Patricia M. Brown, PhD, President and Director, Wisdom Wave Church, wisdomwave@gmail.com, P.O. Box 32443, Santa Fe, NM 87594
The distinction between the human and the divine, between the manifest and the unmanifest, is a false dichotomy in the psychology of religion and spirituality. Native American spiritualities provide perspectives that resolve this dichotomy through a broad and unifying view: supplication. Approaches to supplication, such as faith and single-minded devotion to an ultimate value or deity, are proposed to constitute the human interface between the manifest and the unmanifest. A reciprocal, resonant interchange between the unmanifest and human summoning of the holy can bring the sacred to expression in cultural forms and personal experience. Addressing the boundaries between the human and the divine, this paper presents a cross-cultural model for spiritual supplication. This model utilizes the anthropological term ritual frame and provides an integrative worldview with which to examine the dynamics of sacred contact and invocation. This suggests that supplication is the universal and fundamental human orientation to invoke the reception of profound healings, as well as spiritual blessings, cross-cultural understandings and innumerable gifts of creativity. If practitioners cannot access a similar unifying model, we lose the ability to have a birds eye view in our work, thereby falling into one of the dichotomies and losing the ability to work with the others. Primarily Native American perspectives are presented, but examples are also given from Catholic and Atheist perspectives.
