The Great Belonging and Taylor Swift: Chapter Three
See a list of all The Great Belonging and Taylor Swift posts here.
The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other is available here and wherever books are sold.
It’s time to pair Chapter Three of The Great Belonging with a song by Taylor Swift.
I chose "Exile" to represent this chapter from The Great Belonging, "Wandering around the Stacks."
Here’s one thought I had while picking out a song for every chapter of my first book: In the same way that “enemies” mentioned in various psalms in the Bible can represent powers or forces or various difficult things like loneliness in addition to people, a lover or former lover in a Taylor Swift song (or any song) can represent just about anything you want it to represent. Your loneliness, your belonging, your loneliness that you thought was gone but is back, your belonging that you thought was here to stay but has left. Etc.
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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 Three 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.