Prayer for an Invitation
I pray to understand the stranger inside me
Prayer for an Invitation
I pray for you, world to come and find me, to see me and recognize me and beckon me out, to call me even when I lose the ability to call on you who have searched so long for me. I pray to understand the stranger inside me who will emerge in the end to take your gift. I pray for the world to find me in its own wise way. I pray to be wanted and needed by those I have learned to love and those I must learn to love. I pray to be wanted and needed by those I cannot recognize in my self-imposed aloneness. And I pray to be wanted and needed by those I wish to be wanted by. But I acknowledge the power of your beautiful disguise, and I ask for the patient heart of all things to understand the uncertain, abiding and intimate invitation in my fear of leaving, in my fear of arriving, in my fear of taking your hand to follow that hidden, difficult and forever beckoning way. -original version published in The Bell and the Blackbird available on davidwhyte.com
The poem feels like someone standing quietly at the edge of their own life, whispering a longing they’ve carried for years: the wish to be found, recognised, welcomed. Each prayer sounds less like a plea to the world and more like a confession of how deeply we ache to be seen without having to shout for it. There is a tender humility in admitting that a stranger lives inside us, someone we have not yet grown brave enough to meet. The longing to be wanted by those we love and even by those we cannot yet love feels painfully human. The poem understands how loneliness can make us invisible even to ourselves. And the closing lines open into a raw truth: fear of leaving, fear of arriving, fear of taking the world’s outstretched hand. Yet beneath all that fear lies a quiet, intimate invitation the sense that life has been calling us all along, waiting with patience for the moment we finally step forward.
Start by loving the smallest thing, the bark of a tree, the roundness of a rock as the water smoothes it, the eyes of a coyote you meet in the woods. Go from there, soon you will love everything, even the world, even yourself.