Invocation

Conferring with my father's old and very large Oxford Concise, I see a reference from the year 1698. To invoke is to utter a sacred name in invocation. An invocation is a summons. It is to call something to you by naming it.

Take a deep breath. This is powerful stuff. Perhaps you feel it as I do.

Originally, the meaning of the word was confined to uttering the name of God, or some other deity. I am going to take a liberty and stretch this lovely word, invocation, out to its fullest extent. To invoke is to utter a sacred name in invocation, in summons. A sacred name summoned. For me, this does not have to be the name of God; it can also be an attribute of God, or of the divine in any of its aspects. You can summon to you the attributes of God and into you they will come. You can embody them, incorporate them (in the true sense of the word), and live them, express them, shine them out into the world. Hmmmm.

Not such a bad idea, is it?

Words like compassion....

Unconditional love.....
 
Knowing beyond all knowing. Moving beyond all conceptualizations. The ALL.

Total acceptance.....

Peace that goes beyond all understanding.....

Wisdom beyond any that humanity has ever known......

When I say these words and invoke them into my being, I feel them. I feel their resonance. I feel a kind of a humming within me and know that these are being incorporated into me.

I believe that we invoke much more frequently than we might think we do. We can consider the wisdom of being more mindful of what it is we are summoning. For, as expressed in my Sonnet #3, which was presented to you a few posts back, what we say matters. It makes the world.

We speak our truth in the moment. Our words are evocative. They summon to us what we name. They call what we say into our experience. What we say matters. So it matters when we say things like fear, or hate.... or anxious, or down-hearted. Confused. Depressed. Weak, poor, sad, victimized, lonely.... unemployed, etc. Trapped, sore, aching, unable.... Words are evocative. So what do we do? We want to speak our truth. Yet, we want to acknowledge the evocative and invocational power of words.

Choose well the words you use.

I was invited to attend a small workshop offered by a young woman whom I have recently met and begun a tentative friendship with. I responded to her invitation to the workshop by saying that I would like to attend because it would enable me more easily to see the wisdom in her. I truly believe that by saying this to her, I helped her to express her wisdom and to feel it. My use of the word was an invocation to the wisdom in her. I summoned it. I chose to do this.

Choose well the words you use. Invoke the attributes of divinity, or the presence of the divine itself. By speaking of such things we call them forth. By naming, we summon. We change the world by what we say.

This idea is strange and somewhat shredded by modernity's prosaic attitude toward words. Yet it is powerful in ways that remind me of the very very old tales from our long gone days of magic and mystery. I choose to entertain this idea. I choose to be mindful of the way that I use words. I can feel the power of words when I use them mindfully, as I did in my response to the young woman's invitation to her workshop. Can you feel it as I do?