A sermon preached by the Revd Canon Dr Alison Joyce on the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity (16th October 2011)
Be-Longing
In the name of the living God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen
When my dad was aged in his seventies, he moved back to the small village in rural Leicestershire in which he had been born and grew up, having lived away from that part of the world for the whole of his adult life. Our family ties with that particular village are strong, and go back a very long way: not only was my father born there; but my grandfather, and great grandfather, and great-great grandfather before him.
Interestingly, when my dad returned there, all those years after he had originally left the village, he moved into a modern bungalow, which, oddly enough, had itself once belonged to another member of our family: originally it had been built, forty years earlier, for one of my great uncles. Once there, my dad began attending the church in which he had been baptised as a baby. Amusingly (this is absolutely true), his new next door neighbour was a woman aged about 98, who had played the organ in that church when my father had been a choir boy, sixty years earlier – and, believe it or not, when he moved back, all those decades later, she was still playing the organ there every Sunday. (It makes one realise what a mere ‘slip of a lad’ we have in David Griffiths…)
The war memorial, roll of honour, and graveyard of that church are filled with the names of my forebears. And, when my father died in 2005, his funeral was held in that same church, where so many of the significant events of his life, and the life of my wider family have been marked over the centuries.
My reason for telling you all of this, is the following: I can remember when my dad first moved back to the place of his birth suddenly becoming very acutely aware of the fact that he was in the place where he truly belonged; the place that really was his to inhabit. And this came as a bit of a surprise to me at the time, because it had never occurred to me until that point to regard him as having been in any sense out of place before then: but then, perhaps the truth is that you only recognise true belonging, in yourself or in others, when you experience its reality. My dad ended his days in the village of his birth, within his own landscape, among his own people, and in the place where he belonged. And that was good to see.
Belonging is a very powerful and significant human need; it may be connected with a particular place which we really do feel is home (regardless of whether we have lived there for fifty years or for six months: you recognise the place where you truly belong when you are in it). Or it may be connected with particular human relationships, or particular people; those among whom we feel totally at home; those among whom we know we truly belong. Or it may be to do with a particular job, or a role in life where suddenly we discover we have found our true niche in life. Or it may be a combination of several of those things all at once. But, as the late John O’Donohue, poet and onetime priest, wrote with great insight ‘The hunger to belong is part of our nature’ … ‘we can have all the world has to offer in terms of status, achievement and possessions, yet without a true sense of belonging our lives feel empty and pointless.’1
But of course that sense of ‘belonging’ is a living and dynamic experience, because people, relationships, places even, are never static; they evolve and change and grow, as we do, People and places can come in and out of our lives, they can appear and disappear. We may find that we no longer feel at home in a place where we once knew we belonged; or we may suddenly discover that we belong amidst the most surprising of people and places that we would never have expected to regard as our own.
And we must remember that not all belonging is good belonging: our craving to belong is the same force that drives some lost young people into gang culture, or football hooliganism, in a desire to identify themselves as part of a tribe. And here, it seems to me, we come across a really interesting distinction between good belonging and bad belonging: the right kind of belonging enables us to discover who we truly are; it frees us to become more fully ourselves - because when we belong in the right kind of way, we know we are loved and accepted and it is OK to be the person we really are. The wrong kind of belonging turns us into someone we are not, because we have to conform to the expectations of others in order to be accepted as part of that particular tribe, or gang, or group – in which case we become less ourselves, rather than more, in our craving to find acceptance.
And another aspect of belonging requires an ability to recognise which things properly belong where. If I can digress for a moment, for me, one of the great unfathomable mysteries of life – and I really have never cracked this one – it may be that I am utterly unique in finding this perplexing - is why it is that when you are in a supermarket selecting a particular item from the shelf – let’s say you are looking for shampoo – there, in the midst of all the multicoloured bottles of shampoo, beautifully lined up in rows, there is a single tin of baked beans. What’s it doing there? Who put it there? Why did they put it there? Or there, in the middle of the tinned tomatoes you find a solitary packet of baby wipes. What on earth is going on? Is there some weird person somewhere out there thinking to himself every morning, ‘now, where can I put this jar of pickled gherkins that really will perplex and unnerve today’s unsuspecting customers…?
My reason for mentioning this is that I was in Waitrose the other day when I observed a member of staff, who was showing round a new employee, retrieve one such offending item from a shelf display with the words, ‘Now this doesn’t belong here’. The point being that, whatever the item was (I didn’t pay much attention at the time), there was nothing actually wrong with it, except that it was in the wrong place. It didn’t belong. And because it didn’t belong, it was spoiling the shelf display; and more than that, it was an object of suspicion to other customers who spotted it there, none of whom would have dreamed of picking it up and put it in their trolley, even if it was something that they needed to buy. Because there might be something wrong with it. It didn’t belong.
And Jesus is making exactly the same point about things belonging in the right places, in today’s gospel reading – the famous passage in which the Pharisees, trying to trap him, ask him whether they should pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus responds very deftly, pointing out that their question is a foolish one, simply because they are making a very basic category mistake. The Roman coin that he asks for, in order to demonstrate his point, bears Caesar’s head upon it, because it is part of the system of taxation that is a Roman system. This is Caesar’s coin, says Jesus, so let him have it – it belongs to him. But, he goes on to say, don’t ever make the mistake of confusing what you owe to Caesar, with what you owe to God. You need to know which things belong where in life, and avoid confusing the two. Deal with things within the context in which they truly belong.
To go back to John O’Donohue, for a moment, he makes a fascinating observation about the relationship between ‘longing’ and ‘belonging’, describing the ‘constant and vital tension’ between the two. Let me explain what he means: in O’Donohue’s view, all human beings are born with a sense of longing: that is what inspires us to search; to explore; to seek relationships – it is one of the important driving forces in all of us, which is part of what makes us distinctively human. As he puts it, ‘to be alive is to be suffused with longing.’ But we need a sense of belonging in order to give that feeling of longing direction and focus. It is as if belonging provides us with a shelter from which we can conduct our searching creatively, and prayerfully, and hopefully. Conversely, belonging, by itself, without a sense of longing would, in O’Donohue’s words, ‘be empty and dead, a cold frame around emptiness.’ Belonging without a measure of longing, leads to complacency. We need both.
Today is a very significant day for Joss, for reasons that are to do with belonging. And it is about belonging in all kinds of different ways, and on all sorts of levels. Joss’s family, Kara, Claire, and Charlie, and all their most significant friends and relations are here with her today: these are the people among whom Joss already ‘belongs’, which is why they are here for her at this occasion: because she is loved and valued and treasured by all of them, and their love and support will surround her as she grows up. But Joss is also being welcomed into the family of the Church in this service; from this day forward she will truly belong to the Christian family, both in this particular church, in a very special way, as a full member of our congregation; but more broadly still, she will belong to the global Christian family. Wherever her life’s journey may take her, she will always have Christian community, a Christian family, to which she belongs, because of her baptism. And, of course, by virtue of her baptism, she will belong in another sense as well: she will belong to Christ; his promises of new life, and new hope, and new joy will be hers by right. When you know that God is your father, and Christ is your brother, you will never be without a family.
John O’Donohue observes that, ‘One of the deepest longings in the human heart is the desire to be loved for yourself alone. This longing awakens you completely. When you are touched by love, it reaches down into your deepest fibre.’
‘When you know where you belong, you know where you are.’ I would add to that, ‘When you know where you belong, you know who you are.’
And thanks be to God for that.
Amen.
1 Eternal Echoes: Exploring our Hunger to Belong