Longing for Belonging

Toko-pa Turner, in her wonderful book Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, says that at the very heart of our ache to belong “is the longing to be recognized for one’s gifts, to be welcomed in love and kinship, to feel a sense of purpose and necessity to our community.” Yes, that’s it! Deep down, our bodies and souls know how much we need each other. This longing to belong is written into our very DNA. No wonder it feels so painful, and sometimes life-threatening, when we feel left out. 

But it’s more than just a personal problem. When profit and wealth are more highly valued than living beings, then the culture has to create in its people a fear of not being or having enough. This leaves us all in an epidemic of alienation, of “unbelongingness,” as Turner says. So what are we to do?

Well, Turner suggests that belonging is not a place where we find our beloveds, our people. Rather, it’s a skill that we need to remember. It starts with looking honestly at this ache we share, with grieving and retrieving those parts of ourselves that we’ve tried to cut out so that we could fit in. It starts with belonging to ourselves again, the way we were born.

And it starts with building a community where all of our gifts and our imperfections are recognized and welcomed, where we get a chance to grow together, to become more ourselves both individually and as a community. Turner says that then maybe we can “open to the sacred dimension of our lives, [can] feel in service to something noble, [can] live in magic and wonder.”

Once we began to open ourselves beyond the boxes we’d been trained to occupy, we realized that we need each other’s gifts, and we cherish each other’s vulnerability. 

~Rev. Nancy Palmer Jones