There is a third source of community capital—that represents the sand. Kitchens suggests that this is the specific quality of interactions that take place among those living in a coherent community. These interactions are respectful and inviting for all community members. The quality of interaction at the table is particularly important and diversity of perspective is welcomed (not just tolerated). Privilege is prevalent, with all members of the community being allowed (even invited) to enter and receive services from the institutions, to participate in the events and to engage in the many diverse relationships that are to be found when all members of the coherent community are interacting with one another. This is what civic virtue is ultimately about and how a coherent community can be created and maintained.
Ron Kitchens makes use of rock, pebbles and sand when offering a metaphor regarding how these three levels of community capital come together. He invites people to watch as he fills a bowl with rocks (representing the first type of community capital). He asks if the bowl can contain anything else. The obvious answer is “No.” Kitchens then adds some pebbles to the bowl (representing the second type of community capital). They settle in among the rocks. The bowl can contain more than the rocks. It can accommodate pebbles. Kitchen goes one step further. He adds sand to the bowl (representing the third type of community capital).
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: Finding Sanctuary
While many of us wish to believe that we are living in a secular world where God and religion play at most a secondary role, the “fact” is that we live in a world that is quite spiritual in many ways. The secularization of society that has occurred in many Western societies over the past couple of centuries actually serves as only a thin membrane over a deeply embedded and highly dynamic structure and force that is saturated with spirituality. We need only look at the powerful role played in our “secular” society by ceremonies, rituals (often unconscious), and holidays.
One of the lingering artifacts of a spiritual world is to be found in the various Sanctuaries we have established in our challenging world. It is in sanctuaries where either as Introvert or Extravert we not only retreat from the “outside world” but also find something quite “sacred” about our self. As Jospeh Campbell, the noted mythologist, has declared” “Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.” (quoted by Laney, 2002, p. 261)
Sanctuaries are as old as the human race. Humans, and even animals before them, seem to have always had sanctuaries of one kind of another. At least within a single animal family or species, there are time and places, seasons and locations, when animals of the same species will not hunt or kill each other. Primitive humans have always had their holy spots, their stone enclosures, their sacred trees, within the bounds of which you were safe, no one could harm you, and to which you also went for healing.
