The Challenge of Invitation, Part 2

In the past two weeks we've hosted four meals.  Preparing for intimacy and essence and abundance, we move through the arrangements with our guests in mind:  eat inside or out, bread or no, vegetarian or meat, adult's tastes or children's too.  While I prepare, I cook and think and pray over the time to share what we have with others.  To nourish and fill and be filled.  Invitation is hospitality: that reverence and awe we give to the guest who has arrived at our request.

Come, we say.  We have something for you.  It's us.  
We're free to give it.

# 

After years of invitations I have to come to terms with my humanity.  I have to balance the invitations I give to others with the invitations I give to my children, my husband, my closer friends.  I have invitations to send out to silence and play and creativity and God.  I can't do everything, only something.  I can't invite everyone, only some.  It's the same for all of us.  But somehow that title I took on seems to say it should be everything, everyone.  Even the tribe says it, thinks it.

Coffee with two friends brought up something hard: when I invite it polarizes.   This is so far from my heart.    In these years, when I saw that others were connected I rejoiced, but now I spin a bit when I consider that maybe they didn't find closeness and open up their hearts safe and changed in relationship.  Has the power of invitation been left undiscovered for them?  When we don't give invitation we don't move anyone closer.

Another hit:  when I finally invite they feel like they've arrived.  Arrived at what?  A place to see my struggles and failures?  All the swings and misses?  I don't do anything to save or raise them. I'm walking in faith too and they don't even know that I rely on them to keep my feet on the ground with words of affirmation and correction and to show me the activity of God because I fail to see it so many days on end.  Would anyone really be wishing to enter that place?

Invitation doesn't ignite from coercion, but freedom.  When you demand it of me, I'm no longer free to give it.  

Still, I know that others invite one another.  I asked, "How is what I do different from her small book group, or his accountability circle?"  The answer came back fixed, "You're the pastor's wife. You can't separate yourself from the whole of the church."   And my heart, shattered in pieces, scrambled to assemble into a new shape for the sake of these friends.

From the beginning, a few took exception to my penchant for invitation: labeled as being "exclusive," or not a ministry of the church.  I wanted to differ, but I didn't push back -- eyes on the Father nudging me and not on the critics. If I didn't see others inviting I pressed on to bring in the friend on the fringes, emerging mentor, maturing disciple, broken soul.

And when I heard of invitations happening in new and different circles, I encouraged them, not forcing myself into the center or even to the edges.  I became that friend nodding and winking from afar waving them forward into their own abundance.  So acutely aware that abundance isn't found in me.

The Side B of Invitation is titled Challenge. When we invite, we design an outcome: "I want you to experience this with me."  "I see you in a fuller way."  This requires that we ask others to lean in and trust.  Invitation never says, "Check it out for a while," or "Come, be ambivalent." or "I'll only share a little bit of what I have."  Invitation takes, and to it you bring, the whole of you, the life and the dust equally left fragile in its wake.

Invitation has limits only because I do.  And surely it gets offered to me as infrequently as it does to others.  For this reason, it's odd that I even wondered why the invitations that would draw out my most adept gifts, stopped.

(Continued in Part III)

The Challenge of Invitation, Part 1

His six-year-old love language is quality time.  Fittingly, as the third child, he was born into a life of companionship following, keeping up, learning fast.  And when his brother was at a sleepover two doors down he was feeling a little lost.  Blue eyes turning now to me, sparkling like it was his very first perfect idea, he invited me outside to read to him in the cool of the grass.

He didn't say, "Mom, come wrestle," or  "Mom, let's carve sticks."  Those are brother enterprises.  He knows what I can and can't do; will and won't.  My son knows what to ask and who to ask it of.

He invited me to use my strengths and to be present with him in my most adept way-- there lounging among the words. 

And out of that he received intimacy and essence and abundance.  Out of that I received all the same things. It's simply what felicitous invitation will do.

#

Entering my faith community with skills and gifts, admittedly languid and rusty, I found my title before my tribe: pastor's wife.  Before I could introduce myself to anyone over coffee, chat about passions or families, articulate my faith, my faults, my loves or essentially be known, a task was commissioned to me to do.  It was based on assumptions about the kind of person I might be.

It was a complete miss.

I respectfully declined.  Defining myself and leaving room for my shape to merge with the community's was going to take some work.

My very first night in community I asked how I could help.
"We've got it covered," I was told.
Oh.

The first invitation was unsuitable.  Then, I was rebuffed.  It was evident that no one else could guide me to a proper fit in that new place, among those new people already fit just right.  I had to look for the holes, the hollows that I could fill.  And, to me, it felt like relevant invitation was a chasm.

I took a first stab.  I began a new thing and people came in the way that people come to your open house to see the stuff you live with.  Of the fifteen that answered, three never showed and only four even remain in our community today.  So much for the effectiveness of the open invitation.

I believe in the power of personal invitation; of relationships being the ground for growth, of connection that commences becoming.

I invite because I believe that God's kingdom should be bigger than the twenty percent.  I invite to break open the possibility of faith, start the inner innovation, and commit to companionship.  I invite because I know what it feels like to be invited.  I invite in order to reap challenge and change.

Merging who I was with what was life-giving to others, I began issuing invitations that could fill deeper holes in smaller bites:  book discussions, coffees, Bible studies, mentoring, days of silence.  Looking around for the separated and still, I asked these new friends to join me in things they hadn't done before.

And these smaller movements have initiated a larger action.  Those I invested in are now investing in others, building bridges across broken chasms, being courageous to act, finding the strength to be present in their most adept ways.

Invitation isn't just a way to be welcoming, it's a first step into a divine rabbit hole of intention and companionship.  If I invite, I invest.  And that has come with its own set of challenges.

(Continued in Part II)

The Caw and the Why

The fledgling crow suddenly found himself on the lawn under the pine.  

When we approached he blinked his blue eyes watching us.  His soft head moved side-to-side in the feather-ruffling breeze.   We listened and his scratchy gutteral caw took the attention of the adults looking with sideways interest from the fence.

The fear I felt for him was eased by the information I found regarding what to do:

Well-meaning humans often try to rescue fledglings who will not take food from our hands.  Crows, being deeply familial, will answer the call of any young bird, show it care and adopt it in.  It only needs to caw.

The fledgling lay on the ground through the night, unprotected, undernourished.  Sun rising, as I sat again with word and pen on the deck, I heard his call going out like a question.  It was a call for closeness and care.

It reminded me so much of us.

#

There has been a considerable amount of "why?" floating about lately, both coming at me and going out from my heart.  It is, the question we ask when we feel alone, when the tragedy strikes, when the world moves faster or seems smarter than we do. Just like the birds, we throw it out in strings, "Why? Why? Why?"  perhaps because we value the question more than the explanation.  The question is important. The question opens up intimacy.

Asking why is our own call for closeness.

Babies don't cry out to hear us explain their feelings of isolation, but to receive the warmth of embrace. Fledglings don't call out for descriptions of their fall, but for nurture and care.  When the house is burned or broken by storms we don't ask why to understand the science, but to get a sense of the new boundaries of our dwellings and who will live there with us. We send our own cry out to the universe not so much for commentary or evidence, but for a response that we are not alone.

We ask the why to find the intimacy.

What we really want to know is that we will not walk alone through our own fall, or grief, or shift.  What we really want to know is that we can be companions for one another.  What we really want to know is that God is attendant to all.

We say it nearly as much to others as we do to God.  It is a cry of curiosity as much as it is a cry of betrayal.   The wisdom of the world, incomplete and selfish, is betrayer enough.  The wisdom of God is to be present.

The fledgling cries out, "I find myself broken away from certainty.  I am relying on nourishment in a new way.  Please, find me.  Please, hear me."  We cry out all the same things.  The grieving, questioning one asks, "Why did I fall?" or just "Why me?"  And friends come with hugs and attention and go through our pain with us.  Affection rather than answers.  Support instead of statements.

Every why is an opportunity for increased intimacy.  "Why?" should be a disarming flag, causing us to listen for where the intimacy is missing.  Is it with me?  Is it with God?  Is it with community or other?  The challenge is not to fight back when we're questioned, but to chip away and find the gap that only closeness and vulnerability can fill.

{Summer of Midrash}

Summer Reading Contentment

Each year there is a theme. The theme is simply a challenge to myself:  stay present with present desire. Because it is so easy to become distracted by newer and ever changing tides -- I can easily ride those tides and never master anything -- and because I spend the year teaching others everything, each summer I become a student of something.

This year I'm practicing contentment. Drawing only from the books I already own, I made a summer list straight from our bookshelves.  These works I've collected from used book sales and friends, from Christmas gifts long ago and the books that simply found me at a time when I couldn't make space. This is the reading theme of summer: to give attention to what I have been given.

Interestingly, there is a fiction, a theology, a personal narrative in each month's grouping.  Patchett, Salinger, Chevalier.  Lewis, Willard, Newbigin, Wright.  Sedaris, Lamott, Eliott.   Manning and others on my Kindle.  Some of these good minds have passed this year and I regret not having read them.

There are others on my plate too, one for my own morning deck time, one for park group, two or three for a new little assignment coming up.   Summer's thoughts are full in the richest sense of the word; where I happily fill, fill, fill until it runs over and out of my life into the soil around me.

So, as much as I want to pick up new works like this, or this, or this.  I'll be here, content with the wisdom and craft of what has been with me all along.

June's List:
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (2001)
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (1989)
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris (2000)
The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard (1988)
Everyday Justice by Julie Clawson  (2009)