Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 5, 1990 TAG: 9004041313
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
After all, he uses adjectives such as "mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable" and "seemingly unattainable."
Then he uses the example that nearly everyone has heard of - Alcoholics Anonymous.
Peck cites AA as "the most successful community in the nation and perhaps the world" and traces the origins of the modern community movement to its founding in 1935.
Alcoholics Anonymous has virtually no organization - no dues, budgets or buildings - "yet no other phenomenon has had such an impact for good in the nation," Peck says.
The "true communities" Peck describes are made up of people in extraordinarily committed, long- or short-term relationships to promote their own and each other's spiritual growth and, perhaps, causes such as peace or fighting addictions.
Promoting such intense interconnections among people is the continuing interest of Peck, the psychiatrist-author of "The Road Less Traveled" - a best-seller that promoted the blending of psychological and spiritual approaches to achieve mental health.
Community-building is the subject of Peck's most recent book, "The Different Drum," and is one of three topics he will address Saturday during a daylong seminar at Cave Spring High School.
The other topics are "Togetherness and Separateness in Relationships" and "Addiction: The Sacred Disease."
The seminar is a fund-raiser for the Knoxville, Tenn.-based Foundation for Community Encouragement and is being sponsored by Mount Regis Center, a Salem drug- and alcohol-treatment facility.
Such seminars are "what I do most of" now, Peck said in a telephone interview last week, and about half of the 45 or so he conducts each year are fund-raisers for the foundation.
Peck, 53, said he became interested in promoting community after being involved in several groups that experienced a special closeness after intensive deliberate efforts to bond with each other.
The experiences were defined basically by requirements that individual members be completely honest with each other, make themselves psychologically vulnerable to each other by "serving as a lab for personal disarmament," and be inclusive of everyone with a genuine interest to participate.
Such communities have to have a realistic outlook, Peck says, but are necessarily contemplative and spiritual. Everyone must share in leadership responsibilities.
This Utopian vision is attainable, he says, and the process for reaching this communion is teachable.
Although he is not regularly involved in community-building exercises now, the Foundation for Community Encouragement - which he helped found in 1984 - continues to send its 70 or so designated leaders into two-day or longer missions to help others create community.
And Peck holds up the Alcoholics Anonymous model as one others may follow.
Although AA does not align itself with any organization, the 12-step approach it developed has been borrowed by numerous other groups, such as Mount Regis Center, said administrator Mark Cowell.
The steps involve acknowledging powerlessness over alcohol, turning one's will over to "a power greater than ourselves," or God "as we understand him," making amends to those who may have been hurt, and a pledge to practice the principles in daily life.
This acknowledgement of the spiritual nature of treatment has been championed by Peck in "The Road Less Traveled" and other works.
Cowell said that while Peck's prescriptions for taking personal responsibility for one's life, learning to delay gratification and living with pain are "very compatible" with Mount Regis practice, the center does not use "The Road Less Traveled" as a textbook.
Although that book centers attention on the spiritual aspect of mental health, Peck's later works delve even more deeply into that subject. For instance, he also sees addiction as a form of idolatry, "a substitute for the divine" and "a violation of the first commandment."
Peck said he has been interested in religion since his youth, but that "one of the great blessings of my life was the almost total absence of religious education."
His parents were twice-a-year churchgoers, Peck said, but his only Sunday school experience came at age 8 when he had to color an illustration of the story of Abraham's preparation to offer his son, Isaac, as a burnt sacrifice to God. Peck said he couldn't understand why father or son would have gone along with that.
Later, "Christianity made no sense to me at all," he said, but he was drawn to a course in world religion in high school that eventually led him to Zen Buddhism.
Zen proved to be "the ideal training ground for paradox," Peck said, and that in turn led to his eventual understanding and acceptance of Christianity. On March 9, 1980, he was baptized in a non-denominational service and has jealously guarded his denominational independence since.
He admits that such a stance is "good for business," but that more importantly he sees doctrinal differences as "unbelievably small compared to the basics."
Peck said he is "Eucharistic oriented," however, and cannot understand how any denomination could deny Holy Communion to the non-baptized or to Christians of other denominations.
Peck does not necessarily promote Christianity as a solution to personal ills for everyone. The Foundation for Community Encouragement is not aligned with any particular religion at all.
Nonetheless, Peck asserts that under a broad definition of religion - including any "world view" or thesis of why the world is the way it is - everyone has one.
Peck believes that the creation of community at a grass-roots level, for whatever motivation, is critical to the establishment of peace.
In "The Different Drum," which was published in 1987, Peck argues that the only way to combat the arms race is through the building of community, and the subsequent weakening and transformation of nationalism.
Although he said he's not a scholar of such things, recent events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe haven't changed his mind, Peck said.
Perestroika and its aftermath have been more a reflection of the failure of the communists' economic system than a quest for peace, he said, but it is a hopeful sign.
The United States Constitution was motivated largely by economic interests, Peck said, and only after there was trouble getting ratification did the idealistic Bill of Rights get included.
All the dangers of nationalism that he wrote about in 1987 still exist, Peck said, even in our own hemisphere.
The invasion of Panama is a case in point. While he feels it is clear than intervention was needed to oust Noriega, Peck questions whether the U.S. military was the ideal group to do that.
Peck endorses a "supranational" global government, with a worldwide currency system as part of the answer to international conflict. He says he cannot understand some Christians' fear that such a world government represents the anti-Christ.
But every now and then, even Scott Peck gets so caught up in global concerns that he forgets where his personal priorities ought to be.
He recently became so caught up in the work of the foundation, he says, that "a tough little nun who is my spiritual director" had to remind him that his "spiritual life is the most important thing," not the foundation.
M. Scott Peck's daylong workshop will run from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday at Cave Spring High School. Admission is $67.50 in advance or $75 at the door.
by CNB