Creating Sacred Space: The Mary Altar

Excerpt from One Sure Thing: Creating Sacred Space–DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT

After my divorce, I moved into a tiny attic apartment which I loved. It was surrounded by tall trees and had tons of windows and skylights. When I first moved in the apartment appealed to me because of its light and airy quality and the green hue the leaves on the summer trees cast around.

Gradually the apartment began to work a deeper magic on me. I began to notice the season and the time of the day. In the morning I would wake up to a symphony of birds, rather than the radio station blaring bad news. I began to sit in a sunny corner of the living room and just take in the day, getting up early so I could sit and sip my tea undisturbed. And I would pray. Despite the peace of the morning in these early days my prayers tended most often to be what I would later come to think of as “begging" prayers. I would prostrate myself to the Divine and beg, “Please help me make it though the day” or I would petition piteously for various things to happen, for myself, my family, or my friends, urgently, as though the Divine may or may not be listening. It is not to say that these prayers were wrong; they were heartfelt and necessary at the time. But as time went on I realized that despite being directed towards the Divine, they were arising from a place of disentitlement. They came from a place of feeling small, unprotected, and unloved, in a giant indifferent universe. They came from a place of alienation, from a lack of recognition of my birthrights, as a human, as a woman, and as a child and friend of God/ess.

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Soon after I moved in I found the perfect spot for a small gaudy powder blue and gold statue of Mary that I had bought on a whim while on holiday in Argentina. I placed the statue in the middle of a small window alcove. On either side of it I carefully and symmetrically positioned two tea lights. I began to light them meditatively every evening to the sounds of Krishna Das, blowing them out and meticulously wiping the soot off the glass holders before I went to bed.

As time went on my little altar to Mary began to take on an unexpected and transformative role. It started with my son bringing in various objects he would gather on his two-year old expeditions around the neighborhood: a piece of gravel, a pinecone, a squashed bottle cap, a lost button. I would find these objects lying around the house, and not knowing what to do with them, I started placing them beside my statue of Mary, thinking to myself with an amused smile that they were “like” offerings.

As I would add daily to a steadily growing pile, I began to appreciate that these random objects around my gaudy statue, had an aesthetic appeal all their own. And then one day it struck me: these weren’t “like” offerings, they were in actual fact offerings! Over time they had somehow become so. This miniscule debris or flotsam, was a summary of my little son’s daily activity–as though he were a fisherman, they represented his catch for the day, his daily treasures. And no matter how insignificant or commonplace they looked to me or anyone else, I knew Mary appreciated them. That’s when I began to add my own offerings to the Mary statue; perhaps a bill waiting for a stamp, or a realtor’s card on one day, a rose petal on another day. I stopped trying to wait for something suitably “pretty” to come along, and just offered up anything I had that day; whatever that day had given me, whatever I had been able to harvest. This ritual act somehow enabled me to find moments of peace within myself, a peace that came from bridging the sacred and the mundane.

Each time I offered up a bill to Mary, I would be nudged –just a little– to believe that the bill would get paid on time, that the finances would be fine. As I offered up a realtor’s card, I would feel soothed at the fact that that might be the only thing that particular day had produced; I stopped judging myself for it because I sensed Mary Herself was not judging me. I may not have written a profound poem that day, or gotten around to making crème caramel; I may have handled a power struggle with my child poorly–all the day had aparantly yielded was this measly realtor’s card…but that was really truly OK. The Mother graciously accepted it and kept smiling; She loved me anyway, and tomorrow promised the blessing of a new day, with new opportunities to go harvesting.

What I was cultivating was a deeper faith that every little act of the day is meaningful, though I may not have the eyes to see it. What I was cultivating was a connection with the Holy Mother without and within me–the one who is able to do what women have naturally done for centuries: create sacred spaces out of the seemingly prosaic. And more than that: I was cultivating the recognition that I myself, that my very body, my daily life and struggles are a scared space, though seemingly prosaic. I was developing the “eyes to see and the ears to hear.” I was moving from “begging” prayers to “showing up” prayers; prayers that went simply: “Holy Mother, here I am. I am listening.”