The Invitation to Receive Richer, Fuller, Deeper Lives
Prior to this week, when Megan introduced me to Sleeping Beauty: A Midcentury Fairytale, my favorite version of the old tale came from The Barefoot Book of Princesses. I didn’t read it this morning because the plot turns, as is traditional, on a prince to save the princess–and that doesn’t play well in 2024. At least not without discussion and analysis that would take our entire time and deprive our children of their time in Phillippa’s Place. Still, there are things I appreciate about that other version. It has bright and interesting illustrations. It has 11 blessings plus one for the baby princess. And it has this marvelous, sermon worthy, line:
Now there were thirteen fairies in that country, but because the king had only twelve golden plates for his very important guests, he sent out only twelve invitations.
Ah, a nearly fatal mistake, that! The king’s parents must not have read him fairy tales when he was a child, or he’d have known better. It’s never a good idea to neglect a fairy!
In that other version of Sleeping Beauty, as in the girl power version we heard this morning, a much loved child is given gifts at a festive party. The first eleven of the twelve invited fairies blessed the baby, giving her beauty, riches, joy, wisdom, love, pleasure, innocence, truth, delight, trust and gentleness. Then, before the twelfth fairy can offer her blessing, the 13th fairy, the uninvited guest, rushes into the banquet hall and curses the baby with the familiar curse: on her sixteenth birthday she will prick her finger on a spindle and die. As Flora does in this morning’s version, the twelfth fairy is able to alter the curse, so that the princess will only fall asleep, to be awakened after a span of 100 years by a prince’s kiss.
Both versions of the tale revolve around a spiteful character cursing the young girl, and that could be a sermon in itself, but I’m especially interested the reason the 13th fairy was spiteful–not because it was her basic nature, as we are told was the case with Morweena in the MidCentury Fairy Tale, but because she was not invited to the party.
Any of us who have ever hosted an event with limited space and resources might empathize with the king’s dilemma. Wedding guest lists, for example, and the endless discussions of how many from the bride side and how many from the groom side, or how many from the other bride’s side, and what about step families, and do we have to invite the boss to the ceremony and the reception?! It’s enough to make even the most tradition-bound couple cancel the wedding altogether or schedule a quick trip to the justice of the peace. Luckily most of us don’t have to contend with temperamental and powerful fairies in addition to family and friends with long memories and tender feelings.
Still, we can empathize with them as well, the friends, relatives and neighborhood magical creatures who react poorly to being left off the list. Who among us doesn’t know what it feels like to wait for an invitation that never arrives? The summons to the popular kids, sleepover, an older sibling’s, casual invitation to hang out with them and their friends on a Friday night, a date for the prom, an invitation to unofficial but important after hours office gatherings. Memories of invitations we don’t receive often longer than the memory memories of invitations we do receive.
Was it Auntie Mame, who said, “life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death”? Not an elegant theology perhaps but not without merit. We might consider life a long series of invitations, stretching from birth to death. To a large extent, our satisfaction in life depends on the invitations we receive, and even more so, on the invitations we accept when they are offered. The trick often lies in recognizing invitations when they appear. Only a very few of life’s invitations arrive in layers of thick cream envelopes with engraved printing and sealing wax – and those are seldom the really important invitations, anyway. In addition, while some of us may be fortunate enough to have companions who will bang on our doors and make us get out of bed to see the northern lights, most of us are on our own, most of the time.
Our invitations to a fuller, deeper life of meaning joy arrive tucked inside all sorts of nondescript envelopes. A newspaper article about children in the family justice system may be your invitation to volunteer as a court appointed special advocate or an elementary school mentor. A song with a good beat may be your invitation to move your arms, your feet or your entire body with the sheer delight of being able to do so. That story that you and a colleague think was so funny but no one else in the office seems to appreciate might be your invitation into a friendship with that colleague. A child’s begging you to play hide and seek, which is ever so boring when played by only two people, may nevertheless be the invitation back into the world of play you didn’t know you’d been waiting for. The wind through Spanish moss, or the sun rising over the Savannah River or dark clouds building over Tybee Bearch may be your invitation to prayer. A friend challenging your long-held opinions and prejudices on a particular topic, and doing so again and again, gently but firmly, may be your invitation out of the world of black-and-white, thinking, and into the more subtle, difficult and beautiful world of shades of gray, of yes-but, of maybe, of paradox and seeing the truth on more than one side of an argument. A stranger’s kind gesture may be an invitation for you to give life more chance.
Scientific facts and discoveries, nature’s endless wonders, music, art, humanity–life is a banquet indeed, for our minds, bodies, hearts, and souls. By virtue of our birth, we’ve been invited to it. And we stop starving the minute we stop letting bashfulness or good manners, caution or outright fear stand in our way of stepping up to the table for another helping. What pale, narrow lives we’d live if we waited for hand-delivered invitations. The invitation to the prom may never show up. We might never get invited to the in crowd slumber party–or the grown up equivalent. But there are brighter, more festive parties, awaiting our presence every day, every moment.
Still, it’s not as easy is it? In lives full of responsibilities, overloaded by information coming at us at all times from all directions, invitations get lost, overlooked and mislaid all the time. Church can help us receive them. In the music and silence of Sunday morning or the reflections of covenant groups, the space opens for invitations to drop into our awareness. Though we don’t usually label it this way, this is one of the purposes of church–to give us practice recognizing and accepting invitations.
Sometimes church helps us receive the invitations Life sends us. Other times invitations bring us into church or religious community. As one who was raised Unitarian Universalist tradition, I listen with great fascination to the stories of you who found Unitarian Universalism as adults. Some of your stories tell of great pain suffered within the bounds of other religious traditions. Others have more gentle stories to tell, of past religious affiliations simply not fitting comfortably any longer. And some of you tell of a longing that could scarcely be named and never satisfied in a life lived without connection to religious community. After these varied preludes, almost every single story takes a similar turn as you speak of your gratitude and having found Unitarian Universalism, here, or in another congregation in another city or state. You tell of coming home to Unitarian Universalism, though you’d never been here before. You speak in almost prayerful tones of the freedom you’ve found here, of the kinship you feel with others here. Having found this Church, you support it with faithful attendance, generous, financial offerings, and hours of volunteer service. Your unique backgrounds enrich our common life.
Knowing these are your stories, I ask you to consider what life would be like if you never received an invitation to attend this party. What is life like for others like you who have not yet felt invited to join you here to join us here? We don’t have 12 golden plates (or even one) so we don’t have to worry about limiting our guest list. We might run out of space in the pews, but we’re creative and motivated. We’ll figure that out when we get to it. Remember the gifts those first 11 fairies brought to the baby princess–beauty, riches, joy, wisdom, love, pleasure, innocence, truth, delight, trust, and gentleness? Those are things we can never have enough of, and there are folks out there waiting to bring such gifts to us, if only we will invite them and welcome them into our midst. The thirteenth fairy offered only a curse, but who knows what treasure she might have given, if not for the king’s policy of inviting only as many as he had golden plates to serve them on? Who knows what blessing the 12th invited ferry might’ve bestowed if she hadn’t had to counteract the curse? Creativity? Generosity? Devotion? A gift for collaboration?
The boldness and pleasure with which you speak to your neighbors, colleagues, and relatives of your life in this church may be just the invitation one of them is secretly hoping for. The kind word or smile we offer to a visitor may be the invitation that leads to a lifelong, life-giving affiliation with this church. If your opinions on the issues of the day are grounded in your Unitarian Universalism, then say so when you speak of them, or when you write letters to the editor, or post on social media. Somewhere someone is waiting for that invitation to seek out our progressive faith.
The sermon wouldn’t be complete without a word or two about lost mail, illegible handwriting, forgotten ZIP Codes, and winds that risk envelopes away and out of reach just as we’re about to deliver them into the safety of the mailbox. Another version of Sleeping Beauty has the king and queen send invitations to all the neighborhood fairies, but one gets lost along the way – it slips under the rug, if I remember correctly. The rest of the story unfolds as we heard it earlier this morning. The fairy whose invitation never arrived feels snubbed and curses the infant princess, but one of the other fairies is able to soften the death sentence, reducing it to 100 years of sleep, contingent on the kiss of a (sigh) brave and willing prince. That really does happen sometimes (not from the kiss from the willing prince; the lost invitation). I remember the case of invitations to my ordination that never made it to a distant relative and a nearby family friend. Eventually, the invitation showed up in the bottom of my dad’s briefcase, a fact which supported our insistence that we really had meant to include them from the occasion.
You’ve probably been on the not-quite-giving and not-quite-receiving end of invitations that have somehow gone astray. Remembering those times, the hurt feelings and confusion, let us be gentle with one another and with ourselves. Invite yourself if you hear of a party or rally or other church event you’d like to be part of. Send a second or third invitation if you haven’t received an RSVP to the first one (but accept No when No is the response).
And for heaven’s sake, keep coming to church!
This is real life, after all, not a fairytale. There is no magical creature waiting to undo the heartache we create (for ourselves or others) when we assume the worst of one another. Healing and reconciliation lie in our power, brought about through our generosity, grace and forgiveness. Those are blessings bestowed to each of us upon our birth, by virtue of nothing more and nothing less than our humanity–the power to be generous, to extend grace, to offer forgiveness.
May we wield those gifts with abandon, to transformative effect on our relationships, on our community, on our world, now and in all the days to come. Amen.
