The Need To Belong
Given by James Covington on November 12th, 2006
The subject of my sermon today is “belonging,” fittingly so, since today is “new member” Sunday when we formally and excitedly welcome our newest members. I believe belonging is right up there among our most basic needs. First comes the need for survival: shelter, warmth, food, drink. Next comes the need for safety and security, including freedom from danger and absence of threat. Once safety has been assured, belonging and love, usually found within families, friendships, groups, churches—community—then becomes a priority. The psychologist, Abraham Maslow stressed that only when we are anchored in community do we develop self-esteem, the need to assure ourselves of our own worth as individuals.
So the need to belong is rooted deep within us.
My earliest and most formative experience with community came in the town where I grew up. Part of me will always belong there. The town is in West Tennessee. Population at that time, about 7,000. Most people knew everyone there, on some level. They belonged. The town had about 7 churches, two grocery stores, four gas stations, one movie theater(the picture show) and two beer halls.
It is a place where everybody knew everybody else’s business and also a place where everybody looked out for everybody else, especially in times of need.
But there were distinctions within the town. You had to be there for quite a number of years—maybe even a generation or two to really be part of the place. If you did something shameful, it could take a long time for that to be forgotten.
There was the black section of town where my father would drive to on weekends to purchase his Old Crow whiskey from a boot-legger, while I sat in the car. It was almost like a different town, not to be visited except to buy whiskey.
Then, I realized a few years later, that the two women who lived down the street from my aunt Helen were partners. They weren’t just roommates, they were partners. Everybody knew that, I expect, but nobody talked about it. It was just the way that it was.
So distinctions were made. So it is sometimes. No matter what our setting, we get messages about who belongs and who doesn’t belong. We figure out where we fit and where we don’t fit. We make our way in the world.
But I was also very involved in the Baptist church where I knew many people, most of whom were caring people through whom I learned the importance of “doing unto others as I would have them do unto me.” Yes, I belonged to a fundamentalist church. I was a born-again Christian, baptized when I was nine. Yes many people were hypocritical. Yet, I still learned about the importance of doing the right thing. Sometimes, being good became overbearing at the expense of sacrificing my self. Fortunately, I was able to wake up to that fact in my early adulthood, and with a little help in therapy, I was able to accept those parts of myself I thought were bad.
Each person here has their stories of belonging and not belonging. Those stories shape and form our subjective realities and very much effect how we see things around us and how we connect or don’t connect with others. There are those who seem to fit in just about anywhere they go. And there are those who always seem to be just a little outside the group.
But hopefully we each find our way through, to one degree or another. Part of our identity is that we are outside, but still have a place. We all need a place to belong.
I don’t say that lightly, because so often it is not easy. We live in a culture that makes belonging—and being connected—a big challenge. We get isolated from others and when that happens, it can become even more difficult to find connection and belonging.
In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam argued that civil society was breaking down as Americans became more disconnected from their families, neighbors, communities, and the republic itself. The organizations that gave life to democracy were fraying. Years ago, he wrote, thousands of people belonged to bowling leagues. Today, however, we’re more likely to be bowling alone (hence the name of the book).
Putnam wrote his book five years ago. About a year ago, wrote another piece in the New Republic entitled “American Idle: Four Years after 9-11, We’re Still Bowling Alone.” He was also quoted in the NY Times last week, “The Lonely American Just Got a Bit Lonelier.” Putnam says that we have become so focused on the individual that we have forgotten the importance of community for the future of our country. During an event like World War II, the country was brought together and the role of voluntary associations and rights movements were enhanced. But that has not happened post 9-11. The focus on the individual and away from civic institutions is the same. There are lots of reasons for this. We remain a narcissistic society, where many people are more focused on self than on other. More focused on my feelings, my needs, my rights.
More people are working and commuting longer hours and have little time for the kinds of external social activities that could lead to deeper relationships. So the closest ties are limited to family members, particularly spouses. Which is fine of course. And yet, even that connection is often broken. I see couples in my office who have become like ships passing in the night. And we have the internet. But email is not like face to face contact. And while it is a good thing to be connected to one’s spouse, one can still be cut off from the larger community.
Here is how psychologist James Hillman describes his life: Look, a great deal of our life is manic. I can watch 100 channels of TV, I can get on my computer and communicate with people anywhere. I can be everywhere at once, I can fly across the country, I’ve got call waiting, so I can take two calls at once. I live everywhere and nowhere. But I don’t know who lives next door to me. Who’s in the next flat? Who’s in 14-B
I don’t know who they are, but boy, I’m on the phone, car phone, toilet ph9one, plane phone, my mistress is in Chicago, the other woman I’m with is in D.C., my ex-wife is in Phoenix, my mother in Hawaii, and I have four children living all over the country. I have emails coming in day and night, I can plug into all the world’s stock prices, commodity exchanges. I am everywhere, man—but I don’t know who’s in 14-B.
All our stuff can keep us secure from everyone else. We have more stuff than people in most other countries and certainly that is one of the things that keep us from other people. We get the message over and over again that we are what we consume. We are what we have. Want fulfillment and happiness? This is what you need to buy to get it. This pervades our culture in so many ways. We spend more time acquiring things. We have more stuff than we need and tending all of our stuff takes time. In the end we learn that having more stuff doesn’t add up to being more fulfilled in life.
But those messages can be hard to shake. If we are—on some level—the sum of what we consume, it can happen that we lose sight of what is most essentially meaningful in our lives.
And if relationship, if community, just comes down to one more thing that we consume, something is lost. True community, true connection, that sense of belonging, is something that doesn’t come with a price. It is not so much about what we get, but what possibilities might lay in the relationship itself.
One antidote to this kind of loneliness is our Fellowship. This is a very important community in many of our lives. I’ve noticed over the years that there are many ways that people articulate what it is they are looking for in the church. One of the ways I see more and more is to talk about the church as what it is that I want to have, what I want to receive. It is talked about in the same way that we talk about wanting this object or that object. It is one more thing that we consume. We become customers, just like we are in so many other places.
But, of course, a church is a different kind of beast. It is hard to quantify the value of a covenant, a sacred promise that people together in community make.
Belonging needs to transcend our individual selves and our individual needs. We are looking to be connected to something that is larger than any one of us. It is a fundamental longing. What is it that calls us out of our isolation and how do we move out of that isolation?
It is when we open ourselves, when we put ourselves with others, that we are called out of our isolation.
A story. A little boy was riding the bus into New York, seated between two women, one dressed in grey, and the other in red. During the trip, he leaned in against the woman in grey until, by the end, he was resting entirely on her, with his feet stretched out toward the woman in red. The woman in red asked the woman in grey to please ask her son not to put his feet up on the seat; he was getting her dress dirty. The woman in grey responded, “He isn’t mine. I’ve never even seen him before.”
Incredulous, the woman in red put her face down near his, and asked, “Are you traveling all alone?” “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Sorry about your dress.” She asked him where his home was. “Well,” he replied, “I live with my Aunt Mildred, but Aunt Mildred says I should spend more time with Aunt Clara; that’s where I’m going now. When Aunt Clara gets tired of me, she’ll put me on another bus and send me back to Aunt Mildred.”
The woman in red was devastated by his matter-of-factness. “You’re awfully young to be traveling alone. You’re a brave boy,” she said. And he answered, “Well, I’ve never gotten lost, but sometimes I get lonely. So I pick out someone I’d like to belong to, and kind of snuggle up and pretend I belong to them.”
There are a lot of people like that child. They are not really lost, but they don’t quite belong, either. But in the end, it is important to remember that all of us are on that bus together. I’m amazed when I look out and see all of you on Sunday mornings. What’s to keep us from staying in bed? What’s to keep us from just reading the paper? To watch Meet the Press? We have to get dressed, get into our cars, drive, park.
But the good news is that we come. Something brings us here and we come. And, hopefully, we find a place where we belong. Hopefully the sermon might have something to say, and even if it doesn’t hopefully the music is there. And if not, hopefully there will be a good conversation in the social hour. And hopefully, more than anything else, we feel we have a place here. We have a community to which we now belong.
Community is something we actively enter into, not something we passively wait to happen to us. Community does not come out of this consumer mentality. Community comes when we bring presence and authenticity to a group we join. When the tears ease out during “Spirit of Life,” and you glance over and see someone else tearing up, too. When we do a child dedication and though your children are grown, you feel the love and care of these little ones flowing from your own heart. When you’re in a Community Circle group and you share your most personal stories and feel accepted just as you are.
Or sometimes you see a need and you reach out to see if others are interested and will join you in meeting that need.
You see, this Fellowship not only offers us a place to form deep relationships; it also calls us out of our individual, solitary lives into relationship with social and spiritual realities that transcend any one human life. We are not here just to recover ourselves, but also to nourish the health and well-being of our civic institutions—school, government, and yes, the church. In this Fellowship, we are reminded of the values we want to live by, and we are challenged to build a new kind of community, a community where everybody is welcome at the welcome table. We are called into relationship not only with one another, but with the earth, and with the larger society. As we mature spiritually, we move from asking the question, What about my needs? to the question: What about the needs of our suffering world? How can I contribute to the healing of our society?
As Kermit the Frog says, “It’s not easy being green.” That is, being ecologically sound, not just in terms of preservation of our earth, but preservation of our moral and spiritual selves, and preservation of institutions, like the church, which are life-affirming. Hopefully this Fellowship will always support us as we risk opening ourselves to the closeness which quite literally gives us life; and support us as together we create the kind of world that acknowledges human need over every other value, that puts love and healing at the center of things.
When that happens, that’s when we start to feel that we belong. That’s when we start to find our way in the world. We come together, despite all that stands in the way, and then we know that we are not alone.