Risking the Call to Belong

This week has been incredibly beautiful and incredibly hard at the same time. My friend Beth and I have been blest to be a part of Risking the Call to Belong, this year’s Habits of the Heart retreat with the Center for Courage and Renewal. On Tuesday morning Parker Palmer kept turning the prism to help us to look at belonging from different perspectives. In one way, it is a longing to be…fully human, at home in our own skin, fully alive as we journey toward death.

Belonging to community is a paradox, Palmer said. “We are made by God for community; and we are made by God for solitude. If the paradox is not held together in tension then each side falls apart into their degenerative forms.” Bonhoeffer wrote, “Let the person who cannot be alone beware of being in community; let the person who cannot be in community beware of being alone.” Being in community without being able to be alone leads to group think or mob rule, and an inability for self-awareness. Being alone without being able to be in community leads to loneliness and isolation.

The hard work of the past two days was lightened by a concert Wednesday evening. The first song took me back—a long way, though I decline to say how long. I remembered every word of Song of the Soul by Cris Williamson. The second verse asks: “What do you do for a living?/ Are you forgiving, giving shelter?/ Follow your heart, love will find you/ Truth will unbind you/ Seek out a song of the soul.”

Living in community means “continual forgiveness,” Jean Vanier wrote. Do we live in a way that invites others in to community? Do we live in a way that allows people to find the solitude that allows them to grow up, taking responsibility?