Many of the letters I answer for the fellowship are, underneath their questions about the scrolls or the practices, letters about loneliness. The writer keeps the hours alone. No one in her house or her church or her town walks this way, or any way like it. And sometimes, a few letters in, she tells me about the people she does have: the group that invites her now and then, the committee that relies on her, the friends who are glad to see her when she turns up. She tells me about them as evidence that she is not really alone. And I have learned to read those paragraphs carefully, because very often they describe attention, and not belonging.
Crumbs
When you are starved for connection, almost any attention can feel like belonging. Being invited occasionally. Being useful. Being given a role. Being acknowledged when you are in the room. When you are lonely, those things can feel meaningful, and they are not nothing. But they do not make a community.
The hardest thing I ever have to write to a correspondent is a sentence I first had to write to myself, years ago: stop treating the crumbs you were given as evidence of a feast that is coming. A crumb is not a down payment on a meal. Sometimes it is only a crumb.
The Table in the Desert
The Essenes knew the difference. The philosopher of Alexandria says that among them no one's house was his own, but was open to all who shared their life, and that they kept a common purse and a common store. The historian describes them coming in from their work, washing, putting on white linen, and entering the dining hall as though it were a holy place, to eat in silence the bread set before each of them. The scrolls call the community simply the yahad, the unity. A member of that unity did not have to earn his seat at the table every morning. He had been tested once, and long, and after that the table was his.
The fellowship does not idealize them. The same Rule that set the table also set penalties, and some members were sent away from it. But a person who sat at that table knew that he belonged to it, and that is something many of us have never known. The first followers of the Way knew it too, for a while. They continued daily with one accord, says the book of Acts, breaking bread from house to house, and did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart.
Four Questions
Relationships are reciprocal. That is the whole of it, and it is easy to forget when you are hungry. So watch, for a season, and ask four questions.
- Who reaches out first? Not who answers when you call, but who calls when you have not.
- Who remembers you? Your name, your news, the thing you told them last month that you were dreading.
- Who wants you around when they do not need anything from you? Not when the committee is short a member, or the move needs another pair of hands, but on an ordinary evening for no reason at all.
- Where can you simply exist, without constantly earning your place? Where can you come empty-handed, and tired, and dull, and still be welcome?
If you can answer those questions with names, those people are your community, whether or not they share your practice, and that is where you belong. Tend them. If you cannot, you have learned something true and painful, and it is better to know it than to keep waiting at a table where no one is going to serve the meal.
Being Useful
A word to the generous, because this trap is set especially for them. The fellowship teaches Service and Kindness as the outward turn without which the inward practices curdle, and we mean it. But service can be bent into a way of buying a place. The lonely person makes herself indispensable, and is relied on, and mistakes being relied on for being loved. Then she cannot stop serving, because she is afraid of what will happen to her place if she does.
Give, by all means. But do not pay rent with your giving. A place that must be paid for every week is a lodging, not a home.
When the Answer Is No One
For many of our students, the honest answer to the four questions is: almost no one. The fellowship has said in its Questions and Answers that most of our students have no one near them who walks this way, and that they walk it anyway. That is true. It is not a reason to pretend the loneliness away.
The Lection gives the old counsel: seek the brethren of the Light, and if you cannot find them, be one. Read the four questions again and turn them around. Be the one who reaches out first. Be the one who remembers. Be the one who wants someone around without needing anything from her. Make one place, even a kitchen table once a month, where another person can simply exist without earning it. Communities are not found ready-made. The desert community began, the Damascus Document says, with a few who groped like the blind for twenty years before a teacher came to them. Every table that was ever set began with one person setting it.
Here is a practice for one season. Once a week, reach out first to one person, asking nothing of them. Then watch who reaches back. In three months you will know a great deal more about where you belong than you know now, and so, perhaps, will someone else.
A crumb is not a feast, and attention is not belonging. But a crumb shared honestly, and returned, is how every feast began.