Altarations #2

During a break in our meeting at San Alfonso Retreat House, a friend and I took a walk on the near-empty beach. On our return, we made our way to the retreat center off-path, walking towards a towering crucifix, its back facing the sea, in front of it a square stone altar covered in offerings from the ocean.

I love altars. They are the draw for me. Ocean as backdrop? I am worshipping. I placed my own recent find, a smooth white stone, among the treasures.

My friend held up two stones plucked from the altar. “Look, they’re stuck together.”

Had someone glued two beach stones together? Why? Should we be touching, moving, picking up things from the altar? Wasn’t that prayer tampering? Interfering with potential blessings? What is sacred, if not an altar?

“Everyone picks up things and moves them on this altar,” she assured me.

I looked protectively at my stone.

The first altars were rocks, trees, springs, sometimes a mound of earth, believed to be inhabited by gods or spirits. Offerings were laid on or near them in exchange for hoped-for divine intervention. Later, altars were bloodied by sacrifices, animal and human. Altars can metaphorically exalt people; they worship at the altar of (insert name of writer, actor, athlete, magnificent person). They can be plain and simple or adorned and elaborate, fixed or moveable, visible or secretly internal and always accessible.

The next day, I returned to the altar by the sea and somehow managed to find my offering among the rearranged stones, now formed in the shape of a cross. I took it back feeling both guilty and righteous. 

That stone will find its way to a windowsill or shelf at home or in my office with other rocks, crystals, feathers and whatnot, personal mini altars I seem forever in need of creating, having nearby. Altars, whether grand or small, signal a pause, a moment of grace, a sliver of renewal and transformation, a place to bring offerings, to wonder, wish, and yes, worship, if it suits. Before I left San Alfonso’s, I placed a different stone on the altar, one just as difficult to part with, a small act in a graced never-ending ritual of giving and receiving. There is no tampering with that.