Courageous invitations: a spiritual challenge

My challenge to you for this month is to both accept and offer a “courageous” invitation.  What’s a courageous invitation?  A courageous invitation is one that’s difficult to make and/or difficult to accept for whatever reason.  What makes something difficult for one person may be easy for another person.  Perhaps you might invite someone with whom you’re in conflict with or angry with to have a conversation to clear the air and patch things up.  Maybe you’ve been putting off accepting such an invitation from someone else?  Maybe you’ve been meaning to try a new hobby, a new food, or start a fitness routine of some kind.  You might extend and accept an invitation from yourself to do so.  Maybe there’s a person you’ve been wanting to ask on a date (it might even be a current partner) or a person you’ve been wanting to befriend.  Extend an invitation.  Many invitations come our way in life. Look for them.  Sometimes we miss them! Invite and accept an invitation this month. See if you can make that invitation or acceptance around something that for whatever reason is not so easy for YOU to make or accept. Take a little risk, engage your bravery, expand your horizons. 

September's THEME: Invitation

The spiritual theme for this month is "invitation." Here are some resources to help you reflect on the idea and process of invitation.

INVITING Question to Ponder 

• What is the most beautiful invitation you ever received?

• What is your way of being in the world inviting people to do or become?

• What’s an invitation you’re not accepting because of fear?

• If you could only invite one new thing into your life in the coming year, what would it be?

INVITING Quotes

• “Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.” - Adrienne Rich

• “I respectfully decline the invitation to join your hallucination.” - Scott Adams

• “True hospitality is when someone leaves your home feeling better about themselves, not better about you.” - Shauna Niequist  

• “A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal [themselves] to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.” - David Whyte

Books about INVITATION

• Trusting Change: Finding Our Way Through Personal and Global Transformation by Karen Hering

• New Beginnings; An Invitation to Know Yourself and Change Your Destiny by Yuan Tze

• Radical Welcome: Embracing God, the Other, and the Spirit of Transformation by Stephanie Spellers

• Faithful Practices: Everyday Ways to Feed Your Spirit by Erik Walker Wikstrom

Movies and Television about INVITATION

• “Inside Out2” - On inviting in all of our emotions

• “The Bear” On the invitation to community and beginning again

• “Somebody, Somewhere” On the invitation to self-reinvention

• “Once” On the invitation to connect and heal

INVITING Items on the Internet

• Bill Murray on Life’s Invitation to a New Day - https://www.facebook.com/reel/990746565599609 

• Inviting Fear to Travel with You by Elizabeth Gilbert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgKhHeiah80  

• On inviting in our feelings and hearing their invitations

YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oFD8gbic6A&t=409s  

• On the Life-Giving Questions that Change Invites Us to Ask

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt0arZN6EBM 

INVITING Music

• Click here for the Spotify playlist on The Invitation of a New Day

• Click here for the YouTube playlist on The Invitation of a New Day

• Click here for the Spotify playlist on The Invitation to Live Love

• Click here for the YouTube playlist on The Invitation to Live Love

An Unexpected Invitation

Rev. Tony and friends this past July

Each January for the past three years I’ve received an invitation in my email inbox from a long time friend named Eric. Eric and I were friends at Fitchburg (MA) State College - now Fitchburg State University, part of the University of MA system. We worked together at the student newspaper and at the college’s radio station. Eric was one of a group of friends I hung out with at “The Burg.” One of these friends was Matt who invited me to come meet some of his friends Freshman year. Eric was one of these friends and two more of these friends were twin brothers Scott and Steve (Steve, I learned, was just visiting from UVM). Scott and Steve’s family had a house on a lake in New Hampshire and one year a group of us headed up there for a summer weekend with a lot of beer and hot dogs and had a grand time. We did it again the next year. And the next. After a while most of us got married, had children, and we’d continue to go up to New Hampshire for a weekend each summer, this time with less beer but more juice boxes, and child carriers and family tents and beach toys. Many of us had drifted apart from each other but during that weekend in New Hampshire we’d reconnect and catch up on the past year in each other’s lives. We continued this tradition for more than twenty years. Eventually, too many of us, myself included, moved so far away that it wasn’t practical to travel across the country and attendance dwindled until one year the invitation from Scott and Steve never arrived.

More than 15 years passed. I rarely saw my friend Matt. Eric had moved to Colorado. I only had occasional contact with Scott and Steve through social media. I completely lost track of a lot of the others. Then in January of 2022 I got a Facebook message from Eric - “check your email” it said, “Scott and Steve are having the NH weekend again.” I opened my email. There it was - an Evite email from Eric, writing on behalf of Scott and Steve and two others who were helping to coordinate the event. The invitation said that Covid-19 and pandemic quarantine conditions made it clear that life was too short and too unpredictable to lose track of the important people in our lives so everyone was invited to come to NH on a weekend that July to reconnect and re-establish our annual event.

When I arrived on a Friday night that July, a dozen people were already there. I saw Eric from across the room. We hadn’t seen each other in person in over a decade. We hugged and cried like long lost brothers - because we were. Eric’s teenage daughter, who I had never met, kidded us about being sentimental saps. We are. Guilty as charged and proud of it.

A few weeks ago Tuesday and I spent the weekend in New Hampshire (a photo of the crew is below) at the revived annual pilgrimage of old college friends and their families. Just wonderful and amazing. So. Much. Love.

Thirty-eight years ago I got into a conversation with a guy in my world literature class named Matt. I accepted an invitation from him to hang out with him and a group of his buddies that evening. Through that, I met a lot of other people, two of them twin brothers who invited me to their family compound on a lake in New Hampshire. And then, after a pandemic, I received and accepted another invitation to renew friendships and attend a reunion. I’m glad I had the courage to accept these invitations.

Life continually presents us with opportunities. We are constantly invited into life in many and varied ways. Often, the invitation is unexpected and seems to come out of nowhere. I said “yes” once upon a time to a simple invitation to a very casual gathering. It’s turned into forty years of blessing.