Belonging is perhaps the habit of life. It is so fundamental that it precedes everything else. It has to be recognised, acknowledged, and practiced, but it exists before all of that.
All of us humans, but also all other creatures and forms of life, come into being with relationships: in our case we are the progeny of other human lives. We have parents and they too have relationships, into which we are born as well. We belong. We did not create ourselves.
Here is a quite challenging fundamental of our being. I express it in terms of the nature of existence: to be is to belong.
I say this is challenging because modern cultures in many forms undermine and resist this reality. We have learned to think of ourselves as essentially individuals. We are solo humans, to which we may add relationships. These ‘additions’ are a matter of choice, we claim.
Against that notion, many if not all ancient cultures have asserted that to be is to belong. Indigenous Australian cultures affirm that humans derive from and belong to the land, and are identified by their ‘country’. The ancient Hebrew culture, reflected in the Hebrew Bible, begins with creation stories in which this fundamental reality is expressed. The Creator Spirit calls into being the whole world of land and seas, the sun and moon, creatures on the land and in the oceans, and (almost at the end of it all) humankind. The people are given resources for life, on which they are dependent, and called to care for it all as responsible stewards or co-creators. Their life is essentially related to all other life, and interdependent with it.
The story moves on, however, to the actions of the humans asserting their ‘freedom’, to choose for themselves how they will live and to whom they belong. They resist the wisdom given to them by the Creator. The symbol of eating from ‘the tree of knowledge’ expresses their desire to define themselves, who they are and whose they are. And what belongs to them, now as ‘lords’ of it all.
In a wide-ranging and impressive analysis of the crisis of modern humanity, and the world at large, Paul Kingsnorth uses this story as illustrative of the development, through many cultures and contexts, of what he calls The Machine. This machine is the compulsive, demanding, all-consuming, and ultimately life-destroying situation in which we now find ourselves, where technocrats manipulate what is left of democratic processes for their own enrichment, but also the destruction of the very conditions of life, air, land, water, and society. The Machine destroys the fundamental relationships of human being. (Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, (Penguin, 2025).
Interestingly, Kingsnorth turns to Simone Weil early in his analysis, to explain how this loss and deprivation develops. The many kingdoms and regimes that have developed over the centuries, each with their own ‘Caesar’, have captured lands and people to serve their aggrandisement, and in doing so they keep their minions subdued by separating them from their roots. Weil wrote about The Need for Roots, published in 1943—at the very time when millions of people were experiencing this great dis-location in Europe. Weil saw that this was not a unique thing, but illustrative of the way of Caesars in every age. It also demonstrated the need for roots.
In just a few sentences Weil says so much about this fundamental habit of life, belonging:
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his [sic] real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future. (The Need for Roots, p224)
Kingsnorth goes on to describe the way contemporary regimes engage also in mass uprooting. The situation of living without roots is now almost universal. Not all of this uprooting is violent or ‘domineering’, as the overwhelming majority of us live in megacities, ‘cut off from non-human nature, plugged into the Machine, controlled by it, reduced to it,’ in what Weil saw as a continuing cycle. ‘Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others’. How true this is and how tragic it is that so many people, millions of people, are uprooted from their homelands and communities, and that almost all of us live without roots connecting us to the earth, our home.
As children, we know that we need others and depend upon them. But then we are taught to become ‘independent’, which all to easily becomes anti-dependent. The reality of our life in the world is that we are inter-dependent and need to live in and practice our belonging.
One thinker whose has influenced my thinking for a long time is Paul Tillich, an existentialist philosopher-theologian and who wrote a powerful book, The Courage to Be in which he asserts that we need the courage to be a part and the courage to be apart. That is, we need to learn what it means for us to be an individual, sometimes standing over-against some things or people, but we need also the courage to be a part, to belong and to contribute. The wisdom and courage to exercise these dimensions of life, appropriately, is a life-long challenge.
I have written at length about these challenges in an earlier post: https://www.tobefrank.com.au/books/the-courage-to-be-a-part/
Importantly, attention is a fundamental part of belonging. So too are most of the other habits I will describe in this series. Intentional and responsive belonging is not easy. It is both a gift to be welcomed, with gratitude, and a task or discipline. We might wish to be free of it sometimes. But like the child who ‘left home’ for an hour or two, we also hunger for belonging, for life together.
Belonging provides us with both a place to be and something of our identity, in a sense someone to be.
We may think of our identity in terms of a nation, a country, a cultural group, a faith community, a profession, an ethical commitment. In all these aspects, but in varying ways and degrees, belonging may involve both gift and obligation.
It is also the case that belonging is always dynamic: it’s not something static or fixed. It is a habit, to be lived in and lived into. It may be so habitual that we are unaware of it, for a time, but at other times we become acutely aware of our belonging, often when it is challenged or even opposed.
What I’ve said up to now is largely theoretical or generalisation. What must be added is that if these things are in any way true, belonging has to be specific. It has to be named, owned, acknowledged, and practiced.
Being-with, communicating, doing things are the specifics, the substance and habits of belonging. That’s how we live.