"Beautiful Necessity"

March 2021

In this month in which we offer our Prayer to the Mystery of Creativity, I continue my contemplation of homo ritualis, ritual man and the explosion of human creativity that occurred about 30000 years ago. Revisiting the Chauvet Caves, and pondering all the ritual practices that spill out from the mysterious past measured in thousands of years, I am reminded of the first time I opened Kay Turner’s Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars. There, I discovered photo after photo of home altars, many of them lavishly enshrouded with flowing, vibrantly colored fabric, shelf layer upon shelf layer laden with not only a central divine image, but objects— seemingly hundreds of objects: “photos, candles, incense, ritual tools, potions, medicine bundles, shells, crystals, coins, mementos, knick-knacks, gifts, offerings, decorative effects, and even seemingly anomalous items, such as a jar of buttons or a door knob.”[i] At first glance, the sight of these altars was shocking given my modern decorating sensibilities inclining more toward “zen décor” and away from anything hinting of baroque excess. In the face of these waterfalls of material objects of contrasting color and shapes with all of their vibrant energies seeming to demand attention, my first thought was “How am I to find meaning in all of this?” I persisted in leafing through the book turning the pages again and again to look at the photos, until finally, I realized that I had overlooked, had “not seen” that in each of the photos, somewhere near each of these shrines, seated or standing, was a human being: a woman. Turning the pages once more, I took special note of one photo showing a woman standing near an elaborately “decorated” shrine with a broad smile and an upswept arm not so much as if pointing at the shrine but rather, as if introducing it. The caption reads:  “Petra Castorena’s flower-strewn altar dominates her small bedroom in Laredo, Texas. Gesturing broadly, she proclaimed, “This is mine—my altar.”[ii]

In that moment I experienced, perhaps even as artist John Robinson did, the first time he entered the Chauvet Cave, the wonder of the realization that a very real human being, in this case one named Petra Castorena, had intentionally collected and put each of these objects in place—and, that I am looking at an altar, a place of ritual in a woman’s bedroom, in a modest home in Laredo, Texas. The startling realization is that Petra Castorena, is linked to another human, one who placed a bear skull on a rock table, with devotion akin to hers, some 35000 years ago. This, then, has been my repeated insight: that every time I erect an altar in the world, I too am homo ritualis, in illo tempore. 

Barbara Brown Taylor, in Altars in the World, reminds us that many people are longing to “spend more time in the presence of [a] deeper reality, but when they visit the places where such knowledge is supposed to be found, they often find the rituals hollow.”[iii] Apparently not all altars are to be found in hallowed churches or temples. Where then? Well, certainly in a corner of Petra Castorena’s bedroom, in Laredo, Texas and a cave in the mountains of Southern France, and perhaps even, as Barbara Brown Taylor suggests, 

…in other ordinary-looking places where human beings have met and may continue to meet up with the divine More that they sometimes call God….Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it. So welcome to your own priesthood, practiced at the altar of your own life.[iv]

Kay Turner, in the first chapter of Beautiful Necessity, explains how the book got its title.  She relates that as a young graduate student, she and another young woman traveled extensively throughout South America studying pre-Columbian Mayan tribes. On one occasion, they found themselves without money and were befriended and offered aid from a Guatamalan woman who invited them to her home where she cooked and served them dinner. After the meal, the woman led them down the hall and invited them into a bedroom where, in the corner, sat the woman’s home altar covered with all sorts of objects—some religious and some seemingly ordinary—photos, newspaper clippings, flowers, dried and fresh—all forming a sight unlike anything that Turner had ever seen. Then, kneeling before it, the woman prayed for the two young American women. Turner was enraptured and overwhelmed and ventured to ask the woman why she had an altar and why she prayed before it. The woman simply replied, “It is a beautiful necessity.” 

Kay Turner went on to spend her whole life collecting photos and stories about real women and their faith made equally real at their home altars. She writes:

Unlike the altars in the church or temple which have a certain stability and rigidity framed by dogma, custom, and male exclusivity, women’s home altars are rarely set; instead, they expand and change—items are added or subtracted—following their maker’s personal and spiritual evolution. As artist Jan Gilbert finds, altars can be messy with the process of living: ‘My altar is a jumble as you can see, but it is a jumble of the process—every kind of lucky charm, everything decrepit—it’s all here. This is a source for me….I can’t go to an altar and kneel and pray, I move around it. I work in proximity to it. I look at it. I interact with it. I definitely appeal to it.’ The meaning of images on the altar is encountered, not fixed. Individual concerns mark each altar’s purpose and construction, visibly representing a woman’s own choices of what is to be wished for, remembered, loved and venerated.[v]

In these contemplations, I am brought full circle back to the Chauvet Caves and the wonder of homo ritualis, of human beings who for some 35,000 years have created altars: sacred settings for libations, prayer, offerings, adoration, petition and propitiation. As I am brought full circle, I still sit in wonderment trying to imagine the rituals that occurred before an altar laden with a bear skull and lit candles or those enacted before home altars overflowing with ordinary objects made special. And in wonderment, I still ask how it is that someone, so long ago would paint cave walls, create an altar and light fires upon it? I am brought full circle as well, again, to my six year old son’s question, “Why, every year,does Jesus die on a cross and we celebrate Easter, and then, every year he is born in a manger again and we have Christmas?” And, I am brought full circle to the wonderment of what is to be made of our peculiarly human ritual behavior exhibited in so many places and times. In these contemplations, I realize that what I take away is the wonder of the “phenomenological fact” that ritualization is just such a peculiarly human behavior that indeed, has been exhibited in so many places and across so many times. And this time round, I look at it all and to the question of “Why?” am able to reply, as did the Guatamalan woman, “It is a beautiful necessity.” 

[i] Kay Taylor, Beautiful Necessity, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999, p. 95.
[ii] Taylor, p. 35.
[iii] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, (New York:HarperOne, 2002), p. xvi.
[iv] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, p. xix.
[v] Turner, p. 36.