Empower your Spiritual Path
What does it say about you reading an article about raising an altar?
Divine expression is worth time and energy, maybe? At some level, from whatever spiritual/religious background you come from, you’ve either decided you need that divine communication (whatever you believe that is) or you’re thinking about it. And why not?
An Altar reflects a belief with a mission and provides the structure, safety and strength for the journey. Again, regardless of your spiritual background an altar enables you to worship, pray, invoke and evoke. At your altar you can use faith and action to protect and bless your home, relationships and work. Of course, we seek healing in various forms at an altar.
An altar is a place to take a breath, have quiet, private time; maybe a chance to discover and develop goals and missions. Just setting up and maintaining an altar, just that action is cultivating sacred space that opens to more serious altar work:
For instance, commune with the Spirit side of life, be it the Holy Spirit, the Santos, the Buddhas or the Ancestors. That communication, which comes through consistency, leads to deeper and stronger ownership of your altar, giving you greater direction working with the energy of your altar.
And that – Energy and Communication – is what altars are all about, however before we get to that we have to talk about the authority, permission or license to raise and maintain an altar. If you don’t think you have a right to raise an altar, we need to talk.
Let’s get this out of the way quickly. The authority to have an altar or a fireplace is written on your heart, in your mind and is included with you soul.
You have the right, perhaps the obligation, to reach out to whatever you consider divinity. If you choose to follow paths set before you, you have the right; if you want to evolve your own spirituality, you have a right. It’s between you and Creator what happens between your birth and death.
A tricky issue – the authority to raise an altar – for many, no doubt. We want to get this kind of thing right, so some due diligence makes sense. If it might help you, we talk about a religious/spiritual reset in Five Toltec Principles . If you read it, pay particular attention to the Third Principle. It led us to depend on our own experience to make this decision, rather than the powers-that-be.
We’ve been working our altar 30 years, from spreading a bandanna with a few objects on it to maintaining a full room with all the elements of life represented. We worship, pray, love, learn, heal, get help, give help and from time to time, we make a little magic – a science, actually, we don’t understand yet.
Working with the energy and the matter of the altar, creating a sacred space and applying our time, we focus on creating a functional spirituality. To possibly give you some ideas for you doing the same, we’re preparing a couple of articles moving forward:
Start Simple – Prayer, Invocation and Evocation – Here we bring some concrete detail and suggestion with a little energy work. What goes on the altar and how do I use it? And,
Communication with Divinity – This begins the minute you put up a table for an altar, but the fine tuning requires a little more knowledge.
To give you an idea of where this is going…remember this science, or something like this, from High School science class?
“Energy and Matter can neither be created or destroyed; they can only change form.”
Our experience with that fact prompts us to reply, “So energy and matter are finite quantities, yes, but our ancestors remind us, the quantities of time and space are infinite.”
Again experience, the Third Toltec Principle, helped us see the possibilities in that. Our energy and material conditions can indeed change! And if we use time and space properly, we can create the change we seek.
Our altar, also known as fireplace, Indian Way, is composed of objects – matter – and we apply energy to these objects with prayer, proper use, placement, etc. Then we pour mind and spirit into our space and time.
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