The Great Belonging and Taylor Swift: Chapter Four
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It’s time to pair Chapter Four of The Great Belonging with a song by Taylor Swift.
I chose "Midnight Rain" to represent this chapter from The Great Belonging, "A Fragile Knowledge."
Here’s the entire chapter. It’s super short, so it’s probably fine for me to post it here, right? And I think I own the copyright? Maybe?
My earliest memory of feeling alone is when I went to a week-long YMCA summer day camp. I was maybe four or five years old. I knew no one except my older brother, and back then he wanted nothing to do with me. I don’t think I said more than a few words to anyone at camp for the full five days, and the alone-ness was devastating.
Somewhere along the way, after I entered elementary school, I began to feel lonely even when I wasn’t alone. At the time, I didn’t know my first feelings of loneliness were tied to my awareness that everything was not okay. Everyone around me acted like everything was just fine and expected me to do the same: I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine!
But I knew, even as a child, about tornadoes and missing children and drunk drivers. I knew about death, violence, sadness. I knew we all were capable of flinging unkind words toward each other. I knew we weren’t fine. I held a glass globe filled with all of this fragile knowledge inside me, and I was afraid speaking up and naming our not-fineness would shatter the globe into hundreds of shards. It would only cause more harm.
So I remained in the solitude of my silence. I did my best to convince myself and everyone else I was just fine.
Midnight Rain is a good fit for this chapter because of the narrator’s (do we say that about songs?) exploration of the reality of suffering and pain and how she knows the picture perfect postcard is sham.
See? It’s a pretty great fit. Also. I love this song so much.
Thanks so much for following along!
You can learn more about this chapter, the book, and other things in this Behind the Scenes with The Great Belonging Chapter Four video.
Charlotte Donlon helps her readers and clients notice how they belong to themselves, others, God, and the world. Charlotte is a writer, a spiritual director for writers, and the founder of Spiritual Direction for Writers™. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Curator, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Catapult, The Millions, Mockingbird, and elsewhere. Her first book is The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other. She’s currently writing her next book, Spiritual Direction for Writers, which will be published by Eerdmans in 2024.