Belonging

As a traveler my whole life, leaving places and – much more painfully –
people I have loved (and still do) all down the trail, I was both excited and
challenged to talk today about belonging with you, my friends, my
community, my new tribe of Anglophones here in Paris.
I suspect most of us, certainly I, started as a kid by belonging to my family
first and foremost. Though painful, my parents’ divorce when I was 8
years old caused me to double down on the insignificance of those who
were not relatives. I didn’t belong to anyone who wasn’t my
grandmother, a parent or a sibling, I had no cousins so that made us a
tight little group. Not safe, but tight.
Perhaps then its normal adolescent behavior to look further afield for
ones belonging – but as a 3rd Culture Kid (more about that term later) I
didn’t venture out halfway. I flipped from my birth family to my made
family both rather young and rather abruptly. Like many women
throughout history, I gave up my mother to be like a daughter to my inlaws.
Ironically, it had been my mother who had advised our friends in my
presence “you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your
friends”.
I wanted more than anything to belong – I was willing to do anything…..to
be anyone you wanted me to be …..so that I might truly belong.
Fast forward 25 years and It became pretty clear to me that the only way
to truly belong was to be absolutely yourself and gravitate to those
people who can accept you as you are. Moving around a lot like this is
hard, but I tried so very hard that I mostly thrived. But I got really tired.
Another ten years and three homes later and my made family is now as
strewn around the world as much as my siblings. My nomadic lifestyle
topped with a serving of the western myth of rugged individualism has
left me geographically and linguistically standing aside from “Normal Life”
(whatever that is ).
But I am stronger now, and ‘grâce a’ ZOOM and What’sApp, I am in good
touch with “my people” on three continents!
Honestly, confinement has been good for me because I took this time to
lick my wounds in a safe haven, enough to get over most of my rage
against the patriarchal machine. God only knows how we will move
forward and she isn’t telling anyone.
So here we are, summer of 2021, I turned 60 and found myself mostly
retired. But I’m healthy and financially solvent – so I am actually doubly
blessed: having both some time and some money.
My daughter and I decided to try the Chemin de St. Jacques but this time
just for a week through Brittany. Five days and several touches of grace
into our path we found ourselves in the town of Châteaulin for the
Assumption of Mary. Exhausted and maybe even a bit stinky, we
scrambled up the hill to the town’s Notre Dame church for high mass in
the virgin’s honor.
Here I might mention that my dad was Irish Catholic and my mom,
against her husband’s will, raised his daughters to be good midwestern
Catholic girls (with all the baggage that carries). She herself never bought
into the guilt-inspired patriarchy that goes with this culture (neither did
my half- sisters) but I did for way too long. I have also always loved the
cult of Mary…..”Hail Mary full of Grace. The lord is with thee, blessed art
thou amongst women”….etc etc. [I love the fact that we tutoyer her].
Meanwhile my 30 year old daughter is into the divine feminine, and GAIA
mother Earth. …. When we got to Notre Dame de Châteaulin we were
late and the door was shut. We tried to open it but it was big, heavy and
seemed locked. We walked around to the front of the historic cathedral
but couldn’t figure out how to open that ancient door and get in either.
So we sat down on the entrance steps to just listen. It was shady and cool
here but obviously we didn’t really feel the sense of belonging. We
listened quietly for about 20 minutes, following the mass in French and
through the thick stone walls that had kept the cult of Mary safe for
about 500 years. Then the organ and all the practicing Catholics in
Châteaulin began to sing ‘my song.’
Any of you who know me know that I love the old black spiritual
“Amazing Grace”….Though this may have been the first time I heard a
pipe organ play it.
Sadie and I sang at the top our lungs in English because we finally
understood, that each of us belongs wherever we feel we belong here
and NOW.
Let’s come back to the search for belonging. I always knew that I wanted
more than anything else to be part of a good team. And yet at another
level it is quite clear to me that we, each of us, and therefore me too,
must work out how to be part of our world without losing our true selves
in the process. So I came to Paris alone a few years ago to try (again) to
belong here and now.
As the legendary Maya Angelou said:
“you are only free when you realize that you belong no place.
You belong every place – and no place at all.
The Price is High but the Reward is Great”
This quote scares me. It is quite a different take on the idea of freedom
that I am not sure I’m ready to fully embrace. But I fear that Dr. Angelou
speaks the truth.
The need to belong and the struggle for belonging probably resonates
particularly deeply with us Anglophones in Paris, gathered here partly
because we are a community made up largely of immigrants. In some
respects, we here are all strangers in a strange land.
But in a very real way, so is every human being on earth. Each of us is
constantly migrating and changing throughout our lives. Through each
change we have to learn to renavigate our own sense of SELF-belonging.
As a new baby we are each born into our family (hopefully) and we know
we belong there. It’s a matter of survival for infants to belong fully. But
soon we start to second-guess ourselves. As a toddler we see that we
don’t feel pain in our own hand when mommy burns her hand. Where do
I end, and others begin? As a child we struggle to tell our guardians what
we want and need. Do my parents really understand me? Who do that
want me to be? Am I that person really? Change is good, but we must
change ourselves constantly to keep up with it.
So then as adolescents lots of us venture out from our families because
often we feel the need to ‘go it alone’. Perhaps it’s normal to look further
afield for our belonging – young people put a lot of stock in their friends,
“their tribe,” to belong to. An aside here is that social science points out
that Third Culture Kids (those of us who grew up in a different culture
than our parents came from but then returned to the parent culture, we
TCKs are not immigrants, if this is a new concept to you, ask me about it
later). Anyway, we are slower to leave our families because we don’t fully
fit into the culture of any of our host countries. The break with family is
often later and perhaps more violent for we who were ‘raised abroad’.
Then many of us marry as young adults because it turns out that ‘going it
alone’ is kind of lonely. Here is how and where belonging faces that
weird “happily ever after” paradigm.
While I was discussing the concept of belonging with several friends
during this summer the question of monogamy always came up. I blame
Hollywood. And I don’t buy into the myth of you “belonging exclusively to
each other” as the ultimate fairy tale ending either. We could probably
talk all day about, Adam and Eve, bonobos vs. humans, and our
prehistoric sexuality. But there I would be going off on a tangent. So let
me just say unequivocally that to me Belonging is much bigger than
romantic belonging.
As Rumi said:
My place is the placeless,
A trace of the traceless,
Neither Body Nor Soul,
I belong to the Beloved
I Belong to No Religion
My Religion is Love.
Every Heart is my Temple.

Belonging is a fundamental human need. We, in the west, used to
pretend otherwise. We used to admire the ‘lone wolf,’ the rugged
individualist. The Norwegian bachelor farmer. But a shining silver lining to
this covid pandemic has been just how clearly we have all seen the need
to belong during these trying times. Without belonging we are somehow
less than human.
So we will make up something to belong to. We will make sure we belong
somehow. Some have become Homo Economicus and belong to
capitalism and the Goddess of greed. Some belong to their hatred and
fear, their sickness and need. But we ALL belong to something,
someplace, someone. Or we would not get up in the morning.
The researcher Brene Brown defines Spirituality as, “recognizing and
celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a
power greater than all of us and that our connection to that power and
to one another is grounded in love and compassion.” This is a Sunday
service at a church, so let’s not be afraid to talk a bit about spirituality.
It seems to me that it is our life’s work to learn how to belong to
ourselves and our world, in the here and now. Thanks to your kind nonjudgement, I’m starting to feel like I belong here, now with y’all.
If Brene had asked me personally what belonging meant to me, I would
have to say “it means being part of the team”. Having moved my whole
life I learned early to work really hard to develop the team that I want to
be part of. So one of the things I love about being here in Paris is that
nobody belongs her any more than I do. I can be here, define myself as
Parisian, with my crappy French and all.
When I was a kid, a mantra around my family was always “at least I’m
useful” – so I have always struggled with the need to be useful in order to
be part of a club. Can we belong without helping? Dr. Brown says “true
belonging is not passive, it doesn’t come from just joining a group…….”.
So how DO we belong?
She went on to discuss just how divided the USA had become (her book
“Braving the Wilderness” was written in 2017). Dr. Brown talked about
how we were dividing ourselves into camps of mutual bad mouthing on
social media. These have the psychological effect of making us feel like
part of the in-crowd as opposed to the out-crowd. And yet, we are getting
lonelier in the process. Dr. Brown wrote “we have sorted ourselves into
like-minded groups in which we silence dissent, grow more extreme and
consume only facts that support our beliefs” The once United States of
America may no longer be a healthy place to find your belonging these
days.
Dr Brown continued her discussion of facing that terrible wilderness of
not belonging by stating that “True Belonging is a practice that requires
us to be vulnerable, to get uncomfortable, and to be present with people
without sacrificing who we are.”
This is easier said than done!
Meanwhile the world is full of social media with its blogs, fake news, and
conspiracy theories (as well as the conspiracies that engender them). This
media has been rendered much less communal (or social) since Facebook
started. Our public ‘conversations’ cannot encourage trust! But here is
another tangent I’m not going off on…..
So we must find our belonging elsewhere. But the good news is that we
can, we all have different ways of doing that: yoga class? Friday happy
hour; family, or quiz night? Or even maybe attending a service at your
favorite UU church sometimes. Also, I get a lot of comfort out of my local
shopkeepers and merchants in my neighborhood in Paris. They let me
belong here, despite my horrible accent.
True Belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to
yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the
world, the general public. You can find sacredness in both being a part of
something and in standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging
doesn’t require you to change who you are. It requires you to Be who you
are.
I am still figuring out who I am, after a lifetime of being who my people
wanted me to be, so of course I am still working on belonging here with
you in Paris, or in Nairobi, Kenya, with our school or in six different cities
in the new world with my siblings. As a Japanese friend from the
International School of Paris said to me years ago “Home is where my kids
are”. This was just when her kids were starting to graduate and move out
to college and beyond. She now lives in Houston, and we are still Linkedin friends.

Do we belong to each other?
One of the many joys of being a Third Culture Kid is that you can visit
almost anywhere on earth and see old friends, but the downside is that
‘your tribe’ is strewn around the planet. As an American who was born in
England but grew up largely in Africa, I just thank God for Facebook and
Instagram. There is of course a Facebook TCK community for those who
want to join and belong. Angelou said that true freedom comes from
belonging everywhere and nowhere, perhaps we wonderers have a short
cut to this freedom.
But “True belonging and self-worth are not goods, we don’t negotiate
their value with the world,” Brene Brown said: “the truth about who we
are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild hearts
against constant evaluation, especially our own judgements. No one
belongs here more than you.”
On that note I will welcome your authentic selves here this morning with
a simple question to you: What, where, and to whom do you belong, and
Do you belong to yourself?