Belonging. Few words are as meaningful to us as this one.
If you’ve ever struggled to find community and connections when you moved to a new town, you know exactly how important belonging is. That’s true both as a solution—joining a club or faith community gives you an immediate connection—and as a felt need.
The places, people, affinities, idea groups and so on that we feel a kinship with really matter to our lives, giving us purpose and fulfillment. If we pause and think about it, we have multiple categories that we use to organize our relational understandings. Let’s consider some of them.
Religious & Faith Communities
It’s hard to think of any type of “belonging” in our midst with greater variety than faith. After all, we’re part of a nation with an estimated 373,000 religious congregations. Perhaps you might say to someone:
- I belong to First Presbyterian Church.
- I belong to a mosque downtown.
- I belong to a Buddhist meditation group.
- I belong to a Sikh gurdwara.
- I belong to the Amish community nearby.
- I belong to a Vietnamese Buddhist temple.
- I belong to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church.
- I belong to a Hindu temple community.
- I belong to a Mennonite congregation.
- I belong to a Reform synagogue in the suburbs.
- I belong to the Catholic Diocese.
- I belong to a Quaker meeting.
- I belong to the Unitarian Universalist congregation.
- I belong to a Jewish community center.
- I belong to an interfaith clergy network.
- I belong to American Atheists.
What strikes me about this list isn’t just its range but how differently each of these communities answers the same human questions: what do we do with our wonder, our grief, our need for meaning? Some gather around scripture, some around silence, some around the shared conviction that none of us needs a god at all. The container changes, but the hunger for belonging doesn’t.
Political Affiliations
Other times, belonging shows up as a political home. We align ourselves with people who share our vision for how a community, state, or nation ought to work, stating:
- I belong to the Republican party.
- I belong to the Democratic party.
- I belong to the local Democratic Socialists chapter.
- I belong to the Green Party.
- I belong to the League of Women Voters.
- I belong to the Libertarian party.
Political belonging can be some of the most contentious kind we experience. It’s easy to let our politics become tribal, a wall instead of a table, a label instead of a solution. At its best, though, it’s simply another expression of people caring enough about their shared life together to organize around it.
Ethnic, Cultural & Civil Rights Organizations
Belonging also runs through our ethnic and cultural roots, and through the causes that protect and celebrate them. We proudly proclaim:
- I belong to a Latino cultural association.
- I belong to a Somali mutual aid community.
- I belong to a German heritage society.
- I belong to a Native American tribal council.
- I belong to the Sierra Leonean diaspora network.
- I belong to a Salvadoran immigrant association.
- I belong to a Ukrainian cultural society.
- I belong to an immigrant rights coalition.
- I belong to a refugee resettlement support network.
- I belong to the local chapter of the NAACP.
These are the belongings that often come to us before we choose them, inherited from parents, grandparents, and the long story of a people. But inheritance isn’t passive. Showing up, celebrating, cooking traditional meals, advocating…these are a few of the ways we actively claim what was given to us.
Family & Relationships
Perhaps no belonging is more foundational than family, in all its forms. It brings a smile to our faces when we tell someone that…
- I belong to my life partner.
- I belong to my children.
- I belong to the McKibben family.
- I belong to a foster parents’ support network.
- I belong to a single mothers’ support group.
- I belong to a stay-at-home dads’ meetup.
- I belong to a bilingual parents’ group.
- I belong to my 4-legged companions.
- I belong to a blended families’ meetup.
- I belong to an adoptive families’ community.
- I belong to a working mothers’ network.
- I belong to a military families’ association.
- I belong to a Latino student group.
- I belong to a homeschooling co-op.
Family belonging is rarely simple, and it’s almost never finished. It’s built daily, in the ordinary and exhausting and beautiful work of showing up for the people who are ours. If we’re lucky, these belongings mean more than anything. Sometimes, though, they come with a lot of baggage, pain, or life lessons in patience.
Health, Wellness & Support Groups
Health and the body bring their own forms of belonging. These communities exist because someone, somewhere, refused to face something alone. People understand something about us if we say:
- I belong to a chronic pain support group.
- I belong to a body-positivity movement.
- I belong to a wheelchair basketball league.
- I belong to a deaf community organization.
- I belong to a type 1 diabetes support community.
- I belong to an autism advocacy network.
- I belong to a blind and low-vision support group.
- I belong to a disability rights coalition.
- I belong to a plus-size advocacy group.
- I belong to an addiction recovery community.
- I belong to a mental health peer-support circle.
- I belong to a breast cancer survivors’ group.
- I belong to a suicide loss survivors’ group.
- I belong to a hospice volunteer network.
There’s a particular grace in these groups: they’re often born out of hardship, yet they become some of the most honest and supportive communities we ever find. Shared struggle has a way of stripping away pretense.
Workplace & Professional Organizations
We belong to our work, too. The people who understand the specific pressures of our days become friends, advisors, collaborators. Work is so much a part of the fabric of our lives that we too often identify first as an employee, and secondarily as a human.
- I belong to the local teachers’ union.
- I belong to the tech workers’ guild.
- I belong to the gig workers’ alliance.
- I belong to the an association of children’s literature authors.
- I belong to the social media team at work.
- I belong to the local nurses’ association.
- I belong to a middle-management peer group.
- I belong to a union apprenticeship program.
- I belong to the National Guard.
- I belong to the customer service department.
Professional belonging reminds us that even our labor–so often treated as purely transactional–is something we’re meant to carry together, not alone.
Civic, Service & Community Organizations
Then there’s the belonging of civic and neighborly life, the associations that keep a community functioning and cared for. These groups are the glue that joins people together.
- I belong to a co-op grocery board.
- I belong to the volunteer fire department.
- I belong to the American Legion.
- II belong to a rural farming cooperative.
- I belong to the Elks Lodge.
- I belong to the Chamber of Commerce.
- I belong to a food co-op board.
- I belong to a veterans of foreign wars post.
- I belong to a low-income housing co-op.
- I belong to the Rotary Club.
- I belong to the Iowa Farm Bureau.
- I belong to the Iowa Farmers Union.
These are often the quietest belongings. No one throws a parade for the Rotary Club, after all. Pull a single one out of a town, though, and you’ll notice the hole it leaves, sooner or later.
Academic & Intellectual Groups
Belonging shows up in our minds as well, in the communities built around learning and ideas. We value the classrooms, honor societies, and networks that shape how we think long before we know what we’ll do with what we learn from them. We feel a sense of pride when we say:
- I belong to a first-generation college students’ network.
- I belong to North Central College.
- I belong to the National Honor Society.
- I belong to Mensa.
- I belong to a community college honors program.
- I belong to a neurodivergent professionals’ network.
- I belong to Miss Beverly’s second grade class.
- I belong to the Friends of Adventures Preschool
These belongings can seem to expire the moment we graduate or move on, but they rarely do. The habits of curiosity we pick up in a favorite teacher’s classroom, the confidence we find in a study group that finally makes sense of something hard, or the relationships we make as part of a college fraternity/sorority tend to stay with us for good.
Recreational & Interest Groups
In our leisure time, we gather with the groups that meet simply because something delights or interests us. Then we pepper our conversations by noting:
- I belong to a book club that’s met for ten years.
- I belong to a running club.
- I belong to the Sierra Club.
- I belong to the Audubon Society.
- I belong to the Boy Scouts alumni network.
- I belong to the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association.
- I belong to a Pokemon gaming group.
- I belong to a bowling team.
None of these belongings are required of us, but that’s exactly what makes them so telling. We don’t join a running club or a gaming group to survive. It turns out that joy is better shared than kept to ourselves.
Gender, Identity & Life-Stage Groups
Finally, belonging attaches to who we are and where we stand in life, whether that’s our gender, our identity, or our stage of life. At times, for fear of what people may assume about us, we may be either happy or unwilling to broadcast that:
- I belong to a men’s accountability group.
- I belong to a women’s leadership network.
- I belong to a nonbinary support circle.
- I belong to my church’s Confirmation class.
- I belong to the transgender resource center.
- I belong to a childfree-by-choice community.
- I belong to Generation X.
- I belong to a retirees’ club.
These groups exist because being understood matters as much as being included. There’s real relief in a room full of people who don’t need anything explained to them first.
We belong to…
Add it all up, and it’s clear: we are, by nature, creatures of belonging. We were never meant to be self-sufficient islands. Every list above is really the same list, wearing different clothes or hats. People find each other and decide they belong together. Most of these groups we belong to are small, or at least small enough that we can form affinity groups within them. And, not incidentally, by the way, we don’t generally reverse the order. It makes little sense to say, for example, “The Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation” belongs to me; that would be the sign of a very unhealthy connection.
But there’s one belonging that quietly holds all the others. It’s incredibly easy to miss precisely because it’s so large.
We belong to the Earth.
Every community on every list –congregation, party, union, family, and clubhouse–meets somewhere. Breathes somewhere. Eats food grown somewhere, drinks water drawn from somewhere, and depends, without exception, on a living planet that keeps working.
Belonging to the Earth isn’t one more category alongside the others. It’s the ground they all stand on. When that belonging is neglected, every other one becomes harder to sustain, harder to gather for, harder to protect, harder to pass on to the people who come after us.
To belong to the Earth is to recognize that our care for it isn’t separate from our care for each other. It’s the same instinct, aimed at the widest possible circle.
While we belong the Earth, we often get things backwards and act as though the Earth belongs to us. As a species, humans have now overshot 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries. That will have profound, challenging, even disturbing effects on our future–the future of our children, the future of all of those belonging groups above. Our relationships with one another as we share this planet are thus critical and necessary in this challenging time.
This truth is a big sign that belonging to the Earth is the belonging most worth relearning, reclaiming, even rehearsing.
So try making this your breath prayer, your mantra, your motto, your daily commitment.
I belong to the Earth.
I belong to the Earth.
I belong to the Earth.
Download our free resource, which will help you or your faith community explore what it means to “Belong to the Earth.”