Lisa Blecker’s Blessed Is the Spot: A First Prayer Book with animated DVD transforms a much-loved prayer by Baha’u’llah into a multimedia experience that sends souls and hearts soaring no matter what your beliefs.

Ms. Blecker, a former pre-K through grade 12 art teacher, recently received a 2008 Mom’s Choice Award, sponsored by the Just for Mom Foundation, for her board book and animated rendition of the prayer “Blessed Is the Spot.” The awards recognize excellence in family-friendly media products and services.


Lisa Blecker Ms. Blecker is a regular contributing writer and illustrator for the Baha’i-inspired children’s magazine Brilliant Star. Her husband, C. Aaron Kreader, also works for the magazine and did the graphic design for Blessed Is the Spot.

“I chose Baha’u’llah’s “Blessed Is the Spot” because of its universal appeal. As long as the reader is open to God,” she says, it’s difficult to imagine who wouldn’t resonate with the simple but moving prayer:

“Blessed is the spot, and the house, and the place, and the city, and the heart, and the mountain, and the refuge, and the cave, and the valley, and the land, and the sea, and the island, and the meadow, where mention of God hath been made, and His praise glorified.”

Ms. Blecker’s whimsical, pastel illustrations turn the ordinary -- houses, hills, streets -- into the extraordinary. The DVD, which can be viewed on youtube.com, takes the viewer on a swift, swooping and soaring journey “that honors every place where God is praised,” Ms. Blecker says in an interview in the current issue of Entro, the magazine dedicated to the Mom’s Choice Awards.

Set to a chorus of children’s prayerful voices reciting the prayer, the DVD has us zooming down a path where a house rises up to meet us; watching a hill become a dreaming girl; and seeing a multicultural circle of hand-clasped friends transform into a nine-pointed star, a symbol used by members of the Baha'i Faith to represent unity.

The goal, in fact, of creating Blessed Is the Spot and future projects, Ms. Blecker says in the Entro interview, is to give children the tools to “internalize universal values that can empower them to make the world a better place and build a foundation for peace.”