully engaged with more than a dozen projects: the Cancer Help Program, Healing Circles, CancerChoices, The New School, the Omega Resilience Awards, the Resilience Funders Network, the Resilience Project, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, the Commonweal Archive, the Natura Institute in the Commonweal Garden and the Migrant Support Network project. I care about the youth art work that Oren has championed and other Commonweal initiatives. I will remain fully active as president of the Jenifer Altman Foundation. There is no shortage of work to do.

As Commonweal moves toward its 50th anniversary in 2026, new Board leadership will meet the challenges of the next half century. This is simply one long-planned next step in a deliberate and careful process that began when Oren Slozberg became Executive Director in 2017. I will remain an advisor to Oren and the Commonweal Board as well as staff with whom I work.

I am beyond grateful that Commonweal is in such robust fettle. Oren offers gifted and inspiring leadership. He is a remarkable and dedicated shepherd for our work. His extraordinary gifts for friendship, for attracting partners of high caliber, and for dedication to our core mission give me full confidence in Commonweal’s future.

Oren’s leadership team—including his Stewardship Council and our Board of Directors—is equally capacious. Under his leadership, Commonweal has tripled the number of our projects, the number of staff, and the budget. The challenges Commonweal faces now are the challenges of growth. They require new leadership skills which Oren and his team have amply demonstrated.

A Call

I feel called to focus on the four questions that have guided my work for a half century. They are the unending inquiry into the nature of healing, learning, consciousness, and resilience. These four questions reflect our core values of kindness, consciousness, and dedication to service. Healing and kindness come from the heart. Consciousness and learning are centered in the mind. Resilience and service are the work of our hands. Heart, mind, and hands are what we are each given.

You can call this inquiry consciousness research or, as some prefer, the philosophy of mind called panpsychism—a meta-theory with many variants. Philosophers regard panpsychism and its antecedent, latterly named animism, as perhaps the most ancient human concept of the nature of mind. Perhaps Indigenous peoples were right.

Perhaps consciousness permeates the cosmos. Perhaps Plotinus was right. The mind may be both a receiver and transmitter of universal knowledge. We can’t prove it.

Who knows?

If this were so, the potential of consciousness for healing ourselves and healing the earth are unbounded. Healing ourselves and healing the earth was my vision for founding Commonweal.

I’ve spent my life on the frontiers of knowledge. In my ninth decade, this seems a worthy frontier at the heart of the questions I have asked for fifty years.

Our Work

Hundreds of people have worked at Commonweal over these 50 years. Thousands have been touched very directly by our work, our community, and the Commonweal site itself. Tens of thousands have been affected by our writings, our films, our podcasts, and the examples of our work. Hundreds of thousands live in a world to which we have contributed to health and healing, education and the arts, and environment and justice.

To mention only seven of our initiatives:

● Developing the field of integrative cancer care

● Initiating the campaign to ban oil drilling off Northern California coast

● Helping reform and then close the largest youth prison system in the world

● Working to rid the world of toxic chemicals

● Teaching regenerative design, permaculture, and healing in nature

● Offering transformative experiences for young people in the arts and beyond

● Offering the Commonweal Retreat Center and all our gatherings on the site

I am keeping this letter deliberately short to focus on my central message to you. I thank you for walking with us over the past half century. I hope and pray that you will continue to walk with us. I have complete trust in Oren and his leadership team. I am not in any way leaving—simply focusing on what is mine to do.

Please support our work in any way that you are able. Your contributions are the glue that always have and always will make Commonweal possible. You can choose specific programs you wish to support or support all of our work. Monthly credit card contributions are an immense gift. So are one time donations. Estate giving is the life blood of our work. So are contributions of things of value like land, homes, appreciated equities, vehicles, and the like.

Above all, thanks for your prayers and well wishes for our work. If the cosmos is enlivened by love, your prayers and well wishes make a world of difference.

A Close

Let me close with this poem, a favorite of Oren’s, which speaks to the beautiful nature of the man now shepherding our work:

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A Ritual to Read to Each Other

by William E. Stafford

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If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

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Stay with us. I’ll be çlose by. Let’s walk together.

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Love & prayers,

Michael Lerner

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Photo: The Fall Gathering at Commonweal, 2024. Credit: Stanley Wu, Commonweal's Resilience Project Director