Spirit of Sense of Community

Spirit

Spirit is the first element of this version of sense of community. Originally, the boundary aspect of the first principle of sense of community was labeled “membership” —membership emphasized boundaries that delimit “us” from “them” and that create the form of emotional safety that encourages self-disclosure and intimacy. Membership referred to one’s sense of belonging and to a sense of confidence that one has as a member as well as the aspect of acceptance from the group that facilitates belonging.

Membership also alluded to the cognitive dissonance associated with a member’s responsibility to sacrifice for the community. According to McMillan and Chavis (1986) cognitive dissonance facilitates sense of community in these ways. First, it enhances a member’s confidence. Second, it creates in the member a sense of entitlement. Finally, it serves to build loyalty to the group.

In the current version of the Sense of Community theory, spirit replaces membership as the defining aspect of this principle. Boundaries continue to distinguish members from nonmembers and provide emotional safety. Greater emphasis, however, is now placed on the spark of friendship that becomes the Spirit of Sense of Community. Each of us needs connections to others so that we have a setting and an audience to express unique aspects of our personality. We need a setting where we can be ourselves and see ourselves minored in the eyes and responses of others. In the view of some poets, human nature is naturally driven to express itself:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells:
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

To be nobody but yourself
In a world that is trying it damnedest
to make you like everybody Else
That’s that hardest Thing

e.e. cummings