The Invitational Identity
Summary of the January 11th Three Sundays Session
I’m very intrigued to return again, in this second Sunday session, to the invitational nature of reality. I’ve worked with this theme, with what seems to me like an obvious dynamic of constant invitation, from within and without, for years. But I do feel as though I’m taking a deeper step with it through these Three Sundays sessions – bearing down on it in my mind and in my heart, both in the preparation and in the sessions themselves.
Last week, we looked at the way we are constantly making invitations as individuals, whether we want to be making invitations or no. Sometimes our invitation is actually for other people to go away – out of our own defensive griefs, and to keep their griefs away too. The interesting dynamic is that very often, we are making invitations we don’t even know we’re making. There’s something very important to our sense of self knowledge about becoming conscious of that – of the way we unconsciously affect our world – that despite our best attempts to hide, everything is an invitation to everything else.
From the point of view of trying to hide, we’re always in trouble in one way or another. We should probably just wake up to that fact: that what we’re in the presence of, and what other people are in the presence of, is something precious inside us trying to make itself known, which is often very different from the self we think we’re presenting.
Today, though, I want to work with the dynamic of being invited, and of allowing ourselves to be invited. The whole Buddhist tradition of the last 2,500 years is really about uncovering the invitational nature of the universe – the way it’s simply waiting for us to wake up into its astonishing beauty and its depths. Our ability to make invitations to begin with is often overwhelmed by the immensity of what is inviting us. There’s a famous line by Rilke: “What we choose to fight with is so small; what fights with us is so large.” And this understanding isn’t only found in the Buddhist tradition, but in every religious tradition: the sense that everything is always just beyond our present understanding, and yet the life in which we do understand is only a single step away.
In the Bible it says, “Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” There’s a sense that we’re working so hard at the centre of things, while all the time there is a power in the world, a beauty in the world, an invitation in the world that has to do with uncovering a relationship, a conversation that’s already there, often in very unconscious ways. We are made for the world in a certain way, and there is a core of us that’s always involved in that central conversation, no matter the self-sabotaging, non-deserving nature of our surface identity.
I want to work with that invitation.
I was going through my mind, and my life, thinking of all the invitations I’ve received, and as I did so, I remembered a piece I wrote called “Prayer for an Invitation”. That poem represents one of the core ways I’ve made my way through life – the sense that there is always something waiting for me, something I can’t quite perceive yet that is the next grand understanding of myself in the world, the next horizon.
One of the great gifts my mother gave me was a sense that I actually deserved to be given what I would be given. You could interpret it as being spoiled as a child, perhaps, but it was really an unconscious, unspoken communication between my mother and myself: that there is a world awaiting a human being that is much larger than the life they’re inhabiting now, and that you actually must fight to feel you deserve that life that’s waiting for you. I always remember my mother in conversation with neighbours who were in trouble. One of her great gifts was communicating this sense that there was something waiting for those people that was larger than their present troubles. When they were sitting at my mother’s kitchen table – because she was a great solace to people – she offered them that understanding. This invitational dynamic is something I carried with me out of that deep physical proximity to my mother’s understanding of the world, the world I grew up in.
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 uncertainty I feel
in following your 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.
-from The Bell and the Blackbird
But I acknowledge the power of your beautiful disguise . . .
That was a very merciful line to write – to understand just how much the world does feel disguised from us. The invitation is always hidden away from us to begin with, or it comes in forms we often can’t recognise, and many times don’t want to recognise. We refuse the invitational nature of reality – of every corner of reality, of every corner of creation because somewhere inside we feel we are not equal to or don’t deserve what we’re being invited into. We don’t feel equal to it.
In the Buddhist tradition, we would say we don’t feel equanimous with the world around us, or with the powers of the world. So the invitational practice is practising the ability to drop down into another, silent space, one where shame cannot survive, and that is equal to what invites us, a place that already ‘knows’, one that is as wise as the world itself. That wisdom may not yet be articulated, but there is a part of us that can slip down and dive deep beneath the net of delusion we’ve erected around ourselves.
Asking for help, both physical and invisible, is part of this. Invisible help is a very, very powerful form of help to ask for. Help we do not yet recognise; aid with something we have no idea how we’re going to achieve. We may not even know what we want to achieve. It may be entirely around the corner. There is a part of us that already knows what we want, and above that, surrounding it, is a constant conversation with the world that we think is a real conversation, but isn’t. It’s a defensive posture, a rearguard action against the invitation (one we are afraid of) that has already been made to us.
There is a defensive part of us that tries to sabotage the power of this grounded conversation inside us. There is another part of us that wants something disruptive, something that will break apart our surface life. And so the work is to get down to this radical place, where we can begin to articulate what look like subversive goals in relation to the way we’ve arranged our lives on the surface. Goals that often involve a kind of shriving – a simplification, a giving up of surface complications, a relinquishing of what we think we need.
