Emerging from Longing
Where and when, I wonder, have you felt the greatest sense of belonging in your life thus far. Perhaps here at UUCS. Perhaps in an educational setting. Maybe within your family of origin. Or perhaps in the family you married into or the gathered friends you’ve chosen as family. In a small town or in an urban setting. The place where you grew up or the place you chose to settle down. Maybe your deepest belonging has been in a particular social justice project or movement, or in your vocation. Some of you probably experience your deepest belonging on the shore or in another natural setting.
Can you remember how you felt before you first felt that great sense of belonging? What was the overall tenor or color of your life, day in and day out? Do you know how you got from there to belonging? What brought you to that moment and place and time? To those people, to that movement, cause, institution or vocation, that? Were you surprised when you realized that you belonged, you belonged right when and where you were in your life? Or did it feel like an inevitable coming into where you were meant to be? Or maybe a true sense of belonging is still absent from your life.
It might be, for some of us, that it is a deliberate search for belonging itself that leads us to wherever we begin to experience deep belonging. I’ve thought for a while now, however, that often our deepest belonging emerges out of our deepest longing. That we search for and ultimately find, or we craft, build, shape and ultimately create, the belonging that completes some incompleteness in our being. That while some belonging comes from as a result of searching for belonging, most belonging comes from other searches.
That is, we don’t typically say or think, "I don’t belong as my life is now. I really just need to find a place where, a people with whom, a situation in which I can belong." We do think or say, "I’m lonely." Or "I don’t have much purpose in life." Or "It’s been too long since I’ve been to the shore, the mountains, the desert, the woods." Or "what meaning is there in a world of greed and war and hatred?" Or "I have so many ideas I need to express." Or "I can’t let this addiction claim one more day of my life."
And then our longing for companionship brings us to the Single Parent Meet Up, or the local cycling group or the knitting circle advertised on the coffee shop bulletin board. Or to all three. Or some other place and time we think we might meet some friends. And sometimes that might be it. We develop a friendship or two, or have a few hours of pleasant conversation and fun doing something we enjoy or have always wanted to try. Nothing more. But sometimes belonging happens. We discover our people. We might not like knitting after all, but nevertheless discover that that hour a week, as others engage in an intricate dance of fingers and yarn, wraps us in belonging, clumsy hands, painful secrets, snorting laugh and all.
While some of us might learn we prefer solo cycling after all, others might find belonging in the organized group, as it calls us into our full potential, challenges us to grow or nudges us to accept limits, understands our love of the road, and supports our lifestyle.
We might discover in the other single parents not a group of sleep-deprived, plate-juggling, self-doubting people wondering how they’ll get through the next week and when they’ll ever go on another date and whether or not their kids will ever grow into mostly happy, mostly fulfilled, self-sufficient adults–or at least not just that. But rather a community of joy and shared experiences and mutual support; wisdom and laughter and tears; the understanding and acceptance and belonging that can only come from others–however different they may be in every other respect–who are also single parents.
Our longing for purpose leads us to the food shelf or the animal shelter or the park clean-up or the letter-writing campaign. And it could be as it was with the knitting circle, that sometimes that will be that. We’ll have spent a few hours doing something worthy but the longing for purpose still remains. So we’ll try something else next weekend or next month or next year. And eventually, sometime between walking through the door, donning the safety vest, picking up the pen, and going home with weary muscles, furry clothes, wet feet, and cramped fingers, somewhere in there we’ll find both purpose and belonging. We discover for ourselves the truth in the late theologian Frederick Buechner’s assertion: "The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." That is to say, we find our belonging, because how could we not belong if we have arrived where God/the Holy/the Spirit of Life Itself has called us?
Our longing for nature brings us to the shore or mountains, the river or lake, the forest or prairie. And sometimes it’s nothing more than a weekend’s adventure–good night’s sleep in fresh air, beautiful vistas, birdsong, crashing waves, rippling streams over rocks. Or we might take and release our first deep and unrestrained breath, as we recognize our oneness with Creation, our belonging to the Earth.
Our longing for meaning amidst the harsh cruelties and jarring beauties of 21 century life might lead us into church or temple–one after another, perhaps, as meaning continues to elude us, or starts to stir but doesn’t quite break into our consciousness and our heart. Until one day, in one sanctuary or meeting room, classroom or lecture hall, the words or silence or music ring in our heart and consciousness a clear, pure tone that sounds like meaning, and then we know we belong. If this is a place where at last we begin to make meaning of our lives and our world, then this is a place we belong. Or maybe the meaning never comes from the sermon or the prayers, the music or the silent worship. But in the welcome, the community, the shared service, the genuine care among the gathered congregation–there we find both meaning and belonging.
Our longing to express our ideas leads us to a writing practice, or a craft, or a poetry slam, and there among the line stretching through time and across space, the line of other writers, creators, poets, storytellers we discover our belonging.
Our longing for relief from addiction might lead us to a 12 Step program that brings us both recovery and belonging, because, once again, sometimes the only place we feel true belonging is among people who have hit the same bottom we have, who take one day at a time alongside us, who know that we are only as sick as our secrets and they are, too.
So it is that often belonging emerges out of longing, out of our quest to resolve the longing. But after reflection this week, I think the relationship between longing and belonging is a bit more complicated than that. Longing is often the starting place from which we ultimately discover, uncover or create deep belonging. But it is also true that a sense of belonging–whether deep or fleeting or even inauthentic–is ofen the starting point of longing.
If we’ve known deep and authentic belonging in our family of origin, we are likely to find ourselves longing for an equally deep and authentic experience of belonging as we move out from that family into families of our own making or choosing. Likewise, if our primary partnership turns out to be characterized by, or devolves into, inauthentic belonging, we’ll probably long for the real thing. If the bedrock, all-enveloping belonging of a childhood church or community fades as our experience of the world leads us to question the beliefs or values or behaviors of that childhood church or community, a longing for that same experience, only in a community that aligns with our current values and beliefs, will ache in our hearts.
Elsie*, in this morning’s story, wasn’t longing to find her way into belonging on the prairie. She was just searching for TimmyTune. From the moment she and her father stepped aboard the train to Nebraska she had longed for Boston, for sensory experiences that meant home for her. And that longing, that Boston/home-specific longing, kept her trapped, almost as if in an isolation booth or sensory deprivation tank. But a different, more urgent and desperate longing–to be reunited with the beloved canary who was her only source of joy and comfort–that urgent loning compelled Elsie to break out of her trap. And in the moment her longing for Timmy Tune was fulfilled, when they found each other, she discovered herself free to hear and feel the sensations of the prairie, free to begin to belong to the sights and sounds and breezes of the prairie, just as she had belonged to them, in them, in Boston. She longed to find Timmy Tune. She found belonging. And she delighted in belonging because she had known it before.
We don’t generally consider longing a feel-good state of being. We long for people who’ve died or left us. We long for times and places when and where life felt safer, simpler, more fun or fulfilling. We long for some incompleteness to be made whole. Belonging, on the other hand is, if not the ultimate feel-good state of being, certainly near the top. Belonging connates safety, secureness, acceptance, freedom (paradoxically). But as the words themselves suggest, the two are inextricably intertwined. Belonging emerging from longing. Longing born of having belonged. Perhaps this is why the poet imagines God urging us from the moment of our birth to "go to the limits of [our] longing"–because it is there we find our ultimate belonging–to ourselves, to the Holy, to all Creation. May it be so. Amen.
*Elsie's Bird by Jane Yolen.