Building a Community of Love
For the purpose of this post, “love” and “peace” are often used interchangeably. If you are most comfortable with “peace,” please substitute “peace” wherever “love” is used below.
Lately, I have been listening to one of the last workshops that my venerable teacher, Dr. Kenneth Wapnick, taught before he died in 2013, called, “The Community of Love.” It is the second time through the recording for me, but I am hearing much of Ken’s teaching as if for the first time. There is a depth and richness to this workshop that goes beyond even the great depth and richness I associate with Ken’s teaching. Ken was a great lover of classical music, and he began the workshop by quoting a highly-regarded German operatic singer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. In an interview by Martin Kettle of The Guardian, given by Fischer-Dieskau when he was 80, Fischer-Dieskau acknowledged being greatly influenced by the highly-regarded German conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler. He told Martin Kettle,
“[Furtwängler] once said to me that the most important thing for a performing artist was to build up a community of love for the music with the audience, to create one fellow feeling among so many people who have come from so many different places and feelings. I have lived with that ideal all my life as a performer.” (From “It is the start of the final episode,” The Guardian, May 19th, 2005).
What does it mean to “build up a community of love”? According to Ken, a key component is that no one is excluded. At a music concert, the musicians play or sing for the entire audience. Everyone joins together to share in the experience. It doesn’t matter what genre of music it is or what the age of the performers or attendees. Matthias and I went to a Twenty One Pilots Bandito Tour concert just before the pandemic and there was a definite community of love that night. I am old enough to be the mother of the musicians and many of the attendees, but it didn’t matter one bit. The spirit of the concert was such that “one fellow feeling” united these thousands of people “from so many different places and feelings.” It was the same type of experience when Matthias and I went to see the Cirque de Soleil performance of Amaluna a couple of months later. This audience was truly “all ages” and there was something in the performance for everyone. The performers and the audience joined together as one inside the Grand Chapiteau (the iconic circus tent of this touring show).
Taking this ideal of building a community of love to heart, Ken went on to draw a parallel between the performing artist and himself as a teacher of A Course in Miracles. Rewording Fischer-Dieskau’s quote, he said:
“The most important thing for a teacher of A Course in Miracles is to build up a community of love for the Course with the audience so as to create one fellow feeling among so many people who have come from so many different places and feelings. I have lived with that ideal all my life as a teacher” (Disc 1, track 1, 2:19).
Ken’s workshops were attended by people who traveled from all over the world to learn more about A Course in Miracles. In the audience were people who had been raised Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, agnostic, and atheist. And the workshop recordings are being listened to by still others, of similar and different backgrounds. Ken’s mission—carried on now by the Foundation for A Course in Miracles—was to bring everyone together as one, bridging across individual differences and even time and space. The community of love he addresses excludes no one. In this and other workshops, Ken taught that to practice what the Course teaches, no one would be excluded from each student’s circle of non-judgment, forgiveness, and acceptance. Put differently, all students of A Course in Miracles are engaged in building a community of love with everyone. Or if they are resisting including everyone in their circle of forgiveness (as we all do to some extent), then that resistance becomes the focus of non-judgment, forgiveness, and acceptance.
You might wonder how building a community of love is relevant to this blog about experiencing personal peace through living from the quiet center. The reason is that as we look outwards, we see, interact with, and are influenced by the people in our lives and in the world at large. The ego-mind which projected the world being what it is, there are an infinite number of opportunities to lose our experience of peace simply through the impact on us of what people say and do. To experience peace all the time, it is essential to work with our own minds. One way to truly reside in the quiet center is to build a community of love with everyone, or if that does not resonate for you, then to build a community of peace. To do that in daily life, we practice excluding no one from our circle of peace. With any number of people, we may have no difficulty with this. Most of us naturally share “one fellow feeling” with a group of others, perhaps our friends, family members, and members of one or another community or group with which we affiliate. But there are also very many people—even millions—with whom we will struggle to find “one fellow feeling” to share. Those very many people can provide us with enormous scope for practicing living from the quiet center.
To this, you might say, “Yes, I want to experience more personal peace, but how am I supposed to ‘build a community of love’ with so many blockheads?” This is where living from the quiet center requires going beyond the shared experience of something like a concert. With the latter, despite the individuals in the audience coming from “so many different places and feelings,” they have all come to the event with a shared purpose, namely to experience the music. They have also chosen this event to attend from among any number of others. Together with the magic created by the performers, the alchemy of factors bringing everyone together helps springboard the audience to a state of “one fellow feeling.” When it comes to living from the quiet center, the alchemy of factors bringing everyone together is not on the surface. In other words, people clearly differ from one another in myriad ways and finding common ground where you might think to look is not possible. To build a community of love so that we can live from the quiet center effectively, we need to look beyond the surface.
As far as common ground goes, we all share the same dream of separation. We all believe that we are living in a world of form, where, yes, some nice things happen, like a memorable concert, and also plenty of not nice things happen, like a global pandemic. We are all caught up in the vicissitudes of time and space together, along with our fragile, aging bodies, prone to accident and disease. We are all also out of touch with our Source and with the eternal and indestructible Self that we all are in truth. When we reside in the quiet center—or when we even access it for just a moment—we are in the neighborhood of our Source and our Self. From our quiet center, all differences fall away. Perhaps we are not even thinking of others in that precise moment, or perhaps we are holding one or more people in our minds and feeling peaceful just the same. But what about the supposed “blockheads”? What do we do about the people who take us out of our quiet center with just a word? If they’re not in their quiet center, how are we supposed to remain in ours?
In other posts, I have written about the importance of getting and keeping perspective for experiencing peace. I have also very often written about asking for help with returning to a state of peace through turning to our inner (or outer, if you prefer) Guide. A Course in Miracles refers to this Guide as “the Holy Spirit,” which it also calls, “the Teacher of Peace” (T-14.XI.13:3). The Holy Spirit always looks beyond form, beyond words, and beyond behavior to the innocence that is the core of everyone. The Holy Spirit teaches that everything we hear others say or see them do is either expressing love or calling for love. Expressions of love are usually easy deal with, as they tend to evoke a positive response in us. Calls for love, on the other hand, can severely challenge us. This is because they are often attacks, sometimes vicious ones. If we reside in our egos, we live from the perspective that attack deserves attack, and we can rarely be peaceful. But if we want to live from the quiet center, we can learn to see attacks in the radically different way that the Holy Spirit does, namely as calls for love.
This passage from A Course in Miracles explains how the Holy Spirit interprets calls for love:
⁶Consider how well the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the motives of others will serve you then. ⁷Having taught you to accept only loving thoughts in others and to regard everything else as an appeal for help, He has taught you that fear itself is an appeal for help. ⁸This is what recognizing fear really means. ⁹If you do not protect it, He will reinterpret it. ¹⁰That is the ultimate value in learning to perceive attack as a call for love. ¹¹We have already learned that fear and attack are inevitably associated. ¹²If only attack produces fear, and if you see attack as the call for help that it is, the unreality of fear must dawn on you. ¹³For fear is a call for love... (T-12.I.8:6-13)
When we give up the idea that attack deserves attack and instead turn for help from our inner Guide or Teacher whenever we encounter a call for love, we become free in a number of ways. We no longer have to defend ourselves because we are no longer vulnerable. We also don’t have to attack the other person, even in our minds, because we understand that they must be afraid, or they would not be saying or doing whatever it is that they are saying or doing. We have no further need to protect the thought that we are truly separate because the separation is simply an illusion. Fearful and attacking behavior seems to perpetuate this illusion of separation, but with the help of our Teacher, we can reinterpret what we perceive. Having understood that we are in the presence of a call for love, we are now free to remain at peace or to return to peace quickly. If we are moved to respond, we are in a position to respond to the person kindly or lovingly.
Our community of love (or peace) encompasses peaceful people alongside hostile and aggressive ones. Understanding that there are only expressions of love and calls for love, we don’t need others to express love in order to be at peace. Living from our own quiet center inspires “one fellow feeling” in us: we remain peaceful or we are able to return to peace quickly no matter what we see others do or hear them say. Some of the time, the “fellow feeling” seems shared consciously with others in the moment, and other times there is no obvious sharing. And yet, since all minds are joined, our peaceful and loving thoughts touch others in ways we may never see. Regardless, we practice training our minds. When our peace is disturbed, we ask the Teacher of Peace for help with reinterpreting our experience of harsh words or aggressive behavior so that we discern the fear behind them. We then look further, beyond even that, to the stillness and peace that are untouched by anything.
A Course in Miracles is published by The Foundation for Inner Peace. All the books comprising the Course, along with the supplemental pamphlets, are now found online:
https://acim.org/acim/en
All quotations of A Course in Miracles in this blog post are drawn from this version of the Course.
The recording of the workshop, “The Community of Love,” by Dr. Kenneth Wapnick, can be purchased from the Foundation for A Course in Miracles. For a description of the workshop and a link to the store and recording, visit https://facim.org/monthly-topics/the-community-of-love/
The interview with Dietrich Fischer-Diskau quoted in this post is taken from the article, “It is the start of the final episode,” published in The Guardian on May 19th, 2005. To read the article, visit https://www.theguardian.com/music/2005/may/20/classicalmusicandopera2