Becoming and Belonging
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Do you like elephants? I’m crazy about them. Elephants are not only naturally social creatures, they actually form complex multi-generational societies in which tradition is passed on from one generation to the next. The matriarchs coach the adolescent girls into elephant womanhood. The mature males bring the adolescent boys off on a retreat of sorts, after which they return as adult elephants, ready to take their place as leaders in their society. Fascinating.
It is also true that elephants bury their dead. They grieve and have complex mourning rituals. They return to the gravesite year after year, lovingly running their trunks over the tusks of the dead, just as they did to show affection when their loved one was still alive. Remarkably, elephants treat a dead human being in exactly the same way; they scoop up the body, cover it over with soil and leaves and stand vigil over it for hours, leaving only when their mourning ritual has ended.
An incredible article by Charles Siebert entitled, “An Elephant Crackup?”
(New York Times Magazine, 2006) chronicled the demise of elephant society due to poaching and habitat loss.
(T)oday’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the world, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.
In other words, when baby elephants don’t know who they belong to, they don’t know how to be in the world. Without a common culture, there is no context in which to grow into their truest selves.
While elephants and humans shared a social bond two generations ago, one result of the trauma of recent disconnection and un-belonging, I am sad to say, is that escalating episodes of intentional elephant-on-human violence have become epidemic, killing people and forcing whole villages of people to relocate. When their natural, communal life-style is destroyed, elephants, like people, have no culturally enforced boundaries of behavior; they have no society to teach them how to become what they are meant to be.
At the risk of being too personal, I will tell you where my fascination with elephants originates. It comes from a lifetime of observing the importance of shared cultures and the impact that the environments and people who make up home have on the geography of our souls.
My parents were immigrants from Scotland. We lived in Vermont, where we were fully part of neither Scottish nor American culture. But when Scottish friends and relatives threw parties I knew to whom I belonged, thanks to recitations of Burns poems, great quantities of Scotch, the Highland Fling and haggis. Then it would be time to go back to school—where I might use a phrase or a word unfamiliar to my neighbors and have to check with my sister to see if only Scottish people said that.
I married Paul, a man from Ireland. People think that the Scots and the Irish cultures are similar, but they are not. He had an extensive network of friends and family here who had immigrated in the mass exodus of the 1980s. It was good to be surrounded once again by people who knew who they belonged to and who they were.
Our daughters, too, are first generation Americans, but fully part of neither American nor Irish culture, and certainly not Scottish. (It only takes two generations before a culture is lost.) We were happily absorbed by Paul’s large family with their Irish music and food and humor. But like my sister and me, both of our girls would sometimes come home to ask about the meaning of a uniquely American word or if Americans use a particular phrase.
When my youngest went to college, I noticed that every friend she spoke about was either an immigrant or 1st generation American. African, Greek, Italian—it didn’t matter to her what their particular culture was, she just wanted to be around people who had one! No coincidence that she went into sociology. I understood why. When I was the pastor in Rockport, Massachusetts I would go to Café Sicilia once or twice a day just to be around people who knew they belonged to each other.
My eldest daughter also married an Irishman. A sense of belonging is important. If they are blessed with children, my grandchildren will be the third generation of first generation Americans, which says a lot about the value of belonging.
I haven’t lived in my neighborhood long, but it’s been long enough to feel a sense of belonging—long enough to watch the kid at the end of the street progress from riding a unicycle to driving his own car; long enough for the young twins across the street to go from calling me nice lady, to Ettore’s (my dog’s) mommy and finally (shyly), Wona.
I’ve been here long enough to get to know every neighbor, every dog and every frequent visitor to the neighborhood by name. I now know who to turn to for gardening tips, who likes to trade leftovers and whether or not the older people need to be checked on, who to thank if lobster or bread or garden veggies or pasta or a good book are left on my porch. The people here know who they are and who they belong to.
A sense of belonging is a precious, precious thing. Belonging helps us to become who we are meant to be.
Back to the elephants, for a moment. Another quote from “An Elephant Crackup?”:
Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant; a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multi-tiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birthmother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a lifespan as long as 70 years.
Lest you think that I am anthropomorphizing elephants, I remind you that while animals aren’t people, people are animals. Humans, when left to our own devices, are also social creatures. Young humans were once raised in an extended, multi-tiered network of relatives, neighbors and communities. That is not so true now. America, at any rate, has become a very mobile society. Most of us have family scattered throughout the nation or across the globe and we move for work, for marriage, for sunshine. We have learned to live without a sense of rootedness or connectedness or stability. We have learned to live with the expectation that a sense of place and family is fragile. A sense of community is increasingly rare in our society.
A few years ago, I heard a Native American pastor preach at a gathering of several thousand people. He spoke about what the loss of Native culture and traditions and rituals and sense of community has done to his people. “We have forgotten who we are and whose we are,” he said. “When we forget about where we have come from and who we belong to, we lose our very selves. Without a context of community with which to identify, we don’t know who we are anymore. When community is destroyed, so is our society and our sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves.”
Chilling words. Challenging words. Words to heed in these days amid violence of thought and word and deed. Words to heed in these days of loneliness and longing. Words to heed when we are forced to consider what the demise of even one little neighborhood can do to our common culture.
We, like the elephants, need one another to know who we are, where we belong and what we belong to. We belong to each other.
Rev. Rona lives in the historic Fort neighborhood in Gloucester, and is a vocal advocate for the preservation of the marine industry and Gloucester’s unique culture.
She has a 140 lb. Sicilian Mastiff named Bella Ettore Scandifio and a rollicking sense of humor.
- Becoming and Belonging - October 1, 2016
