“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.

David Whyte, author, teacher and corporate consultant, is one of my favorite poets and philosophers, but not one easily included in this month-long collection. His poems are not the like the nature-based verse of “Moliver,” nor the lovely ruminations of Rumi, the humor of Hafiz, or even the accessible gravity of Rilke. His poetry is full of solitude, and melancholic soul-searching. But when I’m blue and don’t want to be cheered up, or am struggling with an inner question that will not be resolved easily, Whyte is the poet I reach for. Perhaps you can see why?

This is the type of prayer I can relate to, the type of prayer that often fills the pages of my morning journal. When I am moved to pray, it is never with a simple and direct request.  Anne Lamott, whose writing I adore, has said we only need three prayers: Help! Thanks! Wow! In other words, humility, gratitude and awe. But for wordy folk like myself and Whyte, those three words fall far short of expressing the complexity of our longing for the Divine, or the divine fullness of our own humanity.

I love how Whyte takes the time to articulate six different longings in the first six stanzas, direct prayers that require distinct acknowledgement. To pray, “I want to love and be loved,” is one thing, but to understand how your own shadow will avoid the recognition of that love is a greater gift that can lead to greater good.

After those first prayers, the poem turns, with the word “But.” Did you recognize it on first reading? Here, the narrator shifts to humble self-reflection, in essence saying, “I know I just asked for all those things – to be wanted, needed, loved – but now I’ll admit that my fear will be the very thing that will keep me from accepting the invitations you might send to answer my prayers.”

Why are we so afraid? Why do we so often refuse God’s invitations, even though they contain the very answers to our prayers?

For myself, I can only offer the words of another of my favorite teachers, Paula D’Arcy: “God shows up disguised as our lives,” a concept Whyte must be familiar with, proffering his own poetic version: “I acknowledge/ the power/ of your beautiful/ disguise.” We are afraid of strangers and strangeness, of walking blindly and opening our hands to receive, when we do not know what will be placed in our open hands.  But if we trust the Giver, God disguised as our lives, can we not trust the gift as well?

Obviously, I don’t have the answer that question, but poetry like Whyte’s asks me to reflect on it faithfully.