One
of the formative teachers in my life is Rose Mary Dougherty, a Roman Catholic
sister and Senior Fellow at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation. Rose
Mary tells a delightful story about a recurring dream. For many years this
dream seemed to show up to announce some kind of transition in her life, though
she did not always see it at the time. In the dream she was trying to decide
whether or not she should enter a religious community, and would go from one
wisdom figure to the next, listening to each person’s opinion.
Years
later she had this same dream again. Only this time as she approached each
wisdom figure to elicit their advice something told her not to ask. Finally she
came upon a young boy about five years old. To this child she posed her
question, “Do you think I ought to be a sister?” He looked at her for a long
time and then responded simply, “Do you wanna?” Rose Mary acknowledges that
from this moment on she began to encourage herself and others to listen to the
“deep wannas” of our hearts.
I
believe that God the Holy Spirit is communicating with us at a profound level
all of the time. Most of the time, I’m unaware
of what is being communicated, but the divine call is like a continuous radio
signal. It is always being transmitted,
but I’m not always tuned into the right frequency or there is a whole lot of
static obscuring the transmission. Even
so, the “deep wannas” of our hearts, what Rose Mary also calls the “invitations
to love” are always there for us. We
don’t have to be afraid of them. We can
learn to dial in.
Spiritual
awaking is about getting in touch with our “deep wannas” and becoming willing
to trust the invitations to love.
Spiritual guides and wise teachers have their place, but as in Rose
Mary’s dream, their role is to direct us back to our own experience of God, to
listen to the still, small voice within.
We
could only be so lucky to have such a wise teacher as the young boy, Samuel,
found in his mentor, Eli. Eli was the
priest at Shiloh, and Samuel was his servant at a time when “The word of the
Lord was rare” and “visions were not widespread.” When God’s call comes to Samuel, he doesn’t
recognize it at first; he is sure it must be Eli who is calling. It is so much easier to seek confirmation
from recognized authorities than to trust our own capacity to listen. Eli wisely perceives what is going on, and
gently counsels Samuel to give expression to his desire for God, instructing
him to pray, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
Good
spiritual leaders do not say, “Listen to me” – they say, “Listen to God. Tell
me what you are hearing! Perhaps you
have a word for me.” Sometimes, God
speaks to us through the voice of another.
We need the help of others to hear those things that we cannot, or would
rather not, hear. Later in the story,
Eli implores Samuel to share with him what he has heard from God. Samuel is hesitant to presume to speak for
God – and rightly so.
Samuel
is afraid, too, because what he has to say is not easy for Eli to hear, but it
is a liberating truth. Eli’s sons,
Hophni and Phineas, abused the privileges of their priestly office and used
their position to exploit others. They
were bent on a path of destruction, and there was nothing Eli could do about
it. This was Samuel’s message to
Eli. When Eli hears this news, he
replies, “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good to him.”
Eli
is willing to entrust to God’s care what he can not control – even the fate of
his own children. This is a hard truth,
but it is a liberating and, ultimately, healing truth. In helping Eli to understand this, Samuel was
responding to an invitation to love. By
his willingness to listen, he was able to speak a hard truth with compassion.
To
my mind, this is a very tender scene of great vulnerability – Samuel and Eli
are wide open to God and to one another.
It demonstrates something of the way our attention to the invitations to
love is a compassionate and unifying force in our lives, even when it isn’t
easy. We don’t always know what the
consequences will be when we are willing to respond to God’s call in our lives,
but it will inevitably lead us to a deeper engagement with life in the world,
to become more fully ourselves, to become more fully alive.
One
of the most beautiful, but rarely mentioned, aspects of Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s witness was his willingness to listen to God’s call and respond to the
invitation to love that he heard. Early
in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. King was unexpectedly thrust into leadership
when he was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association. He was 26 years old. He almost immediately became the target of
death threats, and his family was continually harangued by threatening and
obscene phone calls: sometimes more than
40 in a day. You can imagine the
emotional toll this took.
As
part of the boycott, the black community organized a carpool system. The Mayor soon ordered Montgomery police to
arrest the carpool drivers. On the
afternoon of January 26, 1957, Dr. King was one of the first motorists to be
arrested, his first experience of being in jail. When he was finally released later that
evening, he returned home after his family was already asleep. The phone rang. It was yet another caller telling him that if
he wanted to leave Montgomery alive, he’d better do it soon.
Dr.
King’s resolve was broken that night. He
sat at the kitchen table, staring at an untouched cup of coffee, and tried to
think of a way to resign without seeming like a coward. Reflecting later on this moment, Dr. King
noted that, although he had been raised in the church, he had never really had
a personal experience of God. But that
night, he found himself praying out loud, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do
what’s right. I think I’m in the
right. I think the cause that we
represent is right. But Lord, I must
confess that I’m weak now. I’m
faltering. I’m losing my courage.”
Then
it happened:
“And
it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin
Luther, stand up for righteousness.
Stand up for justice. Stand up
for truth. And lo I will be with you,
even until the end of the world’ . . . I heard the voice of Jesus saying still
to fight on. He promised never to leave
me alone, never to leave me alone. No
never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave
me alone.”[1]
Dr.
King repeatedly returned to this touchstone experience of God’s presence in the
long struggle for freedom that would end for him on April 4, 1968. This one experience gave him the strength to
love that sustained him for the rest of his life. It was enough. Touching into our desire for God,
acknowledging the “deep wannas” of our heart for even a moment, can change everything.
We
live in a cynical culture that thrives on irony and satire. We seesaw between taking ourselves too
seriously and taking nothing seriously, and risk failing to take the reality of
God seriously at all. Such an
environment makes it difficult for us to trust our desire for God, to listen to
the invitations to love. Perhaps
Nathanael is the perfect disciple for our age.
Nathanael’s
cynicism matches our own. When Philip
tells him that he has found the Messiah, Jesus from Nazareth, Nathanael
responds, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nathanael exhibits the typical urbanite’s
disdain for country rubes. It’s like
expecting the Messiah to come from, I don’t know, Modesto!
Nathanael is skeptical about this invitation. Why would anyone want to meet Jesus of
Nazareth? I love Philip’s response,
“Come and see.”
“Come
and see.” Don’t take it from me – see
for yourself! And when Nathanael
encounters Jesus, his skepticism quickly turns to credulity! Just like us post-moderns, believing nothing,
he’ll believe anything! How quickly we
fall for anyone who pays attention to us and flatters our conceits.
Jesus
admonishes him, “You ain’t seen nothing yet. You will see for yourself how God
will confirm the truth of the invitation you have been given.” Jesus in effect tells Nathanael to keep
paying attention. Keep listening. God will yet show you so much more. Trust your desire for God and stay open to
the invitations to love.
God
is communicating with all of us on a deep level – all the time. Sometimes, the message comes to us through
other people. The invitations to love
find some way to get through to us: one way or another. Maybe your being here today is a response to
just such an invitation. St. Cyril, the
bishop of Jerusalem in the fourth century, writes about how God’s invitations
are at work in our lives – even when we don’t know it. He describes those who have come to prepare
for Holy Baptism as photizomenoi –
those being enlightened. But he admits
that folks may be there for different reasons.
He writes,
“Perhaps you have
come for some other reason? A man may want to please a woman and may come for
that reason. The same may be true of ‘a woman. . . or a friend [may come to
please] a friend. I take whatever is on the hook, I pull you in, you who came
with an evil intention but will be saved by your hope of the good. Doubtless
you did not know, did you, where you were going, and did not recognize the net
in which you have been caught? You have been caught in the church’s net! Jesus
has you on his hook, not to cause your death but to give you life after putting
you to death . . . Begin today to live!”[2]
Maybe you came today because a friend asked you. Maybe you are here to celebrate the blessing
of our new solar panels – wonderful!
Maybe you came to see the bishop – terrific – now I’ve got you on the
hook! You’ve taken the bait, now here is
the switch: Trust your desire for
God. Listen to the invitations to
love. It will change your life. It will change the world. But don’t take it from me. Come and see.
