Community - What's It All About

My inspiration for this blog is the book The Different Drum - Community-Making and Peace by M. Scott Peck, M.D., Copyright 1987. This may be an older book but it is a book for all time. We really need to think seriously about his challenge to take this "journey in self-awareness; to achieve, through the creative experience of community, a new 'connectedness' and wholeness . . .". I see brokenness everywhere in families, in churches, in communities, in governments all over the world. I hear people disagreeing about things that they really don't know anything about but they hear something from someone they know or a family or group has always done it a certain way and so on and so forth. I find in most cases people really don't know what they're talking about because they've never really researched for themselves or because they don't like change. I feel badly for people who end up being hurt because they trusted false people or listened to hearsay and never really truly understood the repercussion of their decision. Dr. Peck shows us how to come together in community to talk things out, to think, to understand and to go through the necessary process of learning how to become community.

The world is getting smaller and smaller by the minute, so to speak and I truly believe that our only hope is to find people, leaders that can take us through the community process. It has a definite pathway, a sacred structure that must be followed; it is work, it is joy. I believe we were meant to evolve into community people. Dr. Peck shows us how to do it and is "a founder of the Foundation for Community Encouragement, a nonprofit organization for promoting community and world understanding.

I was very impressed with his book and plan to follow up by looking into the Foundation. I will share as I learn.

I took this picture at a monastery and gave it a sepia look. This is my sacred passage to a world of holy community. As a visionary it is my hope for the world.