God Bless the Whole Wide World–No Exceptions

Singer/songwriters like me get heckled sometimes.

I learned that lesson again while performing recently in a restaurant bar on Marco Island in Florida. People were eating, drinking, half of them ignoring, and the other half seemingly listening. In that sense it was a mixed crowd this particular evening. For the listeners, I decided to break out a tune that I often reserve for the silent, more attentive crowds, called “No Exceptions”.

The main idea of the song is divine, global inclusiveness, as the repeating chorus goes something like this…”God bless the whole wide world, no exceptions.” Have a listen to ’No Exceptions’ below:

Just after the second chorus of “No Exceptions,” a 30-something year old male in the back of the room yelled out “God Bless America!!!!” as if he were making a derogatory statement about my song.

So I stopped singing right there, just long enough to respond, through the microphone, to the entire, now quite attentive population of this space, and I said “I certainly respect and honor your desire to bless America, God knows we could surely use all the divine intervention we can get; however, it seems to me, if you love this country, and you wish to continue to feel safe and secure living in this country, it would behoove you to open up your heart and mind just a bit more to include the rest of the world in your prayers.”

The crowd began to loudly clap and whistle, and I went on to finish the rest of the song and had everyone singing along…”God Bless the Whole Wide World, No Exceptions.”

I wrote “No Exceptions” after driving through Nashville one day, counting all of the bumper stickers on the cars and trucks that sported the same sentiment of this young man: “God Bless America”. I stopped counting at 95, because I realized it was a waste of time, and because I missed my turn due to all of the attention I was giving to bumper stickers; attention I should have been paying to where I was going. I went home and wondered what I could write to encourage more people to open up to embrace a wider and more inclusive reality than just one very small country.

What could I write that would promote global inclusion, and also include those people that most tend to frown upon world-mindedness, even in their own country? I recalled one of my favorite quotes from Mother Teresa “May God break my heart so wide open that the entire world falls in.”
Then I sat down to write. I decided, once I’d completed the song, that I would go around the world and sing it until everyone could sing along. And so, my lifelong, non-stop journey had begun. Along the way, in a mysterious process, the song led me to its origin:

Now is the time for the lovers of God to raise high the banners of unity, to intone, in the assemblages of the world, the verses of friendship and love and to demonstrate to all that the grace of God is one. Thus will the tabernacles of holiness be upraised on the summits of the earth, gathering all peoples into the protective shadow of the Word of Oneness. This great bounty will dawn over the world at the time when the lovers of God shall arise to carry out His Teachings, and to scatter far and wide the fresh, sweet scents of universal love.

In every dispensation, there hath been the commandment of fellowship and love, but it was a commandment limited to the community of those in mutual agreement, not to the dissident foe. In this wondrous age, however, praised be God, the commandments of God are not delimited, not restricted to any one group of people, rather have all the friends been commanded to show forth fellowship and love, consideration and generosity and loving-kindness to every community on earth. – Abdu’l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha, p. 20.

I don’t know how it happened. Perhaps writing and then singing my own song about world unity caused me to find its inspiration. After performing “No Exceptions” for a few years, I had a conversation with a Christian friend at work. I said that I didn’t want to be a member of any group that excluded others, and she told me “You sound like a Baha’i.” Since I had no idea what that was, I began to investigate and learn about the Baha’i Faith.

Two years later, I decided I had always been a Baha’i. So, five years after the creation of “No Exceptions”, I became a Baha’i.

I’m still trying to get everyone to sing along.

Find out more about Lani Nash or listen to more of her music here:

laninash.com
facebook.com/laninashmusic