Belonging creates and undoes us both. Agreement has rarely been the mandate for people who love each other. Maybe on some things, but actually, when you look at some people who are lovers and friends, actually they might disagree really deeply on things, but they’re somehow—I like the phrase “the argument of being alive.” Or in Irish, when you talk about trust, there’s a beautiful phrase from West Kerry where you say, “Mo sheasamh ort lá na choise tinne,” “You are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore.” And that is soft and kind language, but it is so robust. That is what we can have with each other.
— PÁDRAIG Ó TUAMA
Corrymeela is the oldest peace and reconciliation organization in Northern Ireland. Located in the Northern Ireland village of Ballycastle, Corrymeela began before “the troubles” and continued on in Northern Ireland’s changing postconflict society after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. The organization has grown and now has almost forty full-time staff and dozens of volunteers who work with the 11,000 people who attend programs at the center every year.
Theologian, poet, and group worker Pádraig Ó Tuama is one of the leaders of the community. He has conducted programs on mediation, group conflict, and dialogue for thousands of people. Ó Tuama quotes poet David Wagoner, who wrote, “Wherever you are is called Here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger.” Ó Tuama goes on to say, “And powerful strangers might be benevolent, but only might. Powerful strangers can also be unsettling and troubling. And powerful strangers can have their own hostilities, and have their own way within, [and] they cause you to question who you are and where you’re from. And that is a way within which, for me, the notion of saying hello to ‘here’ requires a fairly robust capacity to tell the truth about what is really going on. And that can be very difficult.”1
In a way, Ó Tuama captures the core message of this book. Belonging is indeed a “powerful stranger.” Belonging can be the greatest of human gifts. It can give us comfort, identity, companionship, and material support. It can ease our fear and help us feel not so alone on this journey of life. It defines who we are as human beings.
Belonging also causes behavior that is deeply “unsettling and troubling.” It leads to hostility, intransigence, tribalism, war, oppression, and even genocide.
This is the great conundrum. Which will we have?
I have tried to help provide a deeper understanding of this core aspect of our lives by looking at the pain in our world of separation, how we are wired to separate ourselves, and how that is impacting key areas of our lives. I’ve also tried to build the case that there are things we can do to heal that divide and create a stronger sense of belonging in our personal, organizational, and community lives.
We looked at ways to search for common ground, to cross the divide between each other and create a greater sense of collective belonging. Finally, we looked at how the workplace can serve as a source of belonging in the modern world.
The great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung purportedly said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate. We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses!”
All that we have looked at tells us something very clearly: The tendency to divide ourselves between “us” and “them” is the way we are designed to function as human beings. I know we may not like that. We may wish it were different. But sometimes things are just the way they are.
When I was a young person doing civil rights work, I used to go volunteer at a black Baptist church about thirty minutes from where I lived. I was one of only a few white young people there, and a woman named Maybelle Jones became our mentor. She would guide us, often through the use of aphorisms. One of the ones I remember best is, “Things ain’t about what they’re supposed to be . . . they’re about what they is!”
The fact that we inherently divide ourselves into tribes may seem deflating, but it doesn’t have to be. When we accept something for what it is, we actually have far more ability to impact it than when we are deluding ourselves into thinking it is something else. Learning to understand the dynamic is essential to addressing it.
As I hope you have seen, the tension between our need to belong and our tribalism can be addressed consciously and thoughtfully in ways that can help us bridge the divide and turn our competitiveness and our differences into assets. It will never happen if we avoid dealing with those differences, refuse to talk about them, or pretend they are not there. The process may be challenging, but as Jung also purportedly said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Separation frightens us. We are afraid of breakdowns in our relationships with others, but breakdowns can be the source of breakthroughs. In many cases, unless we have a breakdown we don’t look at what needs to be done. That is why so many people avoid changing their lives until they hit bottom.
There is no question that confronting the “dark night of the soul” can be painful. Sometimes it comes as a growing awareness; other times it arrives as the shock of a single event. However it shows up, it can threaten our sense of the fundamental meaning of life. It can feel depressing and hopeless. We might feel that nothing makes sense anymore. But if we decide to take on the new reality that has been presented to us, to turn away from denial and embrace reality, that awareness is the seed of breakthroughs. In the case of our search for belonging, those breakthroughs begin with communication.
Ó Tuama believes that language is a key to reconciliation:
Language needs courtesy to guide it, and an inclusion and a generosity that goes beyond precision and becomes something much more akin to sacrament, something much more akin to how is it you can be attentive to the implications of language for those in the room who may have suffered. . . . We infuse words with a sense of who we are. And so therefore, you’re not just saying a word; you’re communicating something that feels like your soul. And it might even be your soul. So the choice of a particular word is really, really important. And there is what is in the text, and whether that’s a sacred text or the text of somebody’s life. And then there is the lenses through which you read and interpret that. And those lenses I find to be extraordinarily practical.
. . . But there does need to be the stage then where we can go, “What can this mean for the wider civilization?” And I would like that public conversation can be a way within which we can talk about things with less fear. . . . We are failed by headlines that just demonize the other and are lazy. And where I might read a headline about myself and go, “I don’t recognize myself in the language that’s being spoken about there,” we are failed by that. But we are upheld by something that has a quality of deep virtues of kindness, of goodness, of curiosity, and the jostle and enjoyment of saying, “Yeah, we disagree.”2
That is at the heart of what is possible. We can see our disagreement as a beginning rather than as a threat. We can take on the challenge of transforming the dissonance of fear into the prospect of curiosity. We can build bridges to belonging.
I know it may seem overly optimistic to suggest that. I know it will be hard. The motivation may not be for ourselves, but for our children and their children. It has been done before.
There has been no greater example of that possibility in my lifetime than Nelson Mandela. After being imprisoned for twenty-seven years, much of it in solitary confinement, by a brutal, racist apartheid regime, Mandela emerged from prison on February 11, 1990. Very few people imagined that a ruthless government that had been at war with its black citizens for longer than any living person’s lifetime would transition peacefully. Civil war was considered by most to be an inevitability. Yet it didn’t happen.
Was it just that Mandela was extraordinary? Perhaps, but not according to him. “I do not want to be presented as some deity. I would like to be remembered as an ordinary human being with virtues and vices,” he said.3 Mandela actually saw that embracing forgiveness was a strategic necessity. Jelani Cobb, professor of journalism at Columbia University, said this:
It’s one thing to make forgiveness an element of a humanitarian movement; it’s quite another to enact it as public policy. [Martin Luther] King sagely and sincerely presented racial reconciliation as a function of Christian love; Mandela knew that beyond his own spiritual inclinations racial reconciliation was an imperative of national survival.
No figure could garner Mandela’s moral standing by simply pantomiming forgiveness out of necessity. He believed in the redemptive power of forgiveness. But he also recognized that it was the only route that lay between civil war and the mass exodus of the moneyed, educated class of white people who were integral to the economy.
Mandela emerged at that rare point in history where idealism and pragmatism were practically indistinguishable.4
Aren’t we at that point in our history now, where the needs for idealism and pragmatism are practically indistinguishable? It is easy to fall into the lazy conclusion that we are doomed, that there is nothing we can do to stem the tide of tribalism that is tearing us apart.
Mandela said:
There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. . . . There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires. . . . I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. . . . A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger.5
The future is in our hands. We can continue on the pathway to separation, or we can take on the challenge of creating a future of belonging. It will require courage, determination, and a willingness to get off the path of self-righteousness. It is a personal task that leads to a collective future. And yet it is a future that is there for all of us if we are willing to take the steps to get there.
It begins with every conversation we have, every relationship we heal. Perhaps a fitting end to this inquiry is this story, which originated with the philosopher and science writer Loren Eiseley:
A man was walking on the beach one morning at dawn. In the distance he saw somebody who appeared to be dancing on the beach. As he got closer, he realized the woman was not dancing. In fact, she was reaching to the ground time and again and lifting things and throwing them into the ocean. As the man approached he shouted out, “What are you doing?”
“I’m throwing these starfish into the ocean,” the woman responded. “The tide brings them in and leaves them on the beach, and when the sun comes up it will dry them out and kill them if they don’t get back in the water.” She reached down to lift and toss another.
The man looked down the beach and saw thousands of starfish similarly laid out in the morning sun. “Surely your efforts will be futile. How can you possibly make a difference with all of these starfish every morning?”
The woman reached down again without speaking and lifted another starfish, once again throwing it into the water. Then, turning toward the man, she shrugged and said, “It made a difference to that one.”6
The task before us is daunting, and yet the path is clear. What starfish will you throw today?