Reflection: Scott Peck

Scott Peck, author of The Different Drum: Community and Making Peace, describes community as “people living together in both freedom and love.” Communities cannot be formed around people (individualists) who are busy satisfying their own needs first and who are not willing to work hard to make love work. Upon entering this class I realized that a community is not an automatic thing. It does not just appear out of thin air. A group must work together to build bonds between each other. The community in which we are trying to build upon is compiled of many different types of people varying in age, race, sex, class, career, etc. It is going to take some time to build the trust, communication, freedom, and love that we need to form a community.

Peck explains the word “community” as something that we tend to overuse without ever truly understanding it; almost making it meaningless. We have a tendency to relate ourselves to our neighbors, without having ever actually talked to them. I recently moved into a rental house close to school. I have been living there a few months and have only so much as spoken to one of my neighbors. This one neighbor, coincidentally, happens to be my landlord. While geographically this is an area where many people and I have things in common (the same street, trash men, taxes, etc.); it is not anything close to a “community”. It lacks the communication, the freedom, and the love.

While reading Scott Peck’s book, I began to greatly relate to his first sense of community at Friends Seminary. I was raised Quaker and attended Wrightstown Friends Meeting in Pennsylvania until I eventually moved to North Carolina to attend school. I would rate the community at my Meeting as one of the closest knit groups I have ever been apart