Kitchens demonstrates that a community can be filled to the brim with rocks, pebbles and sand. All three forms of community capital can (and should) exist in what Bellah and his colleagues have identified as a community of coherence. Kitchens’ full bowl provides a compelling secular vision of this coherence. Rocks, pebbles and sand are essential ingredients in any secular vision of a viable, coherent community—and are needed if everyone, regardless of personality type, wishes to leave their psychic silo in order to venture out into a supportive, welcoming world of caring people who are residing in a coherent community. Coherence provides the container, encourages connection and builds community.
Spiritual Perspective on Building and Sustaining Coherence
A spiritual perspective regarding Coherence can be founded on the belief that everything in the life of a community has meaning and purpose—and therefore should be appreciated, celebrated and remembered. A community of memory can be founded on this sense of meaning and purpose. This community of memory becomes the primary forum for collective appreciation and celebration. Bellah and his colleagues (1985, p. 282) put it this way:
“The communities of memory of which we have spoken are concerned in a variety of ways to give a qualitative meaning to the living of life, to time and space, to persons and groups. Religious communities, for ex¬ample, do not experience time in the way the mass media present it-as a continuous flow of qualitatively meaningless sensations. The day, the week, the season, the year are punctuated by an alternation of the sacred and the profane. Prayer breaks into our daily life at the beginning of a meal, at the end of the day, at common worship, reminding us that our utilitarian pursuits arc not the whole of life, that a fulfilled life is one in which God and neighbor are remembered first.”
At this point, Bellah brings the secular and the sacred together:
“Many of our religious traditions recognize the significance of silence as a way of breaking the incessant flow of sensations and opening our hearts to the wholeness of being. And . . . tradition, too, has ways of giving form to time, reminding us on particular dates of the great events of our past, or of the heroes who helped to teach us what we are as a free people. Even our private family life takes on a shared rhythm with a Thanksgiving dinner or a Fourth of July picnic.”
As Bellah notes, the assignment of meaning concerns the relationship between a community and its deeply felt commitment to interpersonal relationship and group relationships. Ultimately, sacred coherence is based on the overarching relationship between community and some divine (sacred) entity.
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