The Courage to Live & Love Our Belonging
by Claire LeBeau
When I first began to think about the prompt, The Courage to Belong, I must admit I was perplexed because my first thought was, don’t we already belong? We are human, a “custodial species” (Yunkaporta, 2020, p. 51), and as the late great Nikki Giovanni importantly observed, “we’re Earthlings” (Pyar, 2021). We already belong to each other, and as Levinas (1969) argued, we are only to the degree that we are responsible for each other. We are radically social and foundationally intersubjective beings; born into and through relation. It is only to the extent to which we live as though we are separate from each other that we suffer. In training existential phenomenologically oriented therapists, that is where we begin; the disease (or dis-ease) of all human suffering is found in the experience of loneliness and alienation from each other (van den Berg, 1972). The awakening from what Thich Nhat Hanh calls the “illusion of our separateness” may very well be the work that infuses all other meaning-making in our lifelong quest to live the courage to belong.
The etymology of the words in this phrase, the courage to belong, points to how we can begin to understand the movement of this meaning making. Let’s start with belong, or the roots “be” and “long”. The existential theologian Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be (1952) addresses the three-part threat of non-being (ontological death, guilt, meaninglessness) and how each person wrestles with their own individual existential anxiety as they face the inevitability of their own mortality. The courage to be, for Tillich, rests in faith or the affirmation of life even and especially in light of our awareness of our own limitation, finitude, and imperfection. The etymology of the verb form of the word “long” fits closely with the verb to yearn or to stretch towards. Courage stems from the root "cor” which means the heart or the bravery of the soul or spirit. When we bring these root meanings together, we find that the courage to belong is a kind of movement of our hearts to exist towards what we most deeply yearn for. For each of us, from birth to death, this longing and yearning of the heart that calls us away from ourselves and the concern for our own mortality towards each other is the movement of love.
Of course, love always sounds so much easier said than done because, in our modern world, we live the challenges of our illusions of separateness in bountiful ways. Our lives are riddled with divisions of our own design and consequence; social and economic divisions of hierarchy and power expressed through politics, class, race, ethnicity, identity, and technology, as well as our resultant individual experiences of pain, fear, confusion, addiction, and ego, all of which are announced in the ravages of an Earth atmosphere that is mirroring the extremes of our living dissociations and alienations from ourselves, each other, and the world. Insofar as we believe and live the illusion of our separateness, we magnify all the manifestations of dis-ease that are symptoms of it (LeBeau, Lowe, & Macdonald, 2026). The confound of our existence is that at no point in our lives can we ever see ourselves in our entirety as though we had a God’s eye view. Because we are not self-transparent, we rely on one-dimensional linear identity distinctions and definitions of difference to locate ourselves as unique in each other’s orbits such that any sense of belonging only devolves into tribalism and identity war. But that is not, as we have seen, our original condition of already belonging to each other.
In training future therapists, I often tell the students that forgiveness is the holy grail of all therapeutic work. By this I mean that, as human beings, it is not a question of if we suffer but how. Ultimately, if we are courageous enough to suffer-with each other (compassion – com-with & pati-to suffer), we may come to bear our suffering with our hearts broken open rather than closed, within the trust and loving scaffold of healing relationship, and so come to forgive (give or offer forward) ourselves and each other for all of the many human ways we miss or fail. For every person who reaches out to seek healing in and through relationship, in pastoral care, in psychotherapy, in family, in friendships, in acknowledgement, and in acceptance of our shared vulnerability and fallibility, we open to our courage to live the truth of our belonging to each other. What impacts one of us impacts all, and we are only as healthy as the most vulnerable among us. Individually and personally, experiencing each other’s pain allows us to locate our capacity to become response-able, and as Levinas (1995) writes, “the glory of the Infinite reveals itself in what it is capable of doing in the witness” (p. 109). Collectively, Sipiora (2023) conveys how Hillman’s archetypal psychology calls for the development of a “therapy of culture” whereby our “listening deeply” allows us to “hear the suffering of the world in both the perturbation of persons and the disturbance of things” (pp.12-13). As “psychological citizens”, our shared suffering is reflected in all of our varied symptoms and pathologies that we all must bear the burden of together. It is for all of us to continuously break the “illusion of our separateness” with all the yearning our hearts can take; to love enough to live the belonging that is who we already are.
Love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star
E.E. Cummings (1958)
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