Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life

Discovery 6: How Love Orders Our Relations

What resonates with you? What challenges you?

Oct 20, 2026

Making Room for the Whole

Transforming a community can begin with just one person willing to hold space for the whole. They don’t need to have all the answers, only the willingness to listen, gather people, build relationships, and connect what is already alive.

As I had already learned, the people and the good they carried are already here.

My role is not to supply some missing piece, but to hold the space where people already doing good work can find one another.

And that required something of me as well: as best I could, I had to get my own ego out of the way.

Part of that meant recognizing that I hadn’t done it all myself.

I remember someone asking me, “How did you create that local food system in Northern Nevada?” My answer was simple: I didn’t. The farmers, restaurant owners, food advocates, and others who cared about our local food system were already doing the work. What I did was to help them find one another, build relationships, and begin collaborating.

The work can start very simply. Sometimes it means picking up the phone and calling one person. One relationship leads to another. But over time, I learned that connecting people was only part of the work. What brought us together mattered just as much as the kind of space we created when we came together.

I had encountered this challenge several years earlier while we were building our Local Living Economy Network. It was 2003, and the country was deeply divided over the Iraq War. People were choosing sides: pro-war or anti-war. I began wondering whether there was another place where we could meet.

I asked a different question: What do we all care about, left and right, religious and secular, activist and entrepreneur? One answer was surprisingly simple: the health of our locally owned businesses and the community they sustained.

We weren’t pro-war or anti-war. We were Pro-Local.

That didn’t mean our political differences disappeared. They simply no longer defined the room. Democrats and Republicans, activists and business owners, people of faith and no faith could work together around a shared commitment to strengthening the local economy.

I began to recognize something deeper beneath those political differences. For me, it was the truth that every person is made in the image of God. We were already united before we identified ourselves as Democrats or Republicans, left or right. Those political categories had become boundaries through which we saw one another as separate, obscuring a deeper unity that already existed beneath the polarization and fragmentation of our civic and economic life, locally and globally. As I had already come to see, belonging did not have to follow agreement. Our belonging was already there.

The challenge was not to create that unity, but to recognize it, experience it, and learn to live from it over time, making room for the whole community.

Protecting the Space Between Us

We had found common ground on which we could act together.

But as the network grew, I discovered that common ground was not enough. We also had to protect the space we were creating together.

I remember one meeting attended by more than a hundred business and nonprofit leaders. At the end, a man stood up and invited everyone to join him outside the Reno Convention Center to protest President George W. Bush, who was campaigning for reelection.

As the facilitator, I had a choice. I could let the comment pass. But if I did, Republicans in the room might reasonably conclude that beneath our shared commitment to the local community, this was really a progressive political space after all.

Whatever my own feelings about Bush or the war, they weren’t what had brought us into the room.

My political opinions had not disappeared, but they could not define the space we were creating. Our shared commitment to strengthening the local community mattered more than any one person’s political position.

Henri Nouwen, the Christian priest and spiritual writer, described the deeper meaning of hospitality in similar terms: “the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.” It echoed something I had long seen in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan: mercy crosses the boundaries that separate us, allowing the outsider to become our neighbor.

Years later, I came to think of this kind of space as a cathedral: “If we are to hold sacred space for others, we must first remove our shoes, our egos, fears, and ideological armor, before stepping into the cathedral of community.

Taking off our shoes did not mean erasing our beliefs, identities, or differences. It meant setting aside our assumptions and judgments so we could encounter one another within a larger shared space, without requiring our particular worldview to define the room.

That day, I thanked the man for his passion and for caring enough to speak up. Then I reminded everyone that we weren’t gathered to support or oppose George Bush, Democrats, or Republicans. We were there to strengthen our local economy together. I wasn’t asking him to give up his political convictions, or the Republicans in the room to surrender theirs.

This was where I had to learn how to protect everyone’s place in the room. They didn’t have to agree politically in order to belong.

That applied to me too. If I wanted to bring people together across those divisions, I couldn’t allow my own perspective to quietly become the perspective of the room. Holding this larger space required something of me as well. I had to learn when to take off my own shoes.

Making room for one another was only the beginning. Once we had created a space where people could belong without having to agree, we could begin discovering what we could accomplish together.

This brought me back to Sarvodaya, which I had first encountered years before our work in Northern Nevada. With time, I recognized how closely what was emerging in Northern Nevada echoed the pattern I had first encountered there: people coming together around shared community needs, with Love taking practical form through service.

Farmers, business owners, environmentalists, government officials, Christians, progressives, and conservatives can bring their differences with them. We were coming together to serve the needs the community already shared.

Only later did I understand the architecture beneath what we were doing. Shared purpose gave us common ground. Virtues shaped how we related within it. Common community needs gave us places to serve together. The pattern came alive through people gathering in small circles, building relationships, and acting together. And a network-centered structure allowed people and organizations to retain their autonomy while becoming part of something larger.

These would eventually become elements of what I called Symbiotic Culture DNA.

Yet beneath these emerging structures was something more fundamental.

Belonging does not have to begin with agreement. Conventional movements often gather people who already agree. The Ancient Blueprint reveals something deeper: a coherence that already exists, whether or not we recognize it.

We already share our humanity, inhabit communities together, and depend upon one another. Our common needs do not create that deeper coherence. They give us places where Divine Love can be made manifest.

How Love Becomes Embodied

Much of what I had been doing was intuitive. I listened, learned from what happened, and adjusted as I went. In many ways, I lived into the work before I had language for it.

My time with Dr. Ari in Sri Lanka helped me see more clearly what had been happening beneath the work. I remember sitting with him after lunch in 2022. By then I had seen what Sarvodaya had become: thousands of village communities and millions of people participating in a movement that joined spiritual awakening with the practical work of building another social reality.

I asked Ari a question that had been on my mind for years: How could one person mobilize millions of people to build a new social reality? How had something that began with one schoolteacher and one village grown into a movement reaching an entire nation?

Ari smiled but said nothing. And somehow, in that silence, an answer began to emerge. The word that came to me was spaciousness.

There seemed to be so little in him that needed to occupy the space.

He wasn’t seeking recognition, status, control, money, or political influence. He wasn’t trying to tell people what to do or convert them to his particular religious worldview. He was simply present and open to the people and community before him.

But his spaciousness was not an emptiness.

Something was present.

Love.

As I sat with what I was seeing in Ari, I began to recognize something familiar through the lens of my Christian faith. In Jesus, I had encountered a Love that is radically self-giving. Divine Love is not simply something Jesus commands us to give to others. It is something we first receive. As the First Letter of John puts it simply, “We love because he first loved us.”

As I had experienced before, Divine Love came from beyond me, entered my life as a gift and changed how I saw the person before me. As I learned to receive it, the way I approached others began to change. Instead of beginning with what I wanted from them, whether agreement, recognition, influence, conversion, or even participation in my own vision, I could begin with a desire for genuine communion.

This was the transformation taking place within me: a movement from self-serving desires toward self-giving Love.

I saw that same self-giving Love embodied in Ari. His Buddhist language and spiritual tradition were different from mine, but I could feel the same self-giving orientation in the way he lived. For Ari, inner awakening and the transformation of the community were not separate realms of life. The spiritual took practical form in how he entered a village, listened, served, related to people, and made room for others to discover their own capacity to act.

Seeing this, the question I had asked him began to look different.

Perhaps the question was not how Ari had mobilized millions of people at all. In the same way that I had not “built” the local food system, Ari had not built Sarvodaya by himself.

And now I could see how that self-giving Love worked through Ari’s humility, service, and the space he made for others. Through the relationships he cultivated, others discovered their own capacity to serve and act. As they did, that self-giving Love flowed outward far beyond any one person.

I recognized something fractal in the way this happened. The pattern took root in the lives and relationships of others. People who discovered their own capacity to serve could build relationships, gather others, and act together around the needs of their communities.

The same pattern could take root in many communities everywhere, all at once, without depending on any one person to direct it.

The Missing Link: Love Needs Pathways

This growth was not simply a matter of Love spreading from person to person. It found pathways through the relationships people formed with one another. As people came together around shared community needs, relationships became circles, circles connected into networks, and people began creating social and economic structures through which that Love could take practical form.

As these connections multiplied, a living relational infrastructure began to emerge: an interconnected web of relationships, circles, and networks.

Love was becoming embodied not only in people, but in the relationships and structures they created together. And as those relationships extended across different dimensions of community life, the possibility of something larger began to appear.

This helped me understand what was missing from an idea I had encountered years earlier. I read an interview once with a prominent Western spiritual author who suggested that if enough individuals “awakened,” a new society would emerge. I wasn’t even sure what they meant by awakening. But I found that assumption dangerously misleading: that transforming enough individuals would somehow transform humanity and its institutions without the work of changing the structures themselves.

Of course, transforming individuals is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. People could become more loving while the centralized systems and institutions shaping their lives remained largely unchanged. That’s the danger of presenting a partial truth as the whole truth. It lulls people into believing that personal awakening alone will transform society. To me, that is a form of “hopium.”

But Sarvodaya had shown me the missing link: the Culture of Separation had left us on isolated islands of goodness, within systems and structures that were never designed to allow Love to flow freely between us.

What was needed was a parallel social infrastructure that could connect those islands, creating new pathways through which Love could flow into our social, economic, and institutional life.

This was what I had come to call a Superhighway of Love. Here was the Ancient Blueprint coming alive.

And looking at Ari, I could see where building that Superhighway began. It was not simply about bringing people together. It began with those willing to make room within themselves for Love, so they could make room for it between us.

Becoming a Uniter Instead of a Divider

But that capacity to hold space could not remain with a few people. If we hope to build communities capable of coming together across their differences, we have to learn to become uniters rather than dividers.

Becoming a uniter was not simply a matter of learning a new facilitation technique. It required us to confront our own judgments and learn to make room for people who see the world differently.

It isn’t easy. At times I felt as though I were standing in the eye of a hurricane. Around me were people with different beliefs, politics, interests, personalities, and histories. And the more I tried to hold space for all of them, the more that space revealed what was happening within me.

This was some of the hardest inner work I had ever done. The differences between us exposed the places in me where I was still judging, separating, or withholding Love. I began to recognize how deeply the Culture of Separation had conditioned me to judge those who did not share my worldview, making agreement a prerequisite for belonging.

For years, I had simply assumed that my own worldview was the right one, without recognizing how that assumption made less room for people who saw the world differently. The more tightly I held to my own need to be right, the less room there was for others. The more I could release those judgments, the more space there was for relationship.

I continued to see that same pattern of separation around me. As I was completing my first book, I heard many people say they would never work with Trump supporters or Christians. I heard similar refusals from people on the other side of the political divide, directed toward those whose political and religious beliefs they opposed.

Yet through my community-building work, I discovered another way.

We didn’t have to overcome our political, religious, or ideological differences before we could come together. We could begin by working together around shared concerns, such as growing more local food or strengthening the local economy, while remaining different from one another.

But even this approach depended on my willingness to confront the divisions within myself.

I cannot create a Culture of Connection in the room while carrying the Culture of Separation within my own heart.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to a similar realization through his imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag. In The Gulag Archipelago, he wrote that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” His words named something I was confronting in myself.

Becoming a uniter often meant returning to prayer, opening myself to God, and remembering my intention to hold a space large enough for the people before me.

I came to think of holding space in this way as an “extended spiritual practice,” learning to live the Virtues across our differences. For those of us already rooted in a religious or spiritual practice, it means carrying that practice beyond our own spiritual communities and into the whole community. Holding space across our differences requires us to draw upon the full depth of our spiritual practice.

We don’t have to leave our faith or spiritual convictions behind, nor do others have to give up theirs. We don’t have to agree on the Source of Love to practice Love in action together.

I was beginning to understand more personally what I had already learned from Dr. Ari: as we enter into relationship and serve together, spiritual development and the transformation of our communities can become part of the same process.

One example came to be known among us as the story of the “Pastor and the Pagan.” A neo-pagan farming teacher and an evangelical Christian pastor came from very different spiritual worlds, yet in the space we had created, they discovered a shared passion for regenerative agriculture.

They did not need an interfaith dialogue or agreement about their beliefs before they could begin building a relationship. They needed a trusted space where they could encounter one another around something they both cared about.

Our Connections Gatherings were one way we cultivated that trusted space. In these small circles, we practiced the movement from Head to Heart to Hands. We reflected on the Virtues, then brought actual needs, relationships, and opportunities for service into the circle. Holding space became a spiritual and relational practice we could participate in together. As I wrote in the book, “Grace opened the space. Love built the bridge. And truth walked across it.”

The coherence that makes relationship possible is not something I create. It is already there for us to receive and participate in. I was learning that my role was not to have the answers or save the community, but to become a steward of the space between us.

From Holding Space to People Power

But if this work was going to extend beyond me, I could not remain the only one holding the space. Others had to discover that capacity in themselves.

The fractal pattern was becoming clearer.

The qualities we hope to see embodied in the whole must first become embodied in its smallest living parts, in ourselves, our circles, and into the networks we create together.

I had already watched this happen in our own networks.

When I began reaching out to people in our local food system, I did it one relationship at a time. I would begin with someone I trusted, listen to what they cared about, and then follow the connections that opened from there. Gradually, those one-to-one connections became a small circle held together by trust.

What began with one person holding space could become a circle of five capable of holding that same quality of space together. As that small circle reached into its own trusted relationships, something important began to happen. Five could become ten, and one circle could become two, each carrying the same relational character as the first. The network was no longer dependent on me to make every connection. Others could carry the same relational qualities into relationships of their own.

This was the fractal multiplication I was beginning to recognize: each new circle could carry the same relational pattern into relationships of its own, allowing the network to grow without depending on any one person or circle to hold the whole.

What began in a conversation with one farmer expanded into a small circle of committed leaders, then outward through their trusted relationships, until nearly a hundred regional leaders came together at our first large public gathering. Those leaders, in turn, represented organizations, businesses, institutions, and constituencies reaching more than a hundred thousand people across the region. Yet as the network grew, we did not have to lose the relational quality with which we had begun.

That relational quality grows with the network because people carried it into new relationships. This is possible through what I call the Relational Virtues: the Virtues we put into practice as we build relationships and community together. Qualities such as Shared Purpose, relational humility, empathic engagement, sacred welcome, and mutual service shape how we encounter one another, build trust, and cooperate across our differences.

As people carry these Virtues into other circles and networks, the same relational pattern can take root and grow, without depending on any one person to sustain it.

I began to see how this same pattern could take root far beyond our network in Reno. As more of us learn to become uniters where we already stand, each of us can become a new point of connection.

Imagine one person becoming a uniter in a neighborhood. Another in a church. Another among farmers, business owners, activists, or civic leaders. Each begins connecting people across the boundaries around them, creating relationship where there had been separation. No one needs to control the whole. Each helps carry the relational pattern outward.

And as that capacity spreads, leadership spreads with it. People can rediscover their ability to relate, serve, cooperate, and build together without waiting for someone above them to organize their lives. As these relationships develop into networks of cooperation, people gain the collective power to accomplish what none could do alone. They can begin meeting shared needs, strengthening their local economies, and shaping the decisions that affect their common life.

What I had witnessed in Sarvodaya villages in Sri Lanka was now taking form in the very different context of Reno. People were beginning to shape more of their common local life together. This is a different kind of people power.

It is the Third Way I had been discovering: neither seeking political power to reform the existing system nor withdrawing to build a separate alternative, but building another way of life through the relationships and capacities already present within the community.

People power emerges within new spaces where people come together across their differences without allowing those differences to define their relationships.

The more I experienced this, the more I understood what we were holding space for. The Culture of Separation is all around us, pulling us into opposing camps of politics, religion, economics, ethnicity, and identity. These divisions can become so powerful that we lose sight of what unites us. Holding space means refusing to let those divisions determine how we see one another.

Beneath them, the coherence of the Ancient Blueprint is still there. Our shared humanity is still there. Our common needs are still there. Divine Love is still there. We were holding space for a Culture of Connection to take root within the Culture of Separation itself.

But what becomes possible when that Culture of Connection extends beyond individual networks and begins taking shape across an entire community?

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Go to Discovery 7: How Love Becomes Social Architecture