National Day of Prayer

Today is the National Day of Prayer in the United States. I know because, as I was driving through Detroit, I tuned into WMUZ Radio and heard it from Bob Dutko, host of "The Bob Dutko Show". The National Day of Prayer is an annual day of observance held on the first Thursday of May and designated by the United States Congress: people are asked “to turn to God in prayer and meditation.”

I was intrigued to listen to Dutko’s show because he was about to ask listeners of the program what they were praying for today. Dutko began by reading President Obama’s proclamation, who honored the service and sacrifice of the men and women of the United States Armed Forces “we recognize that it is because of them that we continue to live in a Nation where people of all faiths can worship or not worship according to the dictates of their conscience…As we observe this day of prayer, we remember the one law that binds all great religions together: the Golden Rule, and its call to love one another; to understand one another; and to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth…Let us also use this day to come together in a moment of peace and goodwill…Our varied beliefs can bring us together to feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted, to make peace where there is strife; and to life up those who have fallen on hard times.”

Dutko launched into a passionate invective of what constituted “appropriate prayer” and by whom. Dutko proclaimed that only prayers delivered to our One True God delivered by true Christians were appropriate and beautiful. He did not consider prayers by Muslims or Hindus appropriate for today (reserved for true Christians) nor did he consider them beautiful because they were prayers to a false god. In fact, he considered this act of prayer “ugly”.

“The One True God is a jealous God,” Dutko reminded us, invoking the first of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:1-3: thou shalt have no other gods before me.

After taking several calls from listeners, Dutko proceeded to give us his prayer for today, which ran along the same lines as his introduction: he prayed that so-called enlightened Christians would change their misguided false beliefs that included Darwinian evolution, unconditional love, respect and inclusion of marginal groups like homosexuals and different races. Duco advocated a revival of the old fundamentalist Christianity that invoked Jesus as the savior of our sins.

Not only is this very unsporting of Dutko; it lacks respect for the majority of humankind (who are NOT fundamentalist Christians or Creationists).

It saddens me to hear that this very closed-minded exclusionary sentiment continues to prevail in the world during a time when peoples and cultures need to communicate with one another respectfully and with compassion. Such exclusionary sentiment is predicated on fear and fear-mongering and a hubristic sense of righteousness. God is not exclusively your God or exclusively my God; God is all things to all people. God may come to one culture as the personification of a wise man and to another as the divine Universe of Intent. They do not exist in mutual exclusion. Because God is God. Like so much in the Bible, God’s commandment to Moses—do not worship other gods before me—is best read metaphorically.

What did God really mean by “false gods”? How many of us cherish our personal possessions? How many of us worship our material wealth? How many of us obsess over our outward image (“It’s all about optics, Nina,” my old boss used to tell me)? How many of us are ruled by lust and other desires? How many of us vigorously compete for status (often at the expense of others). So, Mr. Dutko, what are our real destructive false idols? Allah? Yahweh? Vishnu? Shiva? How about greed, power-mongering, lack of compassion, and obsession over physical beauty—to name a few.

When we judge someone else’s faith as ugly, or exclude another’s reverence in a divine presence as less worthy than our own, we are judging and excluding ourselves from our own divine nature. For they are us.

Dutko mocking Hinduism or the Muslim faith as false or Florida pastor Terry Jones publically burning a copy of the Quran are not just the immature antics of bullies; they represent the most insidious form of terrorism on world peace.

So, here’s my prayer…

I pray that humanity may be graced by the wisdom to love purely, to look beyond the surface and the literal and see that deep down at the metaphoric level we are the same and all deserve respect and compassion. ALL OF US: Muslim, Jew, Christian, woman, man, child, animal and plant, water and mineral.

Our beloved Earth and her home, the Universe, deserve better. We all do.

Choosing the Less Worn Path of Intuition

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

Intuition is sometimes called “gut instinct” as opposed to using evidence-based rationality. Some describe it as the ability to see any event or object from a viewpoint of “the cosmic whole, from its culmination—the seed, the flower, the fruit—to the whole: the comprehensive grip of the principles of universality. A person who develops intuition can “know anything without the barriers of time, space and any other obstructions.” Inventor and founder of the Intuition Network Buck Charleston believed that intuition “comes from a source beyond consciousness itself.”

Carlin Flora in Psychology Today (Vol 40, Issue 3: 68-75, 2007) defined intution as "quick and ready insight." She added that intuition is "the act or process of coming to direct knowledge without reasoning or inferring." It comes from the Latin word intueri which means "to see within" and is a way of knowing, of sensing the truth without explanations.

Story and Metaphor in Art Form: How Writing and Painting Whisper or Shout Their Truths

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world—C.S. Lewis
A few days ago I painted on a canvas for the first time in over twenty years…okay, thirty years. It was a thrilling experience but also refreshing and freeing to use a different medium to express myself and tap into that place—that force—that resides inside us and speaks to us: God in Art and Art in God.

Part of the thrill was that I was being coached by one of the coolest painters I know: Teresa Young, master painter (see my previous post on her “emotional landscapes”). What’s interesting is that while she instructed me on some of the painting methods, it struck us both how many similarities existed in composition, technique and structure between visual art and storytelling.

Take direction, for instance.