Longing to Belong
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
September 21, 2025
Many years ago, as newlyweds, my husband and I relocated to West Germany for almost a year. Walter’s company transferred him, originally for six months, and off we went on an adventure; navigating finding housing, finding our way around without GPS, and in my case, operating with one year of high school German. We settled in a small town outside of Frankfurt where we knew no one.
In the beginning I was preoccupied with learning how to do the most basic things, such as buying groceries. I remember being in the grocery store and realizing I didn’t know the German word for vinegar. Without a smartphone and Google Translate, the only recourse was to surreptitiously open bottles on the shelves and sniff. Grocery shopping took a lot of time.
So the early days felt busy and it took awhile before I realized that I was very much alone, once Walter headed off to work in the morning. It’s easy for us to forget today how much less connected we were back then, with no Internet and no international calling plans. Many days there was nothing to break the silence; in West Germany even TV programming was very limited until the evenings.
As the weeks wore on I became more and more lonely. One day, I took the train into Frankfurt, just to wander around, and as I was coming down the escalator in one of the big department stores, I passed two young women about my age, riding up, speaking English. And I had a sudden impulse to turn around and follow them back up the escalator, and try to chase them down to talk to them. But I was far too shy to ever do something like that. That incident really awakened me to how lonely I was, how isolated. Not long after that, we were sitting at the breakfast table one morning, and Walter decided that we should only speak German so that we could practice our vocabulary. Suddenly I couldn’t talk to the only human I knew. And I fell apart, right there, just sobbing over breakfast.
Luckily for me, and our shiny new marriage, that was the low point. He started asking around at work for suggestions for things for me to do, and quite quickly after that we enrolled me in German language classes at the Goethe Institute. After that I had somewhere to go each weekday morning, and made friends among the other foreign students. I was rescued.
But I never forgot how I felt; the misery, the sense of being completely outside of everything around me.
In recent years, the topic of loneliness and lack of social connections has been receiving more and more attention. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, the US Surgeon General at the time, Dr. Vivek Murthy, embarked on a listening tour across the United States to try to hear directly from people about the quality of their lives. In 2023 he wrote, “People began to tell me they felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant. Even when they couldn’t put their finger on the word “lonely,” time and time again, people of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds, from every corner of the country, would tell me, ‘I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,’ or ‘if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.’” (https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf?fbclid=IwY2xjawM5nT9leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFnN003SXhmMlhpRUVUZFg0AR7ku2WgpJ1R3jlpUO6tDksViRvRD6hKoRRxeId8wRkkMEWQ7zTWsLBC4vGqaA_aem_L3hsabLL0OmfyoB8InTr3w
The Surgeon General’s listening tour helped to launch a comprehensive study published in 2023, titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” And it revealed the impact of loneliness and the lack of social connection on our physical and mental health. The statistics cited in the overview of the report were quite shocking, and I’ll offer some of them here:
“The lack of social connection poses a significant risk for individual health and longevity. Loneliness and social isolation increase the risk for premature death by 26% and 29% respectively.37 More broadly, lacking social connection can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.4 In addition, poor or insufficient social connection is associated with increased risk of disease, including a 29% increased risk of heart disease and a 32% increased risk of stroke. 38.” (Ibid. p. 8)
Isolation and loneliness hurt. We feel pain and sadness when we are experiencing this; I’m sure most of us here today have felt this at one time in our lives or another, or perhaps are feeling it now. It might come as a surprise to hear about the physical consequences of the lack of social connection and loneliness. But think about it: we humans have evolved to live in communities, to work together, to contribute to the whole of society. When those connections are withdrawn, why wouldn’t it result in physical and emotional trauma, in pain and suffering? I think, just for starters, of the added stress, the impact on sleep, on blood pressure.
Olivia Laing is an author who wrote a memoir about moving to New York City completely by herself. It’s called The Lonely City. She offered this insight: “What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts…”
This description of loneliness resonated with me, remembering my impulse to chase a couple of English-speaking strangers through a department store.
There is more than one cause of loneliness, however. It’s easier to understand the sense of isolation when we are physically removed from our usual environment and our usual connections. Think back to the spring of 2020, as we all retreated to safety at home. But we can also feel lonely in the midst of a crowded room, in family gatherings or other social events, if we do not feel understood. I am willing to bet that many, many people have experienced this: feeling that perhaps the stork dropped them down the wrong chimney and they didn’t really belong to their family of origin, or finding themselves unable to make friends with anyone in a work environment. And too often, we are likely to find ourselves thinking that we are the problem, that there is something wrong with us. Our self-esteem erodes, as does our health.
Regardless of the reasons for our loneliness, maybe we can find a way to welcome it. As we heard in our reading earlier, loneliness can be a catalyst.
Our author, David Whyte, wrote, “Loneliness is the doorway to as yet unspecified desire. In the bodily pain of aloneness is the first step to understanding how far we are from a real friendship, from a proper work or a long-sought love… loneliness fully inhabited also becomes the voice that asks and calls for that great, unknown someone or something else we want to call our own…
Loneliness is the very state that births the courage to continue calling…”. (Loneliness, in Consolations, by David Whyte)
Sitting at my breakfast table in utter misery, all those years ago, I knew that something needed to happen. Clearly I could not continue on as I was. The overwhelming loneliness pushed me out the door to something I had not imagined: language lessons with people from all over the world. And long-lasting friendships with German people, once I could finally converse with them. Eventually some of them came to know our children. But I wonder: what if I had chased those young women on the escalator, and somehow we had connected and become friends? I might have been satisfied, and not felt the same need to stretch myself and push myself so far outside of my comfort zone. “Loneliness is the very state that births the courage to continue calling…”
The work of a church community is very much to create space for everyone seeking to belong. We try to be welcoming, and we try to see everyone, and help them to feel that they matter to us. We try to bridge gaps between religious understandings, or age, or financial conditions. And we do not always succeed. To be honest, we cannot always succeed. But this is our work, together, to be constantly creating and re-creating this community, for people who want meaningful relationships, who want to belong to other people.
I invite us all in the coming days, to think about this, to think about your own loneliness, and whether the church makes a difference for you. Please talk to me, but especially, talk to one another. What might emerge, as we explore how to strengthen our community? Where are our missed opportunities? What happens after coffee hour?
This year, I would like us to explore a new effort to help us connect: a new program that could match people up with companions. I’m just beginning to think about this, so I don’t have much detail to offer. But this gives us an opportunity to create this together, to experiment, to find out what we want and need, and enjoy.
I’ll close with the words of David Whyte: “Loneliness is not a concept, it is the body… attempting to become proximate and even join with other bodies… Loneliness is the place from which we pay real attention to voices other than our own; being alone allows us to find the healing power in the other… Human beings are made to belong…. The doorway is closer than we think. I am alone; therefore I belong.”
May it be so,
Amen.
