Belonging in Society
Belonging is important for our growth to independence; even further, it is important for our growth to inner freedom and maturity. It is only through belonging that we can break out of the shell of individualism and self-centredness that both protects and isolates us. However, the human drive for belonging also has its pitfalls. There is an innate need in our hearts to identify with a group, both for protection and for security, to discover and affirm our identity, and to use the group to prove our worthiness and goodness, indeed even to prove that we are better than others. It is my belief that it is not religion or culture at the root of human conflict, but the way in which groups use religion or culture to dominate one another. Let me hasten to add that if it were not religion or culture that people use as a stick with which to beat others, they would just use something else. Are human beings basically evil? The French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, maintained that love is only one person's freedom eating up another's freedom. Are we all called to live and die in conflict? Do all our generous acts merely conceal the need to be superior to others? Sartre leads me to my main point: What is the need to belong
A group is the manifestation of this need to belong. A group can, however, close in on itself, believing that it is superior to others. But my vision is that belonging should be at the heart of a fundamental discovery: that we all belong to a common humanity, the human race. We may be rooted in a specific family and culture, but we come to this earth open up to others, to serve them and receive the gifts they bring to us, as well as to all of humanity. One of the fundamental issues for people to examine is how to break down these walls that separate us from one another; how to open up one to another; how to create trust and places of dialogue. We can begin by seeing the other person in all their weaknesses, but in their weakness, recognize our own weaknesses and realize that they have something to give to us as we have to them. How did we, the human race, get to this position where we judge it natural not just to band ourselves into groups, but to set one group against another group, a neighbour against a neighbour, in order to establish some ephemeral sense of superiority? In 1997 I took a job as a live-in counsellor for people with intellectual disabilities learning to live on their own. The position was in Calgary, Alberta and it offered an unique perspective to get to know an interesting part of the country and living with
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 906
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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