Little Altars All the Time

I am, when not lamenting the sad loss of the Church of England to the Eurosceptic luddite crowd*, also a believer in Religious Science.(One can believe in Religious Science AND ALSO keep one's other religion, if one has one.) Religious Science is also called New Thought; basically, it was the spiritual playground of, among other great thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, beloved mainstream poets of yore. The precepts of Religious Science were codified in the 20th century by a man named Ernest Holmes, who wrote the book Science of Mind about how to actually do the metaphysics described by Emerson and Thoreau.

It works. I know it works, because my friend Deb, a Religious Science minister, did magical affirmative prayers for me about 15 years ago. Aside from that, I've lived by it for about 35 years now, and find that it fills me spiritually and also has practical dimensions. In short, affirmative prayer actually works. You don't need a minister to do affirmative prayer, and I did it alone for decades. But the more thought energy going outward in affirmation, the better.

Still, despite dabbling in New Thought all this time, and having several friends, in fact, who are Religious Science ministers, I have never set up a home altar.

Why would you, you might well ask. Religious Science doesn't demand veneration in, say, the Roman Catholic Church sense. It is mostly based on affirmative prayer. And affirmative prayer needs no incense nor coins into the little box in front of the candle stand. Just belief, mental energy.

Answer: Because this--

Little Altars for cosmic energy

When you contemplate in front of an altar, you can shift your energy more easily because it creates a space for it in your home and your life. 

Let's say you're upset about a political situation. You can chew it over until your mental gullet hurts, or you can sit in front of a seasonal altar and bring yourself back to...yourself.  Your real self, the one that loves and laughs, not the one that obsesses and despairs. 

My friend Deb sets up seasonal altars in her home, which are both fun to do (she's an artist as well, and her mantra has something to do with art supplies) and a place to shift her mental direction when the world overwhelms. 

Basics of affirmative prayer for change

Anyone can set up and use little altars because energy really is not earthbound like your body and can travel out from you to anywhere. By using spiritual energy that YOU create, you can change your world...and maybe ours, so be careful and loving when you do it, please. Rules of thumb: 

• When using your energy for yourself, end with "this (your desire) or better." Always let the energy deliver more than you want!
• When using energy for others (but please ask permission first as spiritual energy is potent) or for the world at large, always stick to "best possible result for all concerned." You might THINK you know what's best for everyone, but clearly, you don't, or you'd be king or queen of the Earth by now, right? But you can certainly deliver useful open-ended energy to the earth and its inhabitants.

Now you know that spiritual demand is fulfilled from inside yourself, let's tackle the fun part, the altar.

Art supplies=spiritual exercise

Here are some photos from Deb's recent Spring/Easter altar.

Deb's kitchen altar, using kitcheny things--a pitcher, a greetings card, an egg, and a wreath. Wreaths are not just for Christmas; they are a universal spiritual symbol of wholeness and completion.

Deb reuses her basic pine-cone wreath for each season or holiday. This one, for spring/Easter 2019, featured Peeps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I mentioned, I have never set up an altar. The closest I have come is getting a house for Bridget. Bridget is a little pewter sculpture of a fairy that I bought at the shop at Medieval Times in Maryland about a dozen years ago. I had no intention of having a household goddess, but my stepdaughter said one day that our huge corkscrew willow tree looked like a magic tree. There was a lovely knee in which I often set a pot of flowers; it occurred to me that I could also set a household goddess there. We bought her a little "house"--really an outdoor lantern--and there she lived until we moved to the UK; she came with us, of course.

Bridget in her house with sea stones around her and a sea glass necklace, all appropriate since she watches over our house in Cornwall.
The photo at the top was Bridget's first house in our corkscrew willow tree.

 

 

 

Bridget is, I guess, a household god, what the Romans called lares and penates. We don't contemplate in front of her, though we might. But we do ensure that, every season, she receives a number of gifts appropriate to the season. For spring/Easter, she usually gets a lovely flower, but it might also be a chocolate bunny. This year she got a little mechanical bunny.

Although Bridget has done a superb job of sanctifying our house whether in the US, the UK or France, it would be unfair to load her with every random worry that crosses my mind. So I think it's time; I'll have to find an altar space and begin to use it. 

Maybe it will even work to decrease the rains brought by St. Swithin each July 15 for 40 days, IF it is raining on July 15. Since that's the UK's rainy season, it usually is raining. Bummer. Summer screwed! This year, I think I shall set up an altar to summer, contemplate sun and see if I can mitigate the Swithin downpours. 

Couldn't hurt.

 Copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride





* Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England, recently said that he wished the UK would leave the European Union, a move that will increase poverty across the nation, endanger peace in Northern Ireland, prevent the UK from accessing universities abroad for its students (and vice versa) and send many immigrants who do not meet stringent criteria back to the war-torn nations they were trying to escape. The concept of Brexit is selfish and hostile at its core, and is no concept for a high-ranking churchman of any religion to hold.

Torapuk, another name for Brexit

Actor/artist Jim Carrey's Trump-trolling works

Being in the resistance is an art. All those innocent British and French young people who were trained to work under Nazi noses, blowing up bridges, funneling troop movement information to the Allies--they were heroes, and they got a paycheck. Sometimes they got death, either heroically in action or horribly at the hands of the SS.

But it was an art, and they had to be good at it to get the reward; life.

Other forms of resistance to evil have been around both before and after WWII. Indeed, at this moment, the US and the UK--two nations that fought side by side against the Nazis, and won--are engaged in a very similar resistance operation, although the field of engagement is far different.

Back then, it was the fields of France, mainly.

Now, it is cyberspace and the few print media left (which are mainly fascist) and the big pots of money to buy advertising to promote falsehoods; i.e., 350 million quid a week for the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK or Make America Great Again (MAGA) by putting little brown children in cages in the US.

So, reluctantly, I have become an active member of the resistance.  I live in the UK now, having found the US too vicious for me a dozen years ago and having also moved to the UK as soon after that as I could;  I am mostly concerned with derailing the fascist-inspired, Putin-supported, self-harming so-called Brexit.

Brexit, shorthand for Britain exiting from EU membership, ought to be replaced by a more accurate term: Torapuk, short for Tories Raping the UK--for their own further enrichment, of course. (Pronounced Tor-ah-puke.)

They've been doing it since they were elected and had to share the spotlight with second-place LibDems. Cunning and evil, they managed to blame their depredations of the population on the LibDems, convincing the voters that the LibDems are somehow to blame for the continuing austerity in the UK. 

Austerity? In what was the fifth richest world nation? Stupid, huh? Stupid it was for us to allow them to get away with it. What they meant was they had to outsource government functions (health care, public utilities, work-readiness assessments, various hospital functions) so they could reap dividends from the companies contracted to replace the government departments and in which they had a financial interest. Not so unlike Donald Trump selling off America for his own empty--recall, he has NEVER had a successful business until now, American Trumpism Inc.--pockets.

Brexit is beautiful in that regard. The Tories--with their flunkies the Brexiters and DUP, Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, which still thinks this is 1840 or so and they are the true rulers of Ireland--convinced a great many UK voters that the European Union (EU) was responsible for their descending incomes, difficulties with health care, inadequate schooling...despite the fact that, in truly impoverished places like Cornwall, only EU grants had kept the wolf from the door for decades. 

At one point, some witless fool had scribbled Brexit memes all over a sign giving the enormous amount of funding for the industrial estate it stood in front of, an industrial estate that provides jobs that Cornwall would not otherwise have had. And believe me, a county that is torn between second-homers using services and not paying taxes for them (second homes are exempt from most taxation) and a dying fishing industry (what have you done for it, Sheryll Murray, the fisherman's false friend?) needs all the help it can get.

And yet, it voted to leave the EU, to regain sovereignty (huh? did the Queen retire without heirs? I didn't know....) and so they wouldn't have to spend a few cents per person on EU dues in return for many times that amount in infrastructure investment in Cornwall by the EU. For god's sake, people, your sickening, stodgy if historic pasty--a food made to carry down into the tin mines of yore--would not have achieved world heritage status without the EU. Does that make a difference? Of course it does; visitors actually pay for the tasteless, greasy, doughy things because of that, increasing Cornish income by a bit. 

So, Torapuke is ridiculous, and yet, it lives on and on, like the last mosquito of summer, apparently immune to sprays and swatters and your imprecations for the fucking insect to get the hell out of your house and leave you in peace.

And so, I have become a member of the Resistance. I don't think I'll get shot, despite my using Twitter to tell fascist oligarch wanker Jacob Rees-Mogg how despicable he is several times a week, or positing that Tyrant Tess, the Perfidious Prime Minister has dementia.

I'm not quite sure how to use visual art for protest, despite being, by now, an old hand at verbal protest. I also make donations to protest organizations. But art...

Jim Carrey, whom I don't like as an actor but do like as an artist, has found a way. Maybe I'll emulate him. Maybe my planned series of animals in hats will actually turn out to be politicians as the animals they resemble. Many cartoonists have portrayed May as a rather weedy and sickly vulture, and that's right on target. But few have done Boris Johnson (pig? easy) or Michael Gove (help me out here; he's too wimpy for any sort of animal....)  

Well, that's the gist of it.  I have to turn my drawing as well as my writing to this project. Not what I had in mind for my last couple of decades on earth. Sigh. But then, we don't always choose our path; sometimes, it chooses us.

Copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride