Category: Meditations

“We belong far less to where we’ve come from than where we want to go.”
―Franz Werfel

Where do you hope to belong?

The shadow side of belonging appears when our deepest sense of community and place comes into conflict with others’ deepest sense of community and place. Who belongs? becomes literally a matter of life and death, and the ways to choose life far from obvious.

When has your sense of belonging come into direct conflict with someone else’s? What did you do?

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Where do you feel you belong because of a shared commitment to looking outward in the same direction?

In the days leading up to Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, it is traditional to greet people with the wish that they be written in the Book of Life for a good year, for at the end of Yom Kippur God closes the book, sealing it and one’s fate for the year to come. But being written in the Book of Life depends on one’s relationships here on earth—which is, after all, where our fate is sealed.

What will you do today to build a relationship which will bring more life to your year to come?

When Columbus “discovered” the “new world” he felt entitled to claim it as belonging to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. But the people who already lived there had quite a different understanding of what it meant to belong to the land. Those mismatched understandings of land and belonging continue to play out hundreds of years later.

What land belongs to you? What land do you belong to?