Our lives have become complex and stressful, making it difficult to nurture the spiritual connection between and among us that is called relationship. We are so preoccupied with seeing individuals as separate entities and assessing each other's different-ness that there is little sense of that which binds us, what we share in the context of relationship. It is important to value our relationships and design them to be good environments for mutual growth. Yet so often our relationships are cold, tense, conflict-ridden, unfriendly environments. A simple way to say this is that the sense of friendship has been lost from our relationships.
Relationships are our most precious resource.
In this article I'd like to talk about practical friendship - and explore how we can put that sense of friendship back into our lives. This non-residential community is a group of several hundred individuals, living in the Puget Sound area, who are interested in how community can be an agent for societal change and a resource for living. The group is not defined by place or activity but by covenant, the core of which is the commitment to be the finest person possible at both the level of character and integrity, and to compassionately work with others to express that integrity in appropriate ways. The community formed, almost as a byproduct, around the interactions of a variety of professional people engaged in putting on an annual Human Relations Laboratory - a human relations training event. People connected with these events began to network - and found many ways to work, play and learn together.