Welcome to Building Belonging

by the Soul Matters Sharing Circle team

Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
as few human or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
has made my eyes so soft
my voice so tender
my need of god
absolutely clear.

- Daniel Ladinsky, inspired by an original piece by the Sufi poet Hafiz.

Let loneliness cut more deep? It’s an odd place to start a month on building belonging. Maybe even an insensitive place, given how many of us have suffered and suffocated under loneliness’ weight.

But notice how the poem turns quickly to talk of a softening, tenderness and something missing in the heart. It’s apparent that a different kind of loneliness is being pointed to. A kind that has to do with a painful inner longing rather than the typical external-oriented sadness of not finding friends.

It brings to mind something said by the spiritual writer, Toko-Pa Turner,

Our longing for community is so powerful that it can drive us to join groups, relationships, or systems of belief that give a false impression of belonging. These places of false belonging grant us conditional membership, requiring us to cut parts of ourselves off in order to fit in.

So what if loneliness is sometimes a cry from one of these cut off pieces? What if sometimes the pain of loneliness is one of our buried parts pleading to belong to the rest of who we are? What if loneliness is quite often a sacred inner discomfort trying to push, pull and prod us back to wholeness?

Opening ourselves to this other kind of loneliness seems especially important given the dominant trends in this culture of ours, where the marginalized among us are pressured to twist and shape-shift ourselves into smaller beings in order to be acceptable to our racist and homophobic society, and where now our whole culture is “social media-ized,” pressuring all of us - in one way or another - to shave off our rough and imperfect edges and present ourselves as polished people who’ve got it all together.

To focus on such things is to wonder if, maybe without us fully noticing it, our whole society has become a land of lonely belonging, where no one is allowed to live without burying at least one part of themselves. The words of Carl Jung capture this well. He wrote, “Loneliness does not come from having no people around, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.”

So where does this leave us? Well, perhaps it’s an invitation to understand that the work of belonging begins with developing an intimate relationship with its opposite: loneliness. And opening ourselves to the idea that loneliness may not always be just a burden, emptiness or a source of depletion, even though it can feel that way. Maybe sometimes loneliness is also a source of wisdom, arising from a caretaking part of us trying to tell us “This is not the way to live!”

So, friends, this month let’s listen to our loneliness more closely. Because it appears to be the key to the unique kind of belonging that each of us needs.

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WUU is part of a network of Unitarian Universalist congregations that explore the same monthly theme, serving as a web of connection through sermons, reflections, children’s programs, and the arts. Soul Matters resource packets encourage reflection on the theme throughout the month. WUU members can access Soul Matters packets in the Member Area of this website and through Breeze, our online directory. Visitors can contact the office to request packets.