Longing for Belonging by Kyle Kramer

by Kyle Kramer This article originally appeared in St. Anthony Messenger, March 2020

Over the Christmas holidays, our family hosted a visit from my wife’s sister, her husband, and their five children. Somehow, we found room for 12 of us under one roof with just three bedrooms. And though it was noisy and chaotic in some ways, we had a wonderful time together.

My brother-in-law teaches theology at a small Catholic college in a rural Midwestern town. Over the course of some long walks, stacking firewood, and spreading manure on our garden, he and I talked a lot about their life there. They live in a tightly knit neighborhood, do cooperative homeschooling and gardening, let their kids roam free-range among various nearby families, and help fellow parents/friends/neighbors in a mutual exchange of care and concern. I told him it all sounded like Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show and, although he admitted that their town faces many challenges typical of small, rural towns, he said he is profoundly grateful to be where he is. He’s all in for his whole life.

Hearing about his experience made me happy for him and his family. Frankly, though, I also felt somewhat envious and sad. My family and I are on amicable terms with a few neighbors along our stretch of rural highway, but sometimes a year or more can go by between interactions. We’re yearning for more and deeper connections beyond the wonderful relationships within our nuclear family and in my work community.

These hopes are a large part of our discernment about building or moving to a new home— especially because we hope that our kids will stay relatively close by when they are adults, and we want to settle in a place where they can thrive for the long term. But we haven’t found the right place, even after two years of searching and discernment, and I can’t help but be discouraged.

I suspect that most of us, on some level, are yearning for deeper and more meaningful ways to belong in the world. As I’ve written often in this column, I believe that we are relational beings— or, rather, “interbeings,” made in the image of the Trinity. We’re made for community: with each other, with the natural world, and with our Creator, who is in all and through all.

So then why does it seem so hard to find genuine belonging? How did we allow ourselves to become isolated from each other and from the rest of nature? Why have our churches and civic organizations waned, our politics become so dysfunctionally divided, our social fabric become so frayed, such that experiences like my brother-inlaw’s are more the exception than the rule?

Diving Down Into Grief During Lent, one of my spiritual practices is to get in touch with the grief I feel about how such disconnection manifests in my own life and our culture more generally. Sometimes the first step in moving closer to something you long for is to lament how very far away and impossible it seems. For me, this often feels like a slippery slope to depression, but I honestly don’t see any other way around it that retains a sense of integrity.

Anything else feels like denial, which I think is an epidemic in our culture, manifested in the thousands of ways we keep ourselves distracted from this core wound. How else could we keep getting up every day, if we let the full weight of our disconnection settle on us?

David Whyte has a wonderful poem, “The Well of Grief,” which I treasure as a guide in this practice of facing my grief. Once we “slip beneath/the still surface” and descend down “to the place we cannot breathe,” we might discover deep forms of energy, encouragement, and guidance that are

unavailable to those unwilling to dive down into the dark waters of grief.

Deep in my grief at what feels like the world’s unraveling, I’ve also felt a heartbreaking, but beautiful, connection to those who have also suffered—which, let’s face it, is every human being who has ever lived and other creatures as well. I have to think this solidarity is some glimpse of what Jesus experienced on the cross, and Mary at the foot of it. It is a difficult gift, this love and belonging we find only at the bottom of the well of grief, but it feels real and true, like solid ground we might stand on as we help create a better world—possibly from the ashes of the current one.

As I long to belong more deeply among my fellow human travelers and within the rest of the natural world, I’m also trying to find hope and gratitude in the longing itself. Why else would my heart hurt at the lack of belonging, but that it was possible, however imperfectly?

Of course, with St. Augustine, I believe that our restless hearts will only find their ultimate belonging in God. But I also believe that God and the world are so interwoven that belonging in God will also and always mean belonging in the world,

now and by whatever mysterious means lie on the other side of death.

Fortunately, I do feel that we’re at a point in history where we are beginning to acknowledge that so much that is manufactured, marketed, and monetized just isn’t working for us anymore— personally, environmentally, socially, or spiritually. I think this breakdown is a wonderful gift. It’s time to let go of what needs to die, provide whatever hospice care our current systems require, then lean into our longing for deeper and more beautiful ways to belong.

Even in the middle of Lent, some kind of Easter miracle can’t be too far away!

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