The urge to create sacred spaces is universal and crosses over many beliefs
Maybe it’s the time of the year. At Walmart, the Day of the Dead merchandise smiles toothily—cheerful skeletons painted with roses and decked with jaunty top hats. When I see the Halloween décor, I think I should probably be doing some sort of Samhain thing. Isn’t that what good pagans do? At least dust off my chalice.
At one time I had a pretty good altar. A tool for each of the four elements. A nice slate roofing shingle to set candles and offerings on. A little box of salt. A plastic skull from a fish tank. Not exactly pagan, I guess, to keep a memento mori lying around.
Then I put the parts away and haven’t gotten them out since. I turned into the boring kind of pagan who reads the Symposium occasionally and kinda believes in fairies. Yet, I think, maybe I want to create an altar. Not for magic, just for…what? And why?
Searching for answers, I sought out some non-pagans rather deliberately, and found a pastor and a therapist.
I asked them, “Do you have an altar? How do you build an altar? What do you do with it?”
Pastor Jeff P. Crim of Ascension Lutheran Church tells me the urge to create sacred space is universal. Even before he was a church pastor, he says, he maintained an altar. He shows me into his study in the church, where two bookshelves are set aside for two very different kinds of devotion.
“When I’m being good,” he says disarmingly, “this is a place for my own prayer and devotional time in the morning—it grounds me and centers me.”
“Grounding?” I ask. It’s a word I’ve heard used in modern dance.
He explains: “This reminds me why I do what I do.”
Looking at his altar together, we examine a print of the face of Christ, an image of Mary and the infant Jesus, a portrayal of the Crucifixion with a baleful red moon waning in the background, a medallion with a candle and shell from his son Leo’s baptism, two candles, a censor (“incense is good for covering the smell of a blowout diaper”), a candle snuffer, a seal to imprint a religious motto into communion bread, and a plate featuring Martin Luther preaching, and an odd little statue, just a twig set into a wood base. The icons are Byzantine in style—austere, mannered and intense.
Pastor Crim collects items for various reasons. The Mary and child, the adult Jesus and the Crucifixion represent key elements in the Christian narrative. The style is highly stylized; there’s no attempt at realism.
Other items, such as the baptismal medallion and the Martin Luther plate, have personal significance, denoting important people in his life—his son’s birth and a gift from a friend. In fact, he has two altars, side by side. On the next bookshelf over, he has a collection of memorabilia devoted to baseball.
He invites me to examine five framed baseball cards, two balls, a statue and a bat— “all related to some incarnation of the Chattanooga Lookouts,” he explains. “It just goes to show there is nothing particularly unique about setting aside spaces in the places where we live our lives.”
In the sanctuary, we look at the congregation’s altar. Here, the elements are communal rather than personal, and some are merely the impedimenta of daily life in any work environment—a flashlight left out between projects, green drapery to signify the liturgical season of Pentecost, candles, a place for flowers, the minister’s thick copy of the Book of Worship, and a lace table runner covered with a plastic liner to defend against spills. Everything’s practical and well-handled.
While a personal altar is specific to its maker, Pastor Crim says, this space is filled with symbols with meaning to the church as a whole. If I go into other Lutheran churches, he adds, I’ll find similar items arranged in a similar fashion. And, he explains, the public altar is symbolically active in a way that his bookshelf of devotional items is not.
“This is a corporate and ritual space,” he says as we stand in the chapel. “Here, the congregation comes to worship together. My altar is not a ritual space. Even if a paten and chalice were there, they would be present as symbols of the Eucharist, not because I serve it there. Here, the altar is a place for the serving of communion.”
I leave our conversation pondering. The public-facing altar, apparently, consists of symbolic objects arranged to affirm similarity of thought, across locations and occasions. But it’s also active in some way—magickal, so to speak, or salient. Pastor Crim’s distinction between ritual and non-ritual altars intrigues me. Could a single individual create a ritual altar, too?
Apparently not, at least for Christians. Pastor Crim clarifies the relationship: “From a Christian point of view, our individual practice and our corporate practice are related. I look for symbols that relate to the things I experience in church that I carry into my own space. I look for one to reinforce the other. What do I want to carry from my public religion into my personal life? What is important in our group space? Ultimately it boils down to what speaks to me.”
Still full of questions, I visit a counselor who makes altars and teaches others to do so—art therapist Jas Milam, MAAT, owner of Daily Practice Altar Art.
Unlike the businesslike, work-in-progress look of the church on a weekday, Milam’s office/studio is filled with a Little Mermaid’s collection of objects—paintbrushes and a Magic 8 Ball and St. Joseph and rocks and a scarab and a fake skeleton and a glow-in-the-dark crucifix and a Hamsa and a dream catcher—yeah. There’s a lot.
But in the middle of it, Milam’s vision for altar-building is one of clarity. For her, the act of creating sacred items and sacred space seems equally important to the spiritual work done in front of the altar once it’s complete.
She describes a visual devotional object as a “yantra,” the correlative of a “mantra” people may chant while praying. Just like Pastor Crim standing in front of his Crucifixion scene, a seeker may gaze at a yantra or trace it with his or her finger. From thinking about yantra, Milam moved to the larger practice of creating and contemplating an entire altar space.
“I was raised Episcopalian,” she says. “I worship with all my senses.”But she doesn’t prescribe any one religion in her therapeutic practice. Instead, she uses the tools of art and altar-building in a way that is spiritually focused but religiously agnostic.
“You can fill in the blank with God, Jesus, Buddha or Johnny Cash,” she says. “I work with many who are recovering from religious abuse—they may have been shamed, harmed or punished in the name of being good Christians. They often become hippies or pagans. On that level of spirituality I am pretty fluid.”
In building her own altars—there are two big ones in her studio, one of which seems to be also a functional artists’ workstation—she says she is as “sacrilegious as I am religious.” She might include Elvis on a cross next to a serious icon, for instance.
When I ask her how a prospective altar-builder should arrange his or her space, she suggests familiarity rooted in one’s own family or cultural tradition, if possible. However, there’s no need to force things. Milam indicates that reality or science are fully acceptable objects of spiritual devotion.
“The components are necessary by tradition and culture,” she explains, adding that the most basic altar elements tend to be universal. “Most cultures include something like a candle, a feather, an iconic image, and a liquid of some kind, such as water or oil.”
Her references to culture remind me of Pastor Crim’s description of a working altar as communal space; however, as I listen to her speak, I get the sense that she pictures an altar’s real work as spiritual and highly personal.
For instance, there’s individual taste. Milam likes color. Her big studio altar space is arranged to correspond to the color wheel, red to violet. The bright colors are complemented by glittering gold; Milam often uses gold leaf on the meditative objects she creates.
What do people do as they create icons, populate their altars and worship there? Milam encourages them to find or make meaningful items that relate to their lives in some way. Even negative images—such as a representation of someone you’re letting go of—can be important.
The act of creation can be accompanied by another meditative act, such as reciting a sacred name or line of poetry. Repetition is also important. For a while, for instance, Milam was drawing a mandala every day as part of her spiritual practice. I recall Pastor Crim’s description meditating daily “when I’m being good,” and of his reference to grounding. The practice of creating altar objects, or tracing yantra visually or tactilely, can be an act of grounding.
Right now, Milam is creating triptychs, three-sided panels that support themselves to stand up, creating small, portable altars. To paint her triptychs, she’s invented abstract vocabulary of leaf-forms and dots and cross hatches, repeated in continuous variety, often edged with thick lines and traced with gold leaf.
Looking at these structures, I imagine a seeker could paint a triptych him- or herself—perhaps on three sides of a cut-away cardboard box—paint it, and set up an altar wherever it was needed. In fact, I’m thinking about trying. What will I do there? Trace the pattern with my fingertip, dance the pattern in front if the altar, and try to ground myself in values that are meaningful to me.
To create your own three-dimensional altar with Jas Milam, come to her Altar Art: Creating and Holding Sacred Space on Nov. 11 at 10 a.m. All materials will be provided. Register at jasmilam.com
Photo by Stephen Llorca