What is God inviting you to? This was the question posed to me recently at a three day Ignatian retreat. Durning the first full day of the retreat I keep coming back to this question durning our times of reflection. I couldn’t find an answer. As I worked through day two I still wasn’t sure how I would answer. During my free time at the retreat I was reading the book Befriending our Desires for a class I was taking. It is a great book and its content fit in very nicely to the materials being discussed during our conferences.
For the class I needed to write out five things I learned from the book. I didn’t have a hard time coming up with things I learned but I was having a terrible time trying to write them out. I haven’t written an academic paper in quite some time and felt very frustrated. In the vernacular of Ignatius I had entered a state of desolation. There I was, half way through my first course after re-entering a doctoral program and I was ready to quit. It was as though I finally realized that I actually wasn’t all that smart. But the words of Ignatius reminded me that one does not change course in times of desolation for those things started in consolation. I set aside my writing and decided I needed some rest so I went to bed.
In the morning I was up about 4am (this is actually my normal time to get up). I spent some time with God and the took another shot at writing. This time I was able to get my thoughts down and was ok with what I said. Do you recall the question I started with? What is God inviting me to? Well it appeared that the answer came was I was reflecting on the idea of eros-love and God. The invitation from God was how do you love me? God that is a great question let me thing about that. As a matter of fact I’ll make that one of my action points for the book. This question really does intrigue me. As I was to discover this was only the prelude to the real question.
In our morning prayer the topic was, you guessed it, loving God. We talked about three different Greek words for love eros, philios, and agape. Each of these describes a different kind of love. The priest then turned to the story in John 21 where Jesus is asking Peter is he loves him. Jesus was asking Peter to you agape (divine love) me? [Apologies to my fellow seminarians who actually took Greek and are laughing at my pathetic attempt as talking about it]. Peter’s response was this agape love but rather it was philios (brotherly love). Suddenly the question was Scott do you love (agape) me? I didn’t know how to answer. I was not sure of how I loved God. This question was not the invitation I am leaving retreat with. The thing that God is inviting me to is to deepen my love of God. To do this I need to nurture a deeper understanding of my true self which will then help me to know God deeper and then in turn help me to love God deeper.