Review: The Way of Belonging

November 19, 2024November 18, 2024 / rtrube54 / 5 Comments

Cover image of "The Way of Belonging" by Sarah E.] Westfall

The Way of Belonging, Sarah E. Westfall (foreword Lore Ferguson Wilbert). InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514008539) 2024.

Summary: How our longing to belong is an invitation to embrace and extend the deep love of God.

Have you ever been in a group and felt you had done all the right things to be a good member of the group and still felt you didn’t belong? Sarah Westfall was leading a conference with women at her church and Jolene asked her this question. She really didn’t have a good answer. She knew belonging cannot be manufactured. But what do we make of our longing for belonging? It was something with which she struggled.

Then she experienced a shift while reading Henri Nouwen. Instead of asking “what does it look like to belong?” Nouwen reframed the question. It became “How can I be a place of welcome?”, even as the Father welcomed his two lost sons in the parable of the prodigal. From struggling with acceptance, she learned she was of infinite and unique worth to God. Amid grieving the death of a newborn, she discovered a God who sees and finds us. God welcomes us and we belong. Period. And out of this, we can become a place of welcome for others.

The second part of the book explores how we live out of that shift in perspective. It is a shift from lack, of not being “enough” to the opening up of ourselves to God and others of longing. I thought this one of the most important insights in the book. When we are able to discern out of which stance, lack or longing, we are operating, and make the shift to the openness of longing, we take a crucial step. Then, the next step is to name our longing to God and others. Likewise, we move toward belonging when we shift from seeing others as “them” to recognizing them as “us.” And stories help that process as we move from judgment to empathy toward each other.

We may find ourselves removed from another when we maintain the illusion that we must be the “sage on the stage.” We welcome others to share our humanity when we can say “I don’t know” and share our questions. By this, we move from certainty to settled. When we allow others to share their uncertainties without judgment and with empathy, we move into deeper relationship. Depth also develops gradually and it is important to recognize the “circles of belonging” and how deep it is appropriate to go in each.

Finally, when we know we are welcome and live this truth with others, we are released from consuming to creating. We find ways to make and give rather than grasping. And we celebrate those in our lives and enjoy celebrations with them.

Westfall walks us through the way of belonging step by step, with brief “moving closer” exercises at the end of each chapter in the second part. She speaks as a thoughtful introvert who has been on this journey herself and is still living with the questions. Yet she also invites us into the wonder beyond us of a God who sees, who seeks us, who values us and welcomes us. And in the language found on the back cover, that welcome “changes everything.”

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: No Longer Strangers

September 27, 2021September 26, 2021 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

No Longer Strangers, Gregory Coles, Foreword by Jen Pollock Michel. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2021.

Summary: A personal memoir on struggling to fit in and giving up on belonging to pursue Christ, and in the end, finding both.

Gregory Coles grew up struggling to fit in. He was a third culture kid, American-born but raised in Indonesia, returning to the U.S. in college. He grew up pudgy, the least athletic kid in most rooms, thinning out in adolescence. He was a bit of an egghead and he holds a doctorate in English. He is also a Christian, openly gay, and celibate, about which he writes compellingly in his first book, Single, Gay, Christian which I reviewed in 2017. You can see how he might struggle with fitting in.

And yet in his pursuit of Christ, he found belonging as well. But first, something of the story.

The book is written as a kind of a memoir, on the theme of being an alien, an image at once biblical, one that fits his story, and that he plays with in his “Notes From an Alien Anthropologist” at the beginning of each chapter. He traces his family story of how he became a TCK (Third Culture Kid), raised by Jesus movement converts who pursued mission work in Indonesia. He speaks with nostalgia about playing Pooh sticks with friends by the open sewer near his home. He describes airports as his favorite place–where everyone is a misfit and all are passing through and his struggle with national anthems, when one connected more with where he’d grown up than that of the country whose passport he held, and none connected with the one nation he’d given total allegiance to that had no national boundaries.

As a first year college student, he struggles with the question of how he can be from Indonesia with white skin. Three years later, a Christmas trip home results in a case of dengue fever, meaning he only return at the risk of a re-infection that would be far worse, closing the door on that part of his life.

In the second part of the book, he moves from the idea of belonging in a place to belonging with others. He describes the wedding of his boyhood friend Zack to Anna, both the joy and loss, and a wonderful visit to Chicago and a hilarious bingo game he and Anna made up during a Lord of the Rings marathon that sealed a new friendship. Carrie grew up in Indonesia, she and her husband Evan welcomed Greg into their Santai (Indonesian for “relax”) Sundays. There is a wonderful friendship with the Hennings and their boys Grant and Max, who at one point turn a painful conversation after Greg’s “coming out” into “the best Monday ever.”

The last part of the book is about “belonging to.” It begins with his willingness to let go of the importance of reputation to follow Christ when his first book was published, and to know there was One to whom he would always belong. He recalls his habit of giving out carrot sticks in high school, the people he came to know, and the realization that neighboring is giving with no thought of return. He writes of a critical reviewer who became a friend because of her review of his book and concludes with the tattoo that became his Ebenezer of Christ’s love for him.

This is a memoir that is funny at one moment, that takes one (at least this pudgy egghead) back to childhood at another, that catches you up with tears, and sparkles with the joy of one who has risked all to follow Christ’s call only to discover belonging on the other side of loss–of a congregation who does not let him go, of friends who welcome him for dinner and laundry and origami, and of a Christ who never stops loving. Through his own story, he points the way for all of us “aliens” who long to belong.

____________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Three Pieces of Glass

March 23, 2020September 4, 2025 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Three Pieces of Glass, Eric O. Jacobsen. Grands Rapids: Brazos Press, 2020.

Summary: Focuses on loneliness and belonging and the influence of cars, television, and smartphones on the experience, and even design of community and the choices we may make to foster belonging.

A recent commercial for a pizza chain reprises a classic TV scene in which a figure of a somewhat heavy set man who walks into an establishment. In the classic version, he is instantly recognized and everyone calls out “Norm.” In the contemporary version, no one knows his name because he hasn’t created an online profile tracked on his phone. In the old neighborhood bar, “everybody knows your name.” Now belonging is increasingly mediated through a screen.

Eric O. Jacobsen didn’t anticipate the commercial, which underscores the theme of belonging represented by Norm that runs through this book. He contends that three pieces of glass, the windshield of the automobile, the screen of the television, and the screen of our smartphones, tablets, and computers have fundamentally influenced our experience of belonging in society.

Jacobsen begins his discussion by exploring the nature of belonging as having to do with relationship, place and story, and levels of belonging from intimate and personal to social and public and how intimate and personal are not enough. He explores the way in which experiences of social and public, together referred to as civic belonging, offer foretastes of kingdom belonging.

The second part of the book then sketches out the nature of kingdom belonging which he characterizes as unconditional, covenantal, invitational, compassionate, diverse, transformative, delightful and productive. He contrasts this with worldly belonging and highlights the inclusive (the images of the feast and the table) and the covenantal relationship character of the kingdom.

Part three considers the gospel and belonging and shows how through the gospel, broken relationships are restored and there is healing for the epidemic of loneliness. For people who feel estranged and exiled, there is a promise of homecoming. And for those living in a story of meagre existence, there is a better and grander story.

The fourth part of the books addresses how the “three pieces of glass” have contributed to our crisis of belonging. The automobile has changed how our living spaces have been configured, from the design of our homes, to the walkability of our neighborhoods, and the location of where we shop and work in relation to where we live. Television changes how we view real people versus our “TV friends.” Our smartphones and other devices have led us to substitute virtual for face to face interaction. These have led erosion in the civic realm and an epidemic of “busyness.

The last two parts consider, first, the influence of our choices on our communal life, our public policies, and on our liturgical life and second how we may encourage belonging. The last part reprises ideas elaborated at greater length in Jacobsen’s earlier books, Sidewalks in the Kingdom and The Space Between, both influenced by the new urbanism. He looks at the design of our communities, advocating for walkability, our proximity, which includes a parish vision for the church, the making of meaningful public places, and a local culture reflected in language, shared stories, and events.

Writing this review during the Covid-19 pandemic gives me a different perspective on this book than I might have had during “normal” times. The latter two pieces of glass have taken on critical importance both as sources of information (although we have to watch for media overload), and as the one means of connection, or belonging most of us have when we must practice physical distancing–particularly in connecting with family, friends, our church community, our work colleagues, and even our political leaders. For many of us, we can work from home (and this may not even represent a change for some of us.)

By the same token, people are walking their neighborhoods at safe distances, in some cases meeting neighbors they never knew by name. I know of one neighborhood where a local folk singer set up in his front yard and staged an impromptu singalong. When we can’t go to restaurants, sporting events, and many of the other places our cars take us–we are left with walking and a kind of “neighboring” occurs. By the same token, I wonder if fights would have occurred over essential goods in the neighborhood markets I grew up with that occur in our megastores where people come from miles around and it is rare you meet someone you know. You shopped with people you knew in those neighborhood groceries and, perhaps we would be more considerate of the needs of others and neither hoard nor fight. After all, we lived with those people and we would be publicly shamed if we took more than our fair share!

Jacobsen’s book makes me wonder whether we will be more mindful about this question of belonging, as we realize how dependent we are upon both in our churches, and in the civic sphere. It makes me wonder if we will take a fresh look at our neighborhoods, both what is good about them, as well as what could be better about our places, and how we connect with each other. With internet connected devices, I suspect it is a bit more complicated. It would not surprise me if life becomes more oriented for more people around these devices. We are doing more education through them, more commerce, more business collaboration, and even more religious activity. While we discover that the church is not a building, will we also jettison the physical encounters that are at the heart of Christian community, from the breaking of bread and the cup to all those meals and potlucks that are some of the best part of our lives? Even before this crisis, I was in conversation with those who talked about declines in church attendance, in which someone pointed to their smartphone and said, “that’s because many think they carry church in their pocket.”

Yet Jacobsen reminds us of our epidemic of loneliness. He raises the critical question of whether belonging can be mediated through a smart device, or whether the proximity necessary for social and public belonging can be created in a car culture. We may love our TV friends, but will they love us back? Jacobsen’s book raises a series of inter-related questions for how the church understands its message, how we steward our technology, and how we configure the places where we live. How we answer those might well make the difference between places where nobody or everybody knows our names.

________________________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. The opinions I have expressed are my own.