We live in times of constant activity and excitement. The media present endless images of togetherness, talk shows, and parties. Yet behind all the glossy imagery and activity, there is a haunted lonesomeness at the vacant heart of contemporary life. There is a desperate hunger for belonging. People feel isolated and cut off. Perhaps this is why a whole nation can assemble around the images of celebrities. They have no acquaintance with these celebrities personally. They look at them from a distance and project all their longings onto them. When something happens to a celebrity, they feel as if it is happening to themselves. There is an acute need for the reawakening of the sense of community. It is true that neighbours are not necessarily close to you. They do not need to be friends, but humans who live in clusters with each other are meant to look out for and look after each other, rather than live in such isolation. This is a primal sense of duty. You often notice that when something happens to someone on the street or in the village, neighbours who had never been in the house before come to help and support. In Ireland, this is especially apparent at a time of bereavement. People simply gather around so that you are not left alone with the shock and silence of death. While drawing little attention to itself, this support brings so much healing and shelter. It is something you would never forget, and the beauty is how naturally it happens. During times of suffering, the shelter of belonging calms us. The particular shape of belonging must always strive to meet our longing.
Every human heart is full of longing. You long to be happy, to live a meaningful and honest life, to find love, and to be able to open your heart to someone; you long to discover who you are and to learn how to heal your own suffering and become free and compassionate. To be alive is to be suffused with longing. The voices of longing keep your life alert and urgent. If you cannot discover the shelter of belonging within your life, you could become a victim and target of your longing, pulled hither and thither without any anchorage anywhere. It is consoling that each of us lives and moves within the great embrace of the earth. You can never fall out of the shelter of this belonging. Part of the reason that we are so lonesome in our modern world is that we have lost the sense of belonging on the earth.
If you were a stone, you could remain still, gathered in silent witness in the same landscape. The infinite horizons would never trouble you. Nothing could draw you out. As a human, your daily experience is riven with fracture and fragmentation. You wander like a nomad from event to event, from person to person, unable to settle anywhere for too long. The day is a chase after ghost duties; at evening you are exhausted. A day is over, and so much of it was wasted on things that meant so little to you, duties and meetings from which your heart was absent. Months and years pass, and you fumble on, still incapable of finding a foothold on the path of time you walk. A large proportion of your activity distracts you from remembering that you are a guest of the universe, to whom one life has been given. You mistake the insistent pressure of daily demands for reality, and your more delicate and intuitive nature wilts. When you wake from your obsessions, you feel cheated. Your longing is being numbed, and your belonging becoming merely external. Your way of life has so little to do with what you feel and love in the world but because of the many demands on you and responsibilities you have, you feel helpless to gather your self; you are dragged in so many directions away from true belonging.
