Why love and trust—not punishment or rewards—are the only soil where coherence can grow.
Karl Menninger named it without flinching in The Crime of Punishment: punishment is a disease. Step into the courtroom—you can feel it. The gavel falls, but nothing heals. Nothing restores. Control masquerades as justice, and the sickness deepens.
Alfie Kohn struck the same nerve from another corner. In No Contest and Punished by Rewards, he shows us what happens in classrooms and workplaces we’ve all known: the red ink of a grade bleeding across the page, the gold star stuck to a forehead, and the bonus dangled like bait. These don’t nurture; they deform. They train obedience. They kill wonder. They suffocate life.
And two thousand years earlier, Yeshua of Nazareth laid it bare. He knew law could command, judgment could threaten, sacrifice could bargain, and merit could measure—but none of it could give meaning. So, he ate with outcasts in rooms thick with suspicion. He forgave debts that bound whole families in chains. He touched skin that no one else would touch. He refused to condemn even when the crowd held stones in their hands. He knew coherence—the kind that makes life worth living—can only emerge through unconditional love. Through hesed. Through agapē. Through trust.
Hear the truth all three testify to:
You cannot force coherence.
Not with lashes. Not with prisons. Not with grades or trophies. Not with wages or threats. You cannot legislate meaning. You cannot bribe love. You cannot coerce belonging.
Coherence is not an idea—it is a felt thing:
The puzzle piece clicking into place, the picture whole.
The voices blending into a choir, richer than any solo, even the cracked voice belonging.
The arms that hold you, making the world safe again.
The ending of a story that makes you sigh, because no other ending could be true.
That is coherence. The ahhh of recognition. The shimmer of belonging. The click of truth finding its fit.
Sacred Coherence is when that felt clarity stretches wide enough to hold a people, a community, and a world. It does not come through punishment. It does not come through reward. It grows like a garden—through patience, risk, generosity, eros, and love.
The state punishes. The school grades. The culture competes. Sit there long enough and you feel it: fear thick in the air, silence pressed into every mouth, alienation creeping into the bones. But Sacred Coherence—the life Yeshua embodied, the sickness Menninger exposed, the wisdom Kohn named—erupts whenever people dare to love instead of control. Whenever they dare to trust instead of punishing. Whenever they choose agapē instead of power.
And when it appears, you know it. You can hear it in the laughter around a table where no one is shunned. You can feel it in the choir, where every voice belongs. You can taste it in the meal that is shared without price. The fragments align. Life tastes whole.
This is Sacred Coherence. This is the realm Yeshua pointed toward. This is the lineage we claim.
So hear the invitation: Dare to love. Dare to trust.
The coherence we crave will come—not by force, but by freedom