As Sojourn is in the process of 40 days of prayer, an artwork keeps coming up in my mind.  Sojourner Michael Diaz made the sculptural piece ‘The New American Standard’ for the Holy Lands exhibit at the 930 gallery earlier this summer.

This artwork looks exactly like a traditional prayer kneeler found in any kind of Christian chapel.  There is a simple wooden cross on the wall.  The only other objects that are part of the piece are a new Bible, New American Standard version, and a small shelf with three plastic Viewmasters.  If you aren’t familiar, Viewmasters are toy slide viewers that allow you to click through a series of small illuminated images when held up to light.   The commercial use of Viewmasters in the 70’s and 80’s, at least as I remember it, was to sell postcard-style images of Disney World or Sea World.  For this piece the artist has found a way to make his own Viewmaster slides of images from holy sites in Israel.  The images are mostly of market places surrounding the Holy Sites – hundreds of holy water containers for sale, endless rows of saint statues, and money changing hands.

The combination of symbols in this artwork offers a lot of directions for interpretation.  The context of the white wall gallery and the plastic oddity of the included Viewmasters make it clear that this is not a typical place for genuine prayer. The images hidden inside the Viewfinder tie the meaning together and reveal the substance of this artwork’s ambition.  The title, ‘The New American Standard,” further clues us in to the irony intended by the artist.  The New American Standard is a specific English translation of the Bible, but the phrase also is easily understood to represent the high standard of American living and the ever increasing felt pressure to meet that standard. The artist is tying together American consumerism with Israel’s tourist economy and showing how religion, and specifically prayer, is thwarted as a result of ‘the lust of our eyes’ and the subsequent release of finances.

Coming from a Protestant background, in a tradition that is weary of the ‘stuff’ of religion, Michael Diaz has pointed out the inevitable results of comingling the search for God and stuff.  We end up with a spirituality attached to plastic and detached from any environment conducive to genuine prayer.

Someone recently shared with me a definition of prayer I like very much.  As understood by philosopher Dallas Willard, “Prayer is talking to God about what He and I are doing together.”  Surely the American standard of seeking new stuff all the time gets in the way of healthy communication to God.