It's relational all the way down (or, "why being locked in the gym was all about belonging")

I was 17 years old and had just finished an after school sports practice in the gym. For some reason I’d been slow to get showered, changed, and then saturated in the potent Lynx deodorant that was mandatory for teenage boys. Consequently I was last out of the changing rooms only to discover that the coach had assumed all the kids were gone and had already headed home. “No problem” I said to myself. “Everyone has gone, the gym is eerily quiet, but that’s no problem at all.” 

But it turns out there was a small problem. The gym doors had been locked, and there was no opening them from the inside. I was locked in.

This was in the days before every high school student carried a smart phone, or any kind of mobile phone. The closest thing to a phone I owned was a calculator, and while calculators may be useful for, well, calculating, they are certainly no good for calling people to tell them you’re stuck inside the school gym at 5 in the afternoon. As I searched for possible alternate exit points, including louvered windows that I could open enough to get an arm through but not much else, I became increasingly frantic. 

It was then that two 13-year old boys turned up at the tennis courts outside to play a friendly late afternoon game. I stared at them through the locked glass doors, trying to determine my best course of action. I could either choose to spend the night here in the gym alone freezing my ass off, worrying my parents, and being discovered by the gym teacher in the morning, or I could alert these boys to my predicament and ask them to get help. To be completely honest with you, it was a tough decision. While getting help seems like the obvious choice, I was mortified by this scenario. How embarrassing, how deeply wounding to my pride it would be to bang on the inside of the door to get the attention of these young lads, to see me and come over and then have me yell through the door that I was locked in the gym and needing rescue. 

This was, in the end, the path I chose (after some long deliberation). And I’d like to say that it didn’t turn out so badly, but these kids thought it was absolutely hilarious. When they eventually picked themselves up off the ground laughing, they were convinced to go and find the school caretaker who lived on the grounds. He was a rather stern man who expressed considerable frustration at having to come and unlock the door, and then berated me for being so stupid. But finally I was free from my cage! 

Fortunately, once I had been freed from my cage and was finally on my way home, at least I could comfort myself  with the fact that it was only two 13 year old boys and a caretaker who knew about my ridiculous situation. Except that I turned up to school the next morning and it turned out that everybody knew. The news of my imprisonment and eventual rescue had spread like wildfire, and I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me right then and there. 

We’re odd creatures aren’t we? Because on one level, what had happened was completely understandable, yet on another level, I felt like the world had caved in. And although I’ve grown out some of those acutely self-conscious teenage anxieties, there are still logically innocuous occurrences in life that leave me feeling embarrassed, under threat, at risk, or alone.

A lot of it has to do with belonging. When we feel like our belonging is under threat, we’re likely to react in ways that aren’t necessarily logical, but are deeply visceral. Our embodied and emotional selves can respond in ways that struggle to be talked around through reason and rationale. 

In many respects, it is the desire to be known, to be accepted and to belong that shapes so much of our life experience. And perhaps this is true for all sorts of reasons. There seems little doubt that belonging and connection form part of an evolutionary survival mechanism. To belong as a human being means safety, means protection, and means collaboration in the face of challenging external elements. 

But there may be more going on here too. 

There are both theologians and scientists who suggest that there is a relationality and connectedness to things, right down to the fundamental levels of reality. If this is the case, then perhaps it is no surprise that the creatures who have the most complicated and advanced sense of self and consciousness also possess such a deep and profound need to find a sense of belonging and feeling at home in the world. This seems like a plausible and potent truth to come to terms with.

And there are significant implications for how we practice human life, and even more specifically, how we shape our faith, spirituality and religious traditions.

The human desire to belong and to be known is part of what makes us so truly capable of love, self-giving and the joy that comes from true connectedness. And yet our need to belong can also be co-opted, manipulated and misdirected. We’re likely to make fearful and even violent decisions if we’re convinced they’re necessary for our belonging to be preserved. And if I felt under threat simply by getting mistakenly locked in a school gym, how much more can a sense of dislocation, aloneness and isolation be fostered through the more complicated challenges that we bump into all of the time.  

In light of the all of this, religious traditions and faith communities have a couple of options to consider. An unhealthy emphasis on the in-out categories so often utilised in religious traditions, on the ‘rightness’ of one’s own community at the expense of others, on the power of those who decide on the belonging and participation of others, on the shame directed toward those who betray the group – well these are excellent strategies for fostering a strong sense of belonging, but they’re not necessarily helpful in fostering the healthy and long-term flourishing of human community in all of its diverse realities. 

So perhaps we could ask instead, whether our faith and spirituality is able to offer a sense of belonging that both grounds us in an awareness of connectedness and safety, whilst also challenging us to look beyond our in-out group think categories, to resist the temptation to wallow in our own rightness, and to see that all of us are connected, whether we realise it or not. This kind of belonging does not need to stoke the fears and anxieties that reside too easily beneath the surface of things. Instead, what I’m in need of is something to help me navigate the way these fears can so easily take hold of me and disorient my sense of place. 

This is where religious traditions and spiritual practices can indeed be truly helpful, transformative, and even revolutionary. I am in need of practices that remind me that I don’t have to be afraid, that I belong, and that I need to offer others the same grace that I have experienced. The stories and rituals that regulate my life confront me with both acceptance and challenge; like a breath inward into a greater sense of belonging, and a breath outward into a movement of transformation in the world beyond me. I’m not sure we ever arrive here, but as Brian Mclaren says, “we make the road by walking.”