God's Invitation Part Two: Some Further Literary Details

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Around the borders of the invitation I created, I wrote some lines from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that continues to resurface in relevance for me.

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

What if what you’re called to do is simply to be who you are? This is a key part of my understanding of God’s invitation at this point in my life: God invites me to be myself. This is such a freeing thought: I am invited to be myself. My truest self, my self as I was created to be.

The poem goes on, and these lines also appear in the borders of my invitation:

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Suggested reading for the weekend retreat was a book called The Great Dance. One part of the book in particular resonated quite deeply for me:

“[Jesus] continues to live out his sonship, today and forever, as a human being—he just does not do it alone, but in union with us, in and through us, in and through our work and play and gardening, in and through our relationships, our friendships, our marriages and romance…” (63)

It’s this idea that the last few lines of the poem address: that the life of Christ is lived out today in us, in our everyday lives as we live the fullness of the life God gives. As we live out our true identity. God invites us to live as who we were intended to be, and in so doing, we reflect Christ. And it's beautiful.


On a related note: I find that for me, God speaks loudest when multiple, seemingly unrelated sources converge at the same time with the same message. As I caught up on some blog reading yesterday, I found this post on one of my favorite blogs. These coincidences happen too often to me.