This week I'm starting something new: each week, I want to share a piece of my altar — the objects, art, and touchstones that surround me in the space where I live, pray, and work. First up: a mandala with roots in my sister's creativity and my grandmother's memory.

Greetings, friends.

I’ve had an inspiration to share, each week, something from my altar. My bedroom has become, in many ways, my sanctuary — my church. I record many videos from this chair where I do all of my Zoom gatherings, and I have a lot of different art and objects around me that I’ve collected. That is my altar. My workspace. Part of the nest, I guess I could say, that I’ve created to hold me in this work I’m doing right now of cultivating the Helen Keller Spiritual Life Collaborative, and of cultivating the life I’m called to live.

My suspicion is that we all create this. I wonder — if you’re in your room right now, or your space — if you look around, you might find a picture, or a painting, or an object that carries some kind of emotional charge. That carries some spiritual weight. I wonder if you sometimes think about your own life as a process of creating altars, of cultivating sacredness, in your own home, in the place where you live day to day.

I’ve always been conscious of this, but I think probably when I was working in churches — you know, sanctuaries built by communities to honor the sacred and to live into sacred work together — I didn’t think, maybe, as intentionally about my personal space. But now that my personal space is also where I’m cultivating church community and cultivating sacred experiences, I’m really aware of what has formed around me. And, interestingly, the way I care for it — and the way I neglect it.

Part of what motivates this series is: I just spent some time cleaning up here, and was noticing some of the neglect that had occurred. We had a pet that recently died, and had been sick for a while. There was some debris from all of that tumult. There was laundry I just couldn’t put away. It’s quite a thing when your sacred space is also your bedroom, because there’s a lot of other things that happen there that need to be taken care of.

But at the same time as I noticed all of that neglect, I realized — certainly there have been times in my church life where there has been neglect in the buildings that I have been caring for, that communities have been caring for. It seems like the reality is: when we have sacred space, it’s work. It’s work to maintain it, it’s work to care for it, and it has to be continually renewed. Life has to continually be put into it — life energy, to care for and maintain that which we honor and respect. And it’s useful to be sensitive to, aware of, those cycles.

"It seems like the reality is: when we have sacred space, it's work. It's work to maintain it, it's work to care for it, and it has to be continually renewed."

So I’ve become aware of those cycles in my personal space. I am certainly aware of those cycles in the life of the church — cycles when communities are really caring for their space and loving it, and then times when there’s just not enough resources, or care, or life energy to put into maintaining those spaces. All of this is a natural rhythm, and a rhythm we can learn from.

So, in my effort to make worship life and life worship, and my effort to look for the sacred in the day-to-day and the everyday, I feel really excited to honor the sacred space I’m creating, and hopefully inspire some of you who listen and follow along to look around your space and consider what you have placed there, and what that says about your spiritual life, and your calling, and your way of connecting to God.

I often have the sense that if we just stopped and noticed what was around us, that everything we need to hear from God would be present — is present. It just takes a tuning in, and attentiveness, and intention to look. So that will be my intention with this Altar Space series, and I hope you’ll enjoy seeing some of my altar, and I hope you might share some of yours.

So the first thing I want to share is this mandala that I created. You may recognize this — the dot paintings that are very popular now. You can find them at Michaels: you get a little kit with a bunch of little jewels, and you’re instructed on where to put them. My sister got very interested in this dot art — she’s one of my closest friends and confidants, if not the closest, and I’m often inspired by her ideas. So I got into it as well.

Creating this one felt particularly special because it’s a mandala, and my grandmother, Melissa, before she died in the last few years of her life, really enjoyed coloring mandalas — you know, you can buy those mandala coloring books. She enjoyed it so much that the basement walls in her house were just covered with these mandalas she had created. It was very soothing to her.

She had told me that earlier in life she’d made me a latch-hook rug that was like this beautiful sunburst — I’ll see if I can find a picture of it to share in this post — but it was a mandala shape, and she shared that this was her perception of what God looks like. She really saw the mandala as that Divine image, which of course many of this world’s spiritual traditions see — the sacredness in this mandala image, with all of its diversity and intricate uniqueness, but also shaped around a center point and then expressing outward. So resonant with this idea that we all come from the same source, but then burst off into all of our myriad differences.

So anyway, to have this mandala in my altar space — it reminds me of my sister, whom I love so much. It reminds me of my grandmother. I love that it’s dot art, and it connects me to that playful, childlike spirit of creating. It’s a beautiful mandala, and a recognition of the way the divine operates.

I also had a powerful experience my first year of undergraduate college, when I was at Wesleyan University. A group of monks visited and created a sand mandala in the student center. That was a hard year for me — I only ended up staying a year, and I dropped out, really, with deep existential angst about why I exist and what the purpose of life is. Watching those Buddhist monks in the student center diligently crafting this beautiful mandala — that they would then, of course, sweep away — the impermanence of it really had an effect on me. It was maybe a sacred touchstone in a very difficult time of my life, one that helped me stay tethered to this earth, and helped me connect to the Divine — something bigger than myself — at a time when I felt very alone, isolated, and afraid of life.

So that’s my first installment of this Altar Space series. Let me know if you’re enjoying it. Let me know if you notice something in your own space you’d like to share with me — I would so love to hear it. Let’s just see what unfolds over these next few weeks. I have a lot of things on my altar, so I’ll have a lot to share, and a lot of stories to tell. I look forward to telling them, so that you can know a little bit more about me and what I care about — and hopefully help you feel comfortable thinking about what you care about, and how you’re creating sacred space around you.

I hope you’re having a good summer. We’ll talk soon. Blessings.

Share images and stories from your altar in the comments!

I’d love to see what spaces you are creating❤️

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