This interview appears in the Home Issue of The Mockingbird magazine. To receive your copy, order through our store or subscribe here!
In 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy sounded the alarm about what he called our “epidemic of loneliness.” As he warned, “The increased risk of premature death associated with social disconnection is comparable to smoking daily,” and it’s harming our communities, fueling explosive resentments that “threaten to rip our country apart.” In this context you might suppose that remedying this “top public health priority” is simply a matter of taking the right practical steps, both on a personal and communal level.
But for many of us, belonging can feel hopelessly elusive. That elusiveness is the starting point for author Sarah E. Westfall’s own journey — and the one she takes us on — in her new book The Way of Belonging. As she writes, “There is no secret formula or five-step program that guarantees the connection we crave.” Belonging “cannot be prescribed.” And as frustrating as that might be, it can also be a relief; we can stop trying so hard.
Westfall certainly hopes to aid us in our search for belonging, but she does so primarily by reorienting us and reframing important concepts rather than by offering trite practical solutions. For starters, as she notes below, loneliness is not “a disease that needs eradication.” Instead, it is “a good longing,” one that is “trying to tell us something good about ourselves — that we have this communal nature and in it, we long for connection to God.” In that sense, loneliness might even be a gift.
Beautifully threading her own biography through each section of the book, Westfall frames much of her exploration of belonging around a series of such shifts in mindsets, such as “From Lack to Longing” and “From Them to Us.” What makes this exploration both resonant and hopeful is that she continually locates true belonging in God’s love for us. By virtue of our belovedness, she emphasizes, “belonging is already in us.” Thus it “is not about finding the right place or the right people but about embracing our worth as God’s beloved and then extending the welcome.” Which is what home, at its best, is all about. We welcome each other because God first welcomed us.
— Benjamin Self, interviewer
Mockingbird: What made you want to research this topic?
Sarah Westfall: Belonging is a question that has been right at the surface for me since I was a little girl. Part of that is my personality. When I walk into a room, I often feel very conscious of what is missing within me, or that I’m different. But I’ve also spent a lot of time working in community-building spaces, trying to foster connection, whether that’s on college campuses, in creative communities, or within our church.
A few years ago, I was speaking at a church conference, and a woman came up to me afterward and said, “I’m doing all the things that you’re talking about — showing up, inviting people over. Why do I still feel like I don’t belong?” And to be honest, I didn’t have an answer for her. She touched on something that I too had been feeling. Even though we are doing all these things to be with other people, there was a measure of unsettledness internally, a feeling that we didn’t quite belong. That made me take a step back and say, okay, what is belonging? That was pre-pandemic.
M: And it’s only gotten worse.
SW: Yeah, it has. That question has gotten even more urgent for people. So over the last several years I started digging in and asking myself that big question: What is belonging, and how do we get it?
M: This issue of belonging hits deep for me — I lived in seven different cities growing up. But you spent your whole childhood in a small town in Indiana, right?
SW: Yep. Auburn, Indiana. It’s just 25–30 minutes north of where I am now. I never thought I would land back near the place where I grew up, but here we are.
M: I think I always assumed that people who grew up in one place… Well, of course they belong, right? But you suggest that belonging is something everyone is struggling with.
SW: We often think about belonging as something that is bestowed upon us by other people or as a place that we arrive at. But the sense of belonging is internal. If it doesn’t begin in our interior landscape, we’re always putting it in the hands of others.
Growing up, I tried to wrap my belonging in achievement or recognition — getting that pat on the back, you know? I was constantly trying to prove my worth, thinking that if I could just do the right things, then I would be in the inner circle. I put so much weight on things outside of myself.
We always think there’s this inner circle that we’ll never quite be in, but I think we’re all on the outer circle. So I’ve really had to reframe belonging from something to attain to a way of being in the world.
Diana Zrnic, Disconnected Connectivity, 2020. Oil on canvas and digital drawing.
M: I like that. In the book, when you describe that encounter at the conference, you write, “I did not know how to soothe her ache.” It reminded me of a famous line from Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
I like that line, but it also feels frustrating because, for starters, that kind of deep, life-giving community is so hard to find — certainly in modern American society. But then, even if we do find it, this “long loneliness” that she talks about — this ache — it persists, right? Because ultimately our need for belonging is a spiritual longing. In that sense, can it ever fully be fulfilled or satiated?
SW: Well, one’s sense of belonging ebbs and flows. We have seasons when that ache is soothed and we feel settled, but again, it’s not a place of arrival, and so that ache will inevitably return. My mom, who’s in her sixties, is in this new season of life, trying to find her place, not quite sure where she fits. And so she is once again asking these questions.
Often we need to reframe the ache itself. There’s a lot of language around loneliness right now that I don’t love, words like “epidemic.” And while loneliness is certainly on the rise and far-reaching — I’ve read the reports and feel it in my bones — the word epidemic sometimes does loneliness a disservice, because it makes it sound like a symptom of a disease that needs eradication, versus being a longing that is good.
Loneliness is trying to tell us something good about ourselves — that we have this communal nature, and that in it we long for connection to God, who is infinite. In our finitude, we are always going to want more of Him. There’s limitless supply of who He is. And then, also, we’re going to have that ache because we are human, and relationships shift, and we hurt each other sometimes. It’s an election year, and we’re all very aware of our opinions and beliefs and differences. And that can make the ache swell. But if we can look at its roots, then we learn to pay attention to it differently and begin to take steps toward God and each other.
M: As you’ve alluded to, you were a bit of an overachiever in high school. You write, “Achievement is an easy anesthetic. Beneath the accolades was a girl who wondered whether she was wanted.” That’s something a lot of us can relate to well beyond our school years — that need to perform our way into belonging, even in the church, to some extent. But I wonder if people who are successful have a harder time with this because they haven’t experienced as much failure. Do you think that’s true?
SW: I do. And I see it happen. You know, I’ve read a lot of celebrity memoirs — I enjoy those! But I also see it up close with friends, like those who are in church leadership. Elements of those positions make them feel like they can’t be the fullest versions of themselves. Their questions, their failures, their uncertainties — it often feels like these must be hidden.
For people in the spotlight, there can be a moment when they step onstage and it feels good — immediate feedback can act as a high for a little while, like, “Oh, yeah, I am great, and I do fit in.” But the high never lasts and the spotlight fades, and then we’re back in that place of looking for what’s next: What else do I have to do to be seen? We trade being known for being seen, and it’s a cheap substitute.
M: One of the things I really enjoyed in the book was how you dig into the parable of the Prodigal Son. What was it that spoke to you in that parable?
SW: I read Henri Nouwen’s book The Return of the Prodigal Son in the infancy stages of working on this book, and it made everything click for me. Nouwen talks about what it looks like to be home to one another, to become like the Father.
Home is the place where we feel most settled and most safe; or it should be. The ideal version of capital-H Home is where we can truly rest in just being — rest in who we are, in who God is, just settling into that divine embrace. When I was looking at the story of the Prodigal Son, I saw myself so much in the older brother. And there’s a question mark at the end: We don’t know if the older brother ever goes to the party to celebrate his brother who had returned.
That story was so important to me because I saw that both sons were lost, each in their own way. Both were longing for home but looking for it in all the wrong places.
There’s this great phrase in the story. The father goes after both sons at one point or another, but he’s talking to the oldest. He goes to find him, and the older son is like, “Why didn’t I get this? You did this for him — why not me?” I just imagine the father looking at the son with such compassion, and then he says, “I’ve been with you all along. Everything I have is yours.” The journey toward belonging — that journey home — is not in finding our identity as one brother or the other and acting accordingly, but in receiving that love of the father and then becoming like the father by offering the same welcome he did.
M: I loved these lines from your book:
Home had always been but a few feet away … All the [eldest] son had to do was turn around, and he would have seen that everything he had been working for (worth, recognition, a sense of purpose, love) he already had in the nearness of his father.
It’s such an important side of the story — that the father comes out of the party to find his elder son too and welcome him back.
In the book, you use this phrase “welcome of God” to refer to the love of God. That seems intentional.
SW: I think the more that I get to know God and the more I come face-to-face with my own questions, my own failures, my own struggles, the more expansive I see that God is. He is eternal and infinite, and with that comes a really wide welcome. You know, while I was writing the book, I just read the Gospels over and over and paid attention to Jesus. And there was so much welcome in how he interacted with other people.
Yes, he had moments where he got feisty and moments where he made people angry, but he sat down with a lot of different people and was interrupted by a lot of people. Just this morning I read a passage where he had compassion on the crowds and allowed that compassion to change what he was doing.
So that concept of welcome just spoke to me. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the church, but the phrase “the love of God” has been used so frequently. By reframing it into welcome — there’s a lot of invitation in that word. There’s a reminder that with God the door is always open. God is always with me. And that’s helped me to reframe my own posture toward others as well.
M: In other words, Jesus’ welcome is sometimes very proactive. Like with Zacchaeus, right? Jesus initiates the connection rather than just waiting. A lot of times when we think of welcome, we think of people coming to us, and we’re just receiving them. But there’s also a proactive side to it — outward-directed hospitality.
SW: And that’s hard. When it comes to connecting with other people, we are all waiting for someone to come to us. But for belonging to be sturdy and meaningful, we also must be willing to be that person who sometimes goes first, who moves closer, who asks questions, who is curious about the people that we interact with in our everyday lives. That then changes something within us.
Geoffrey L. Cohen, a Stanford social researcher and professor, has a book about the science of belonging, and one of the research studies he cites said that we have a more meaningful sense of belonging when we offer it to other people than when it is given to us. Internally, that act of offering solidifies our belonging more when we give it than when we receive it. That tracks with a lot of what Jesus said, too.
M: One of the hardest parts to read in your book was also the most beautiful — when you wrote about the death of your second child, Carter. You had been told by the doctors that, because of a rare condition, once he was born, he wasn’t going to be able to survive for more than a few hours. There’s a moment where you describe that time you had with him in the hospital:
For an hour, we watched his chest rise and fall. Each breath was both a blessing and a curse … That February morning, a hospital room transformed into holy ground. A Divine presence was so thick, so tangible … I caught glimpses of [God’s] love in the eyes of my mother and brother, in the tears that quietly slipped down the cheeks of our sisters and parents. And it was there in the middle of such palpable love that our son slipped quietly from Ben’s arms to the Father’s. For one full but brief moment, we were all Home. Love came near, and my soul recognized its sweetness.
That’s incredibly powerful. I was struck by the use of your word “Home” there. Have you ever again felt that same deep spiritual sense of being capital-H Home?
SW: I think that in that initial experience in the hospital, I was given a very large portion, a large taste, of Home, of something that I hungered for amid such loss. It came unexpectedly in that moment, but from that initial taste, it’s like I acquired even more of a hunger for it. And over the years — that was thirteen years ago — I’ve been learning to recognize Home in smaller portions.
Being present and attentive to my everyday life, to my right-here, right-now, has become important to me, in part because I tend to be a person who is either looking out at the horizon or caught up in my past. But the more I cultivate an attentiveness to what is right in front of me—whether that is the sun peeking out from behind a cloud, the laughter of my children, or the kindness of a stranger—the more I see smaller glimpses of that capital-H Home. That is a huge part of it for me, finding that sacredness in everyday ordinary things.
I’m also a words person. So sometimes I experience that feeling of Home when I write. There are places within myself that, when I peel back the layers or open a door, are not always pretty and don’t always feel good, but I find God to be welcoming there and willing to just sit with me in it.
And then I also feel it often in conversations or in stories, where I hear echoes of my own ache, echoes of my own experience, through the words and experiences of other people. So there’s that communal aspect of glimpsing Home in other people as well.
M: One of the common experiences that feels to me most like capital-H Home is being in the Communion line. It’s such a leveling experience. Everybody is welcome, and we’re all in this together.
SW: That’s beautiful. There’s that commonality there. It’s a very clear image of people desiring and doing the same thing in the same place. When I think of the concept of Home, it’s a place where everybody’s kind of equal with one another, or we can see the image of God in each other — while also still being aware of our need.
M: I love that you mention that sense of need. There’s a great verse from one of my favorite old hymns: “Your sure provisions gracious God / attend me all my days; / oh, may your house be my abode / and all my work be praise. / Here would I find a settled rest / while others go and come; / no more a stranger, nor a guest / but like a child at home.”
To feel that sense of Home, you do almost have to be “like a child,” right? You allude to this in the book when you write about wanting to get back to that younger version of yourself — to a time when you were socially uninhibited, gleefully and fearlessly going out and gathering people to yourself.
SW: Yeah, but this is also where that concept of home can get a bit complicated. All of us have different experiences of home based on our family of origin, our culture, and where we are in the world — and sometimes there can be wounds associated with that word. Even me saying that a sense of belonging or home is something that I’m trying to “get back to” implies that it was something that I did once experience, something I had initially in my life. And there is some good fortune there. I recognize that’s not the case for everyone.
But I think that all of us can understand that, in our infancy, we wanted to be attached to our mother or our caregivers; we wanted to let our needs be known by our cries. We don’t have shame over that at that age. Those early experiences of having our needs met can be a frame of reference for a sense of connection to God, and to others.
M: You write that belonging is a “welcome we carry with us.” It’s mobile in that sense — you can take belonging anywhere. But I also wonder if, in practical terms, there is such a thing as excessive mobility or transience in our society today. Even if transience is not a problem for connection with God, it can be a problem for connecting with people, for maintaining a sense of social belonging, right? How do you make and keep deep connections with people if you don’t stick around?
SW: It is difficult. There can be lots of reasons as to why place changes for us. Think of military families, for example. My husband and I, in our first thirteen years of marriage, moved thirteen times. It became a running joke: Oh, it’s Labor Day; Sarah and Ben are moving again. There were lots of reasons for that. And I was incredibly lonely in those first thirteen years. Now I did have the benefit of having a spouse who I love deeply. But in terms of wider connections, that mobility does make things more complicated.
Sometimes we try to rush connections. I remember meeting people when I moved to new places and having that feeling of, Ooh, I kind of like you. Be my friend — fast. Of wanting to dive in quickly. And sometimes you will find those people you can connect with quickly, and that’s beautiful. But it usually takes longer. And I had to learn the hard way that even when I’m the new person in a place, sometimes I still have to be the one to reach out and invite people in. I’ve had to learn to be willing to do that, even when it feels like it should be the other way around.
M: In the second half of your book, you spend a lot of time unpacking these overarching posture shifts that can help us in our search for belonging. The first is “From Lack to Longing.” You talk about the importance of digging down beneath our feelings of “lack” to name the deeper longings those feelings point toward. What are some ways we might put that into practice?
SW: Therapy can help, and spiritual direction. Those are ways for us to name our feelings alongside other people. Psychiatrist Curt Thompson talks and writes about the importance of confessional communities — for some people it might be AA or some other small group setting. Time and space with other people carved out into our calendars when we do have the opportunity to pause and to name what it is that is stirring within us.
But if we’re just talking about day-to-day life, it can be hard. Our kids right now are at the end of the school year. Everything is moving very quickly, and the opportunities to pause and reflect are few and far between. Emily P. Freeman talks about just putting things out on the table. We’re simply naming things for what they are. I do that through journaling a lot, but sometimes it can be speaking it out loud or texting it to my husband or a friend. You don’t need to do anything with it, but you’re just saying the words out loud. Because, in doing that, what often feels very large and ominous and heavy and swirling can settle just by the act of naming.
M: Right. It diffuses some of the anxiety. You also write a lot about how we might better connect with people we don’t know very well, including those who are very different from us. But there can be huge challenges in deepening connections with other people, and it seems to me that the risk involved might require some underlying faith. Is that true in your experience?
SW: Yeah, absolutely. Very frequently, before I go into a room with groups of new people — maybe it’s a new space or a crowded space, and I’m, like, kind of sweaty — I allow myself to become aware of the welcome that I already carry. I remind myself that I am beloved, that God goes with me, that I can get it all wrong and, even still, his love for me will not be affected. These are the things I preach to myself, the things I have to carry with me into the room. I can take the risk of being vulnerable — appropriately vulnerable — extending part of myself to other people because of that rootedness within me, that settledness I carry that no one else can really touch.
Of course, there are times when things don’t go well. One of the worst experiences is to be misunderstood, to have a version of ourselves floating out there in the world that is not accurate and/or positive. But that doesn’t change who we are and how God sees us.
M: There’s a place in the book where you say, “There is no them. There is only us.” That starting point, informed by our faith, feels so crucial. But also, it just takes time, right?
SW: Yeah, time and getting to know each other’s stories. Story is a huge part of this. We have to replace whatever narrative is going on in our brain with the story that somebody else will actually tell us of who they are or why they arrived at a certain idea or belief or choice or whatever. There’s always a story there. So the more that we can be curious about what those stories are, the more we begin to see the overlap in our humanity. Our stories might be very different, but our human experiences of grief, joy, sorrow, laughter — all these things are shared.
M: One of the challenges with our search for belonging is the temptation toward tribalism. Our desire for belonging can have a dark side. You touch on this in the book:
Faced with differences, we become like magnets pulled toward the allure of sameness … Sameness can be both comforting and familiar. The original motivation for these securities comes from somewhere good — a desire for Home. But by cozying up in our neat and tidy corners, we inadvertently and often subconsciously create a culture of “us” and “them.”
How do we seek belonging without falling into that trap?
SW: I named that section of the chapter “The Problem of Sameness,” but not because sameness is always bad. There is good in sameness in that we find commonality or things we both enjoy. We might root for the same sports team, and that can be fun. Sameness in and of itself is not a problem unless (1) we stop there, or (2) we begin to villainize those who are not the same. A third problem I have also experienced with sameness is that we are all still people in a state of becoming. And so what happens when we are the one who changes within a certain circle? Suddenly we’re like, Oh no, can I even say these words out loud? I’m not that kind of person anymore. What are they going to do to me?
Yes, sameness provides a measure of safety, of fun, of celebration, of commonality, but there is something really important that happens in experiencing people who are different from ourselves. Without encountering the people who are different from us — whether in the color of their skin, the amount of money in their bank accounts, their ideology, theology, whatever — it’s easy to lose sight of the image of God in them, and even to lose our softness towards each other.
Like, you and I can disagree vehemently on who we’re going to vote for in the next election, and that is fine. We can have those conversations. But we should also want to know the things that are underneath all of that as well, to try to keep hold of each other’s humanity and dignity amid our disagreements. If we stay in our silos just so that we can feel comfortable and safe, we ultimately make belonging harder for everyone.
M: In the chapter “From Certain to Settled,” you write,
Despite how much I long for meaningful, authentic relationships, the depths can still elicit anxiety. That’s one of the many wonky things about belonging — how we can want it and resist it at the same time. This tendency to fear what lies beyond the shallow end follows many of us into relationships.
When I read that, I was like, Yeah, because exposure is terrifying and disturbing! To some extent, the idea of being fully known sounds awful. You can’t hide.
A friend of mine uses the phrase “soul toupee.” Everyone’s got a soul toupee, right? So, how honest do we really want to be — even with ourselves? Or how honest can we even be?
SW: I would say that we have to go gently on ourselves and other people. We’re going to make mistakes. We are going to say something and, after the fact, be like, Ooh, I could have said that differently, or, Ooh, I was trying to be a peacock in that situation. That’s where we have to let ourselves be human.
It was Parker Palmer who said, “What a long time it can take to become the person one has always been.” And I love that, because it’s a reminder that this is a process and a journey. I find a lot of freedom in that idea. And in spaces where I probably would have held a lot of guilt and fear, and wanted to then go back into hiding, I’m learning to live a little more exposed.
We humans are so prone to hiding. We’ve been doing it since the beginning. That is our natural response when we realize, Oh, I’ve said too much, or, Oh no, I’ve shown the real me. We go into hiding. And sometimes that pressing in and pulling back is good, because when we pull back, we’re able to reconnect ourselves with the welcome of God. But then we’re able to keep stepping toward each other again, too.
M: My favorite chapter is your last chapter, “Seeds of Confetti.” You come back to the story of the Prodigal Son and ask: What if the older brother “let himself witness the splendor of that moment and embraced his brother? What if, instead of pacing in the dirt, he went inside, grabbed a party popper, and participated in the celebration?” I love that. It seems like such a hopeful way to move forward as we seek belonging — to just take every opportunity to celebrate. Is that something you try to do? I mean, with four boys it might be a lot.
SW: Haha. Our whole house is a party all the time. You know, I think that the practice of celebration has been most important for me — in relation to belonging — because I often default to envy in my relationships with other people, less in the sense of wanting what they have, but more so of feeling like they contain a quality, that X-factor that I lack. When envy rises, my natural response is to pull away, or to tell myself a narrative about somebody else that may or may not be true just to make myself feel better.
But the practice of celebration really resists comparison. It resists the consumerism that says I have to grasp for what is mine. Because celebration is generosity. Celebration leans forward and toward other people, and it lifts them up. And not in a cheap or forced way. It’s when we truly see the good in other people and we call it out and we say, “That is beautiful and true.”
And we can celebrate small moments. Like, I had a wonderful interaction with somebody at the grocery store today. I think of the Parable of the Good Soil: I want the soil of my soul in a place where it can receive and grow and flourish. So I plant those seeds of confetti. I celebrate in order to stay soft.
M: And that’s how belonging grows from just one person to something that affects the community, right? Celebration may be a birthday party or a cookout — any number of different things. But when communities are working the way they’re supposed to, people are celebrating, right? People are breaking bread together, scattering “seeds of welcome like confetti.”
SW: And remember that confetti and seeds — these are really small things. It’s easy, when we think of celebration, to try to go way over the top. Like maybe we have to throw this giant barbecue or a block party. But no. You can start with saying “Hi” to your neighbor. You can reach out in small ways, and then see what grows.
M: Like making brownies.
SW: My gosh, that sounds good right now.
