Belonging

"When we give ourselves significantly to others and to causes, we open our existence and we unclog the arteries of being. Existence turned inward toward the self is ever the death warrant: while existence turned outward toward the world enlarges us and give meaning and purpose to our life."

-Peter Raible

Growing up in a small town in coastal Maine in the 1950s and 60s, I feel as if I know something about that. I know in my bones how it feels to belong. Poet Philip Booth, who was a descendent of many generations in that same small town, has written in one of his poems about that sense of fitting naturally, that "By blood or illness, gossip or hope,/ I’m relative to every last house." You can’t get much more organic than that.

Many, if not most, of us will never experience that deep kind of relationship with a particular place. People nowadays just don’t live in the same place for seven or eight generations, as half of my ancestry did in Castine, Maine. Maybe that is just as well, as there can be something pretty stifling about that kind of small town life (and it can also lead to unpleasant speculation about the quality and depth of the gene pool). But especially if one feels that he or she doesn’t quite fit, or isn’t appreciated, small town life can be difficult. I know something about that feeling, too. The idea, ideally, is to grow wherever we are planted, not just to wither on the vine.

People have always left the country or the village for the town or the city for just these reasons: to make a fresh start, to get out of the goldfish bowl, to seek a new identity or to lose the one which has been unfairly imposed upon us. (The demise of nicknames in our culture is just one indicator of how mobile we have become. Nicknames just don’t stick if you don’t stick around long enough for them to take. It is doubtful that there will ever be another "Bossy" Gillis in Newburyport.)

Nonetheless, and in spite of all the drawbacks, many of us still long for that deep sense of belonging, of "fitting naturally," of being rooted and of being related to everyone, of knowing our neighbors intimately, of being in community.

Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, essayist, novelist, and poet, refers to this kind of belonging as "membership." In his fictional landscape set in the Kentucky River Valley, Berry tells beautiful stories of deep belonging. In fictional Port William, Kentucky, membership is important. People are important, and everyone, even the most difficult and intransigent, is valued for his or her unique place in the community. The community takes care of its own. No one is intentionally left out, no one is completely beyond the pale, everyone is necessary. It is truly a beloved community that Berry has created in his novels and short stories, a place where people care for and about others, or at least put up with their shortcomings. (And when they fail, as Berry’s own forebears did with some of the Black members of the community, it leaves what Berry has called in one of his books "a hidden wound.")

How do we create such communities in our world, places where, in my favorite words from another creator of fictional beloved community, Garrison Keillor, "people love us, and are glad to see our faces"? Where do we go when we want to find that sense of fitting naturally, that sense of deep belonging?

For some of us, religious community is that place. For some of us, religious community has taken the place of those other communities of "blood or illness, gossip or hope," those places where "everybody knows your name." We come to church, some of us, in search of such a place to belong, in search of a place where, finally, we just may "fit." We may come for theological reasons, but more importantly, I think, we come for the kind of "membership" that Wendell Berry describes: a membership which accepts us, in the words of the old gospel hymn, "just as we are." I’m not saying that we always find it here, but I believe that it is what many of us are seeking when we make the decision to join a church.

I think this desire for belonging helps to explain the decades- long popularity of Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, which is, in his creation, a kind of secular or at least non-denominational church. Keillor’s weekly monologue is a kind of lay or folk sermon, filled with glimpses of the sacred, a vision of the beloved community so many of us crave but are unable to find in the fast paced, highly mobile modern world in which we live. We see ourselves, with all our faults and foibles, with all our imperfections, but also with all our beauty, in the characters of Lake Wobegon.

At its best, the church, too, can be a mirror reflecting what is most human in ourselves and in others. At its best, in its best moments, it can give us a glimpse of what the beloved community is supposed to look like. And unlike Lake Wobegon, it is real.

For quite a while I have been aware that while we have a lot of people attending services here, not everyone makes a real connection to our church community. That is, while we have done a good job of attracting people on Sunday mornings, we have not always done such a good job of assimilating them into that deeper sense of belonging and of "fitting naturally" that I spoke of earlier.

Now, I know enough about Unitarian Universalists and those attracted to Unitarian Universalism to know that some of us like it that way. Some of us are not really joiners, and that is OK; we still value your presence here among us! But for others, who may want a deeper and more meaningful connection, I think we have too often failed to provide it. Too often, people come and go without really becoming a part of the larger community that is our congregation. We have failed to bring you in to the center. We sometimes refer to this as "the revolving door." Sometimes you come and are gone almost before we know you have been here. But believe me, we do care, and we do feel your absence when you are gone.

In thinking about this problem--this challenge, or, perhaps, this opportunity--we have also recognized how important it is that we provide many opportunities for connection and participation in the life of our church. We have come to understand that there need to be both long term and short term opportunities for becoming involved in our church at that deeper level.

In response to this understanding, we have tried to expand those opportunities for both families and individuals. We have tried to provide more adult religious education, more affinity groups, such as our Retired Guys and Women’s groups, more opportunities for youth and teens, such as our youth choirs, more opportunities just to socialize with one another, like our Circle Dinners. We understand that necessary though they are, committees are not the only, and not always the best, way to invite people into the life of our congregation, at least not at first. And so we have been striving to offer other ways for you to become more a part of us.

One of the ways that we have recently found to do this is through what we call "shared ministry groups." These are small groups of up to eight people who meet regularly with a trained facilitator for what we like to call "intimacy and ultimacy." These groups provide a chance not only for you to share something about your life with a small group of others, but also to investigate some of the larger issues and questions of Life with a capital "L." They are open to all, and we are looking to expand participation in them. There is information available on the Visitor’s Table if this sounds like something you might be interested in.

Of course, we also want you to become members of our church, as those who participated in the ceremony of new member recognition did this morning. Membership confers certain rights as well as responsibilities and obligations. But most importantly we want you to find here that deeper sense of belonging, of membership in Wendell Berry’s sense of the word, of "fitting naturally."

I believe that each of us is called to serve. I believe that each of us deserves the care and attention of others, but I also believe that each of us is called upon to care for others. I guess that that is my ideal vision of belonging: that we will be cared for, but also that we will be called upon to care for others. That is what membership is really all about. It is about striving to create a just and equitable world, that world where people love us and are glad to see our faces, that world where we are accepted as we are. I also believe that in order for that to happen, we need places where we can find hope and courage along the way. We need places where we can find companionship for the sometimes dark journey of life upon which we are embarked.

I believe that each and every one of us is precious: even those of us who are difficult and cantankerous, even those among us who are temporarily lost along the path of life. But it is not just about "us." It is about all of those others out there who need what we have to offer. The major purpose of the church, writes church consultant Michael Durall, is "to empower people to go out and make the world a better place in which to live." It is to create compassionate community. If we can do that, even if we do it imperfectly, we will have gone a long way toward creating the beloved community of memory and hope for ourselves and others who may not know us yet.

In the end, belonging is our mutual responsibility. It is up to us to create community. No single person can do it alone. I cannot do it alone. Less and less frequently, it resides in particular places. Rather, it resides in particular people. Belonging is a two way street: it’s not only about getting our needs fulfilled, but it is about filling the needs of others.

When we have found that place of belonging, of fitting naturally, we will recognize it. Some call it a feeling of "at-homeness." We will know that we are there, and we will want to remain. We will want to invite others in, because we understand that it will only become richer and deeper as we reach out to others and enter into that process of sharing which is at the heart of all belonging. My dream is that this church will be such a place. For some, it already is.

Wendell Berry has written, "Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world?"

That, I think, is the ultimate goal of all our belonging: to recognize at last that we are part and particle of this beautiful, mysterious world, with its people and its places, its animals and its plants. If we have found a place where we are reminded of this reality, if only occasionally, then we should give our hearts, our hands, and our minds to it. We should give ourselves to it, fully, because it is in giving ourselves that shall find meaning, purpose, and a sense of belonging in our lives. And we should rest in it, too. May it be so, for each and every one of us. Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock