Here-and-Now Communities

The benefits and challenges of belonging

The “beloved community” that Howard Thurman imagined and Martin Luther King, Jr. popularized provides a vision of a compassionate, just society in which each person is valued. As I aspire toward that vision, my here-and-now communities give me something essential for my well-being: belonging.

With social disconnection so prevalent that the U.S. Surgeon General classifies it as an epidemic and issued an advisory last year, this is no small benefit. The risks are significant. Loneliness and isolation can “increase the risk for premature death by 29% and 26% respectively” (8), “similar to [the impact] caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day” (4). Yikes.

Hopefully, the tapestry of communities I’m part of makes it unlikely that I’ll lose this sense of belonging when I retire. Yet, I recognize this potential peril.

In my first four years of teaching, I taught at the high school I’d attended. Some of my teachers were still there, and one woman’s image springs to mind as I consider this risk. She was a demanding, funny, dedicated English teacher who punctuated her remarks by tapping a yardstick on the chalkboard. She even spoke with punctuation—as in “semicolon; however, comma”—when she transitioned to a new topic. After she retired, her lantern dimmed. Being a teacher was a core part of her self-identity, and when she left the classroom, she lost that part of herself.

Teaching is a key facet of who I am too. I belong to my school community, the school librarianship profession, and the larger societal category of educators. Luckily, several of my librarian friends have shown me that retiring from librarianship doesn’t need to mean leaving the profession. Among the many hats that school librarians wear, one of them is advocating for students and the resources they need; that’s something I can keep doing. As far as the big tent of educators goes, I’ll likely always see myself under its canopy.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? That picture we carry of ourselves even as our circumstances change. In her magazine Oldster, Sari Botton often asks people, after she asks how old they are, “Is there another age you associate with yourself in your mind?” It reminds me of a frame from Zits, a teen-centered comic strip which debuted about the same time I started working with teens. It showed the mom pausing near a pile of laundry (or something similar) while imagining herself in a leather jacket beside a motorcycle, her stance wide and confident. In the picture I carry of myself like a worn wallet photo, I’m 29, newly single and out, driving a pickup truck, and singing along with Melissa Etheridge at the top of my lungs.

But I digress. Back to community. It’s not that I believe, as Josiah Royce, a 19^th century philosopher credited with first espousing the concept of “beloved community,” that “my life means nothing, either theoretically or practically, unless I am a member of a community.” But communities do, as he observed, convey shared values, histories, and traditions that add meaning to my life.

My family’s shared history echoes in the stories we tell when we gather and in the traditions that help bring us together. The values I learned from my parents—love, kindness, honesty, humility, dependability, responsibility, and a strong work ethic—weren’t handed down on a stone tablet or formalized like the Code of Ethics that guides librarians or the principles of Unitarian Universalism, but they’re written into who I am.

Another group that’s had a significant impact on my sense of history is the LGBTQ community. Because of what I’ve learned and experienced as a lesbian, I see and respond to situations, stories, and images differently than I might otherwise. Let me share an example of what I mean.

Back in 2011, my wife Annette and I were staying at a hotel in Mississippi while on an experiential history tour about the Civil Rights movement. She woke me at 2am in excruciating pain. Holding hands as we rode through the dark to the nearest ER, we worried if the hospital staff would treat us as family (we were married in the eyes of our church, but not legally) or relegate me to the waiting room. I don’t remember if we had our legal healthcare papers with us or not. Thankfully, the folks working that night respected our relationship. But it could have been otherwise.

When I tell that story to someone in the LGBTQ community, they get it—sensing what that worry felt like piled on top of all the other worries riding with us in that taxi, knowing the history of how often it has been otherwise for people like us. And when they tell their stories, I bring that history to my listening. Sometimes, when my life gets out of balance, I go for months without spending time in an LGBTQ-majority space. Then when I do, at a poetry reading for Pride Month or a game night with lesbian friends, muscles I didn’t even know were tense relax.

Yet, even more than values or histories, communities layer my life with the connection and caring that comes from relationships, extending my human ties beyond ancestral family. My close friend group is small but they’re people I can count on and who can count on me. If I need to talk with someone other than my wife, a friend, or my mom about a struggle I’m having, I can call the lay pastoral care team at my church. When I’m frustrated with the latest surge in book banning, I can turn to my library colleagues. And when I’m afraid of rising violence or discrimination against LGBTQ people, I can find refuge in an LGBTQ-majority space—spaces that are also fabulous places to celebrate progress on LGBTQ rights and inclusion.

Pride flags flying outside a nightclub in Provincetown in the wake of the horrific mass shooting at Pulse in Orlando on June 12, 2016. Amidst pain, fear, anger, and sorrow, the solidarity of singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” together on the deck to which these flags were attached infused me with strength and love.

Howard Thurman said, “the loneliness of the seeker for a community is sometimes unendurable.” I’ve known that seeking, that loneliness. Thankfully not for long, yet long enough to deepen my gratitude for the communities I’m part of now.

But for all their promise, communities, large or small, have potential perils too. Along with values, they can teach habits of judgment that separate us. They can erase or suppress other people’s stories (past or present) when they contradict or complicate their own. And they can enclose the people within them in a suffocating silo of sameness.

I’ve caught myself in that kind of judging. Last week, I wrote about my journey to becoming generously frugal. Before that shift (and sometimes since), I judged other people’s spending decisions, sometimes making assumptions about their values or beliefs. The neighbor who drove a jacked-up diesel dually truck didn’t care about the environment. The couple who lived in a 6-bedroom 5-bath home with an elaborate brick gate didn’t care about people who couldn’t afford housing or groceries. The colleague who—. You get the idea.

Without knowing that neighbor, couple, or colleague, I couldn’t know what they valued. The fault was mine. But some communities tacitly (or explicitly) encourage this kind of judgment. Sometimes they do it by uplifting different spending choices as the acceptable or even meritorious ones. Ah, she drives a Prius or a hybrid. She must care about the earth. We even do it with groceries.

In the runup to the 2020 election, the New York Times ran an article about a study that asked people to guess a household’s political affiliation (as if all the people in a household would have the same one) based on a photo of what was in their refrigerator. Over 175,000 people took the quiz. The results? Participants were about as accurate as if they’d flipped a coin. Political affiliations, at least on either end of the red-blue spectrum, are some of the judgiest communities around. Along with the policies, values, beliefs, and worldviews they promote, they often push narratives that dehumanize, demonize, or lobotomize their opponents. I’ve seen it in action at my school, in my church, and among family and friends.

When the time comes, I’m not worried about leaving my school community. I’ll have a sense of belonging elsewhere. What I want to guard against is being in communities that make me more judgmental.

Instead, I want to be part of loving communities that expand and complicate my awareness and understanding of humanity. Professor and writer bell hooks said, “Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.” I want my here-and-now communities to reflect this same affirmation, this same richness.

So, if a silo of sameness starts closing in around me, how can I step outside my comfort zone before I’m sealed inside? I’m an introvert who feels awkward in crowds. I don’t make friends easily. When my wife’s out of town, if I’m not intentional about making other plans, I’ll stay at home by myself all weekend and be perfectly happy—and often do. But late last year, I added a new community to my tapestry unexpectedly.

It happened at the gym. I take an exercise class called Nia. It’s a playful melding of dance, martial arts, and mindfulness, and it’s the first indoor exercise I’ve ever stuck with—ever. Because it makes me laugh. No one judges me if I spin in the wrong direction or reach up instead of down. Depending on the routine, we might skip, shadow box, strut, shimmy, or pretend we’re sneaking down the stairs like the little girl in “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” It’s the kind of movement that precludes pretentiousness. When a woman invited me to join a book group with her and several other women who take Nia, I thought, what a fitting foundation for discussing books. I said yes—and I’m glad I did.

In most of my other communities, conversations often center on public policies or politics—or drift there. Here we talk about whatever books we’re each reading (mostly fiction). It’s refreshing. And it’s also more than a book group. Long-time members tell me that when someone is struggling with grief or illness, they take care of each other. I already sense that caring. The other support groups I’m familiar with are either at church or for people who share a specific struggle. These women support each other in a struggle we all share: the uncertainty of life. I also appreciate that they do so outside the framework of religion. It gives me hope that there are more communities like this—and that building more of them is possible. As I transition to whatever’s next for me, I’d like to join another community like this, or perhaps build one.

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Here’s a poem for your pocket this week: “The Forest for the Trees” by Rena Priest.

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