"I am human and I need to be loved"

I am posting our Friday traditio the evening before because in liturgical time a new day starts at dusk, plus I will preserve more time in the morning for prayer. Like last week, I am reaching back to the '80s, except this time for The Smith's How Soon Is Now? Like a lot of The Smith's music, this is a song about the difficulty of connecting on a meaningful level. In short, it is about belonging without compromising one's self. .

The difficulty of connecting the way we yearn to connect with others was dealt with beautifully by the late John O'Donohue in his book, Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Yearning to Belong:

In post-modern culture there is a deep hunger to belong. An increasing majority of people feel isolated and marginalized. Experience is haunted by fragmentation. Many of the traditional shelters are in ruins. Society is losing the art of fostering community. Consumerism is now propelling life towards the lonely isolation of individualism. Technology pretends to unite us, yet more often than not all it delivers are simulated images. The “global village” has no roads or neighbors; it is a faceless limbo from which all individuality has been abstracted. Politics seems devoid of the imagination that calls forth vision and ideals; it is becoming ever more synonymous with the functionalism of economic pragmatism

We all seek, or at least say and often think we seek, authenticity both in ourselves and in others. We want to be ourselves, that is, who we are meant to be. In this quest we quickly recognize we have no self apart from others.