Invitation happens between people in community. We show up, cross paths, say hello, and accept the invitation to be in each other’s presence. Invitation is so important to our healing and wholeness.
When we invade, when we attack, bomb, take over, exclude, or isolate, then the invitation is destroyed in the violence. Kaur writes in her book, See No Stranger, ”Violence is a rupture, violence makes a hole… The hole swallows up language, memory, and meaning and leaves us in a scarred and stripped landscape… We tell a story about violence to make sense of it, and the story returns us to the public realm where grieving is possible. The act of naming the violence and grieving loss in community is how the hole turns into a wound that can heal.” (chapter 2)
“You are invited to a Holy Lent.” Another human being has to say that to you. I cannot invite myself into healing. Maybe, in a mystical way, God could invite me to tea with the Trinity. But today, I need God with skin on to touch my head with ashes. To touch my body and say, ”I know, it hurts to be human and mortal and vulnerable.” You are invited to turn holes into wounds, crosses into loving-kindness, death into life.
[ X ] I ACCEPT
[ ] I SEND MY REGRETS
I love this question. Who is it that invites us into this Lenten journey? There are so many voices trying to lead us, vying for our attention, inviting us to follow them. But, whose voice truly invites us to participate in a Blessed, meaningful, and Holy Lent?
And if we accept the invitation, are we willing to feel the Blessings of God accepting us just as we are? Do we truly believe that God is actively forgiving all of our transgressions, so that we can rise again and strengthen our walk with Christ?
Do we feel empowered by the depths of God’s Grace, so that we can wipe off the dust and be filled with the Holy Spirit? We all hunger for this Forgiveness, and it is waiting for us to accept the invitation to receive it.
Why do we block ourselves for being able to fully receive this gift, this invitation? Why do we hesitate to allow ourselves to be nourished by God’s Healing Love? Do we think that we are not worthy of this gift? God offers it to us, invites us to embrace it, because God believes in You.
What a wonderful-painful surprise when a friend sent me a link to this blog. The artwork echoes one of the greatest English-speaking prophets, William Blake.
And inevitably (for some of us) I am thinking of the ashes now settling in Kyiv and other places, unable as always to discern the invitation within fiery darkness.Broken, blessed, beloved indeed.
For now, though, I offer more modest words than those in Scripture (read now and then) or in Valarie’s book (seems like a lifetime ago (i.e. before covid, that I read it.) I took something I read and arranged it as a poem, with the author’s permission as it is the start of my most recent (unpublished) book:
The Presence of a Face
The presence of a face
initiates
the human ethical compact.
We are bound
even before we know
what stands behind it.
Even before
we might
learn that it is the face
of a machine…a landscape
where we seek recognition.
The face communicates
Thou shalt not kill me.
– Sherry Turkle, words excerpted and arranged
by the author, from her 2011 book Alone Together.