Did You Get Your Invitation?
When I worked as a priest among the Aymara-speaking people of Bolivia, it wasn’t unusual when walking to communities high in the mountains to find remnants of pagan worship.
Among the most commonly-found items were dried-up llama and alpaca fetuses and small, clay, handmade statues of various gods. We who worked in the parish knew that many of the people who left them there also participated in our masses and other religious functions.
It didn’t bother us. The people’s lives were hard and they figured they needed all the help they could get. We also speculated that this confusion of deities was one of the results of the Spanish conquest of the 15th and 16th centuries. It included the forced baptism of thousands, maybe millions, of indigenous people. They and their descendants had scant access to religious education, and the term “implied consent” hadn’t been invented.
One of our jobs, some of us thought, was to compensate for that by making sure people knew the gospel message was an invitation, not a divine or human command. The idea that God invites, and doesn’t impose, is important for people searching for God – including believers.
Ah, you might say, my invitation must have gotten stuck in the mail. How, exactly, does he/she invite us?
Well, if you’re talking about the Judeo-Christian tradition, it’s important to say that the invitation is universal and comes in different forms. There are no un-inviteds. According to the Bible and church tradition, God extends the invitation to everybody – including those who don’t give him/her a thought.
Not a Popular View
I would say that the most common way is the invitation he/she extends through the religion in which we grow up. That’s not a popular view. It’s almost become an expectation that young people reject the religion of their parents.
That, in my view, is exacerbated by the view of some parents that they shouldn’t discuss religion with their children, let alone take them to church or synagogue or enroll them in religious education. They feel that it’s a form of coercion, and that children should be allowed to choose for themselves whether God should be in their lives.
I agree that there comes a time in their development, perhaps in their teenage years, when children have to decide for themselves. But before that, why shouldn’t believing parents teach their children about God and their religion, and take them to church or synagogue?
You don’t ask your children if they want to go to the doctor when they’re sick or if they want to visit the dentist when they have a cavity. They may not understand why they need the vaccination or dental procedure, so knowing what’s good for them, you make the decision for them. And in the process, you hopefully teach them about the importance of staying healthy.
But that’s about the body, not the spirit, and we humans seem to have a blind spot about the spirit.
And that returns us to the question of how God extends his/her invitation. Besides through our families, people have received it as a result of being in the military at a time of war; through a friend or acquaintance who inspires us; from reading a spiritual writer; by receiving an insight while admiring nature; and as a result of one’s prayer – including communal prayer at church or synagogue. But, of course, you have to be open to the invitation or it has no meaning for you.
Oddly, the common wisdom about religion is that it is an imposition. This may especially be the view among religious people themselves. Be religious or else! God will get you if you don’t. That’s not how God works.
Entirely Gratuitous
The story of the “rich young man” in Mark’s gospel illustrates how God’s invitation is entirely gratuitous, arrives at unlikely times and places and is tailored to the individual.
Jesus was “setting out on a journey,” when a man ran up to him, knelt before him and asked, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” The question itself is a bit complicated and there follows a bit of banter about it. Then Jesus answers directly: You know what you must do. Keep the commandments.
“Teacher, all these I have observed from my youth,” the man responded.
“And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said to him, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ At that saying his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions.”
Like the young man, most of us have obstacles that keep us from responding to God’s invitation. Some of us respond half-heartedly. Others simply ignore the invitation. Ironically, one of the obstacles may be the notion that God is trying to compel us, not recognizing an invitation when we see it.
