The idea behind Credenso is simple: believing in people.
The first root word of our name is credenza. More than just a fancy name for a side table, credenza is an Italian word for trust or belief - the cornerstone of Western spirituality.
Secondly is enso, the name for the iconic hand drawn circle of Zen Buddhism. The enso symbolizes a mental state of mindful presence, which is the foundation of spiritual life for most of the Eastern world.
Combining these words represents the essence of what we aim to do - finding synergy, mutual understanding, and shared purpose between people of different backgrounds from all over the world.
The broader vision of Credenso is to act as a non-denominational and fully inclusive spiritual community. Rather than focusing on labels and differences, we take a Rogerian approach and choose to focus on the common ground between people - what do our beliefs have in common, and how can we work together to accomplish common goals?
Our founding philosophy and central ethos is well summarized in the following parable.
It goes something like this: you are among a group of people sitting at a banquet table. There is enough soup at the table to easily feed everyone, but the only utensil available to the group's members is a long spoon, too long to reach your own mouth as you hold it. At this banquet, we have the choice to live in heaven or hell - and it all depends on how we work with what we've been given.
This is us. We, as human beings, regularly decide to put our own needs above those of other people. "I'll get mine, and then maybe I'll help you get yours when I'm done" is the default mode that our brains operate on. This would be fine if we all grew our own food and weaved our own clothes, but we don't live in that world. We've chosen to live in the world of long spoons - society.
Within the framework of this parable, you can consider the spoons to represent our access to technology. We rely on other people to understand things that we don't have time for so that we can focus on being good at one specific thing. This is the strategy that humans have used for several thousand years, and it is the same strategy that has allowed us to spend time investing into developing new technology without dying of starvation or disease - shoutout to agriculture and modern medicine for that.
In recent times, people have been forgetting that we're sitting at the same banquet table. We've become so focused on our own problems and meeting our own needs that we've forgotten how to use our spoons. Within the parable, this is what it means to live in hell: to be so caught up in our own basic fears and desires that we forget how to be kind, compassionate human beings.
This is the alternative. Same table, same spoons. The only difference is that here, people are using their spoons to take care of the people around them. We might not have the capacity to meet all of our own needs as individuals, but we do have the capacity to work together and meet our needs as a collective. In fact, that capacity is what human beings are built for.
The goal of Credenso is to give people the support they need to start looking around the table and imagining how they might be able to help others in their community. We all have long spoons and we all have a place at the table - so take a moment and come see what we're up to!