Jane Higgins discusses the challenges we face in promoting belonging in our society.

“Go up into the gaps.” So writes Pulitzer Prize winner, Annie Dillard, in her wonderful essay collection The Abundance. She’s been reading Ezekiel and cites his excoriation of false prophets who have failed to go up into the gaps, the breaches, in the walls protecting the embattled city. This failing has left the people vulnerable to enemy incursion.

I’m interested in walls at the moment, and very interested in gaps in walls. That’s because I'm trying to understand what has happened to belonging.

Belonging with Conditions

Belonging is good. We want to belong, we need to belong. It’s an essential part of being human. Hannah Arendt once wrote that terrorism begins with an absence of belonging.

And yet, I'm not sure that's true anymore. It’s never been easier to find a community ready to welcome you in, provided that you sign up at the door, or the login, to the beliefs that community holds dear. I don’t simply mean those online groups inhabiting the wilder reaches of the internet. I also mean various churches, political parties, campaign organisations and interest groups.

We go to these places because we want to seek out our people. We want to feel safe and seen, and the company of our people is a powerful place for experiencing that.

Unfortunately, it's also a powerful place for nourishing what writer-researcher Brené Brown has termed “common enemy intimacy”. This is intimacy based simply on hating the same people. It’s a counterfeit of belonging, but invitations to join up to it are everywhere. I know I’m tempted by it whenever I’m drawn to read an article about Donald Trump, or climate change denialism, or QAnon — just so that I can think to myself: “What is wrong with you people!”

Belonging Can Wall Us In

Like many people, I watch in horror the partisan gridlock in the United States and the bitter division in the United Kingdom. These are fuelled by frightening levels of certainty. Conversations across camps in those countries appear to have ceased almost entirely because positions have become utterly entrenched. So entrenched, in fact, that if you take a position on one issue, this seems to provide license for people to assume they know your position on every issue. And if they know that, or assume they do, why have any conversations at all? Why not simply succumb to the comfort of hunkering down inside the walls and lobbing accusations at the enemy?

Curiosity Can Limit "Othering"

Brené Brown urges us, instead, to be curious. She reminds us how passionately we wish others to hear what we’re saying, and then invites us to invest that same level of passion in listening. And if the people we’re trying to engage with aren’t curious in return, let’s think about why. Are they clinging to certainty out of complacency or out of fear? It’s hard to challenge complacency, but we can surely work out ways to address fear.

Here in Aotearoa, I think and hope we’re still curious, still listening to one another, although we’re certainly not immune from “othering”.

Deadly forms of this are the on-going legacy of colonisation.

Milder forms are buried in everyday, well-meaning discourse. The language of the “team of five million”, for example, has been a great way to bring people together to fight the COVID-19 virus, but it has made possible the characterisation of those coming home from overseas as “other” in sometimes unhelpful ways. These homecomers can be seen as a threat: might they be bringing the virus here when our team has worked and sacrificed for months to keep our country and our people safe?

Hospitality with Civility

The COVID homecoming situation is a concrete example of a more general challenge to our forms of belonging: how can we be hospitable to those whose beliefs, world views and opinions we do not share or even vigorously oppose? Civility is important here. Indeed, civility is a necessary condition for hospitality to flourish because being hospitable makes us vulnerable.

Brown cites the non-profit Institute for Civility in Government to define civility as “claiming and caring for one's identity, needs and beliefs, without degrading someone else's in the process”. I find this helpful. It means there are limits to hospitality: it can’t happen when safety or dehumanisation are at issue. But I think it can happen when comfort is at issue. I think we can risk comfort. As singer-songwriter Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock once said: “If you're in a coalition and it's comfortable, you know it's not broad enough.”

Boldness with Openness

Curiosity, then, is important. And hospitality. What else can we bring to the crafting of forms of belonging that will leave us open to possibilities and points of view outside our own? When everyone has taken a side, and is fierce in their defence of it, openness takes courage and judgment. It invites us to be bold.

Curiosity, hospitality and boldness: these are states the spirit can embrace when, as Alice Walker says, the heart is “so open that the wind blows through it”.

Which brings us back to the gaps. It’s cold up there: it’s high and spare and risky. But we can see a long way. And we can meet strangers who might broaden our world. Annie Dillard is urging us to go there, to put our faces to the wind that whips through those spaces, to find the places where “the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man, unbound.”

But she’s cryptic, and reading her I was puzzled. It doesn’t seem very helpful if Ezekiel is simply urging people into the gaps in order to defend or rebuild the wall. So I went and read what he had to say. And it wasn’t what I expected.

Meeting the Divine in the Gaps

In Chapter 22, Ezekiel tells us that the one who is coming from outside to break down the wall, the one who must be met and bargained with lest the city be destroyed, is no enemy general. It is Yahweh. Yahweh is coming because those within the walls have mistreated their widows and orphans, they have oppressed the foreigners in their midst and committed sexual violence against women. They have accepted bribes, made profits from the poor and exhorted unjust gains from their neighbours.

Whoever goes up into the gaps, goes there to encounter God, to admit to failings and sin on “our side” and to plead for mercy.

Where does this leave us in our attempts to understand belonging? In humility, for a start. Seeking mercy. But also, it invites us, I think, to be curious and hospitable and bold. To sacrifice, or at least not cling to, comfort.

Can it still be called belonging, this state of being so open that the wind blows through? I think it can.

We’ll always need and cherish those places where we can gather and speak in safety, the places we can go out from with confidence, and return to with relief.

What the gaps in our walls are offering us, though, is something else. The chance to meet God. The chance to be transformed.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 254 November 2020: 4-5