Meditations on belonging

All we see is light for forever

'Cause the sun shines bright for forever

Like we'll be alright for forever this way

Two friends on a perfect day

Belonging is such a strange word. It is a verb, which if you remember your primary school grammar, means that it’s a “doing word”. Doing implies action. “Jog” is also a verb, which is why you can say, “Let’s go jogging!”

But no one ever says, “Let’s go belonging!” That’s awkward. Technically you are using the word correctly with respect to its part of speech, but no one says stuff like this.

Belonging is passive. You either are or are not. You either belong or you don’t. When it comes to the subject of belonging, being a member of something, being a part of something, you cannot, by the rules of English grammar, take action to do it. 

You can’t belong the same way that you can make a sandwich.  

But with respect to life, I can hardly think of another word that is more vital and more desperately lacking in our lives than belonging. 

I think of belonging as existing, but with respect to community. The most basic need that a human life has is to exist. Take my word for it. As an individual human being, I’ve got loads of needs: Happiness, oxygen, food and water, and a warm place to sleep, are just some of the examples. But before I can even begin to satisfy any of these needs I’ve got to make sure that I exist. I need to be. 

The need for existence is a signal towards one of the two most basic properties of being a human being: We are embodied and embedded. Because we are embodied physical creatures, rather than say, an abstract idea, existence is a non-negotiable property of being human. I am Daniel, a real person made of flesh and blood, I am not a figment of the imagination of some slumbering cosmic creature who constitutes the entire universe in its dreams. I am embodied, therefore I exist. 

I think along similar lines, belonging is a cardinal property of a whole human being because we are embedded creatures. We cannot define ourselves in isolation from others. If I do not invoke my relationships when I describe my identity, it is an incomplete and pointless description. In fact, almost every time you ask someone to tell you who they are, the first things that they tell you are relational things. Just look at how I’d define myself off the top of my head:

I am a husband and a dad (my relationship to my wife and children)

I am an American (my relationship to the body politik)

I am a member of CCC Milsons Point (this one’s a no-brainer)

I didn’t rig this to make a point. You try it. Try defining yourself without ANY reference to other people or communities. You can’t. Because you’re embedded. You are a part of something. Of a lot of things probably. Your identity is defined by where you belong. Descartes was so, so wrong and because of him and a few other key Enlightenment thinkers the West is on an off-the-rails cliff dive of radical selfism. It’s not “I think, therefore I am”. It’s “I belong, therefore I am”. 

The other day, speaking to a group of young adults in my church, I said, “Your twenties are a crucial time in your life. It is the time when you wrap up working out your identity, and start building your community”. I regret making such an artificial distinction between the two. I just mean that the crucial decade after most of us finish our formal education is the time when we lay roots, start families, build forever homes, declare ourselves part of forever villages, and such. If God blesses your twenties, you emerge from it with a rock solid confidence in who you are, because you will know who you belong to. 

But as I survey the landscape of the modern Church, what I find so much more often is the tragic absence of this confidence. Most young people have no idea who they are because they don’t know what communities they are a part of, and they have no idea how to find out. Every day, my heart is broken as I hear of another young single friend who doesn’t know who his friends are, or who doesn’t feel like anybody she knows truly knows her. I shudder when I think of the young families who are trying to raise small children on their own, without neighbors or grandparents who can mind the kids for two hours so that they can attend a job interview. If they want a village, they have to pay for it in the form of a babysitter or daycare. 

This is where the idea of belonging is so insidious. In the West we’re so used to being active doers. We trade in ideas of ambition and initiative and goal-setting and upwards-climbing. If we know what we want in our careers or hobbies or fitness aspirations, we know what we need to do to get there and we’ll make plans to do it. If I want to squat twice my bodyweight I know how many times a week I need to go to the gym and what I need to have for lunch and dinner most meals to make that happen and if I don’t get there then it’s all on me and no one else. 

But belonging doesn’t always work this way. Just like you can’t say, “hey guys, let’s all go belonging this Saturday!” it’s a very strange and awkward idea to set “belonging goals”. “For my new year’s resolution I want to belong to a community, and here’s what I need to do every week in order to get to my goals.” 

In some sense, you can’t set a goal to belong. You have to be found. And accepted.

This is not to say we have no personal agency. In fact, so many of us desperately want to belong to a community for life but we sabotage ourselves at every turn. They take jobs overseas. They get bored of their friends. They see spending time with family as a chore. They change churches at the drop of a hat for the most infuriatingly and stupidly trivial decisions, such as “The pastor uses too many Star Trek sermon illustrations”.

We do other stupid things that aren’t as dramatic. We want to belong but we don’t want to be vulnerable. We decline invitations from our friends to share our weaknesses. We don’t practice hospitality. We ghost each other all the freakin time. We lose ourselves in new romances. We get married and stop hanging out with our single friends. We only spend time with people that we enjoy. We find ourselves in our work (by gum, how stupid is that? Trying to define yourself by what you do to earn a paycheck, seeking the approval of your boss or manager, fooling yourself with a pseudo-“Band of brothers” camaraderie with your colleagues because you are all overworked and experiencing PTSD-related stress together. Invoking hackneyed warfare metaphors like “fighting in the trenches together”, getting blasted together on a Friday night to erase the memories of the week and then going home and living separate lonely sad lives).

Belonging is the crisis of the modern era. 

If you don’t know where you belong, you are lost.

My life is one of inexpressible blessing. I have belonging coming out of my ears. And I dearly hope that, in view of all I’ve written so far, you understand that this is not a brag. It’s a gift of grace. My heart is full in the love I get from my parents and brother; they form a foundation for my essential identity. Since I moved across the world and away from them, I’ve been accepted by my church community here, with relationships that have endured even though we’re all now worshiping in different places. I have a family of my own now,  a mini-village that grounds me even as I assume the responsibility to ground them in Christ. Despite my sometimes borderline crippling lack of confidence in myself, I have not in a very, very, very long time been unsure of who I am. 

And this is what drives my deepest desires in ministry. This is my evangelism. Because I see the need everywhere. I’ve received the gift of grace and want everyone to have it. Every day I feel the ugliness of a a society fractured by atomistic lies and my heart never stops hurting when people suffer because of this, emotional and psychic wounds that are invisible and that’s why they tell themselves that they’re doing okay and they should stop complaining, because in a rampantly materialistic society the only way we can conceive of suffering is if someone is starving or being physically abused and meanwhile we’re all walking around with gaping holes in our souls because we don’t know where we fit vis-a-vis each other and all this stems from our disentanglement from the God of the universe who formed us whole with him and within ourselves and with each other, but now the dark forces of sin have undone us.

And unbelonged us.

My evangelism is to proclaim to people the desperate belonging they need, the reconciliation they are so thirsty for, with the one Being in all the cosmos who can make their identity rocksolid. 

“Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household” - Eph 2.19

This is the holiest promise and gift of grace today. This is the gospel for our era.