The inner altar

 Spiritual reflections. 

The inner altar. 

About the Golden Fleece and other religious and non-religious fetishes that distract us from God.

Today I have been saved and I want to share it with you. Once again, I was on the verge of straying from the truth, because there is only one truth and many lies.

In a simple and perfect world, the truth does not need many words, and what I would like to clarify in this reflection for the spiritual orientation of the soul can be summarized in a short sentence, for example:  Let your heart be the altar of your love for God.

But we do not live in a simple and perfect world, but in a confused world that we have made complicated thanks to personal interests that we call selfishness, like a ball of wool that gets tangled in our hands. Selfishness leads us away from the truth.

There are millions of religious altars in the world where people from all walks of life pray to their God. But there are also altars that are not religious and do not pursue a spiritual goal. Most people in the world no longer build external altars for God or for useless idols, but they have built an altar for themselves and their own lives, with which they are fully satisfied in a complex game of self-deception.

All these altars, whether dedicated to God or to selfishness, turn us away from the truth through our love, a love that becomes an attachment to our possessions and our ideas. The outer altars are, in a sense, traps for our souls. Today I was saved from falling into such a trap.

If you continue reading now, something may have resonated in you. You can return to the simple sentence of a simple world that you read a few moments ago and have already forgotten.

Let your heart be the only altar for your love for God.

If you read it again more carefully and understand it, or at least keep it in your heart, you won't need to read a word more of what I am about to write, because this noisy and complex world is a world of traders who offer miracle potions to the unwary, who cannot distinguish oratory from truth.

For those who want to delve a little deeper, let's start with a question: What is an altar?

An altar is a place where we venerate something that brings us luck and well-being, and where we make a sacrifice as a sign of an exchange that keeps our relationship with the revered object alive. An altar is a gateway to grace. We go to the altar to receive this grace from a power that is higher than ourselves.

So we all have an altar, because we all sacrifice something in order to get more of what we have given in return. In the world of finance, this is called investing. What is invested must bring us profits. This says that we are poor and want to be rich, to become richer. We seek abundance in what we worship and in what we invest or sacrifice, from which we receive a portion of our wealth. We hope that we will emerge as winners and leave the altar richer than when we entered it. At least that is the case with God, because God, the giver of life and the highest being, will always do more for us than we are able to do for him, namely... nothing!

The entire universe has emerged from God as its source; everything we have has been given to us by Him. What offerings can we make to Him and what altars can we build in his name that surpass those He has placed in the cosmos, by sowing it with countless planets and suns, each of which is an altar bearing His signature and name?

We cannot give him anything material, but we can give him something important and intangible that belongs to us and that God cannot give us: our love. Love is a force that each of us must awaken and shape within ourselves. It is our most precious possession, and as our most precious possession, we give it to the one with whom we want to unite in order to feel fullness and perfection.

But we should not be too hasty, because although love is the key, it is not wise to reveal too soon what it means for hearts that are still too cold. Love is warmth. Too much warmth for a piece of ice would break it instead of gradually melting it, and we don't want to break anyone's heart, but to awaken it so that it begins to beat.

We will continue to apply gentle warmth, hoping to melt the ice in our hearts and awaken them to true life.

The use of many words has an advantage: it can be fun, like an educational game in which a group of attentive children try to figure out the trick of the magician, who skillfully moves his hands in front of them. The truth is not imposed, it must be discovered.

I am neither a magician nor skilled, but I do what I can with words. Words give me great joy when they come together like birds and fly in formation. Well-formed words create well-formed feelings.

Let's move on; let's return to our altars and our love. What does love have to do with an altar? What do we project onto the altar if not our hopes and our devotion, which is love?

But don't think of a religious altar, think of your altar.

What is your altar? What do you worship in your life?

Stop, to think.
Yes, stop and think...

Have you thought about your love? Love is the key, but what is your love like? Is it a love that seeks advantage, gain, happiness? Or is it a love for the beloved object itself? What do you hope to receive in return for your love? Do you wish the other person happiness with your love? What or who do you direct your love towards every day?

I ask you all these questions and at the same time I ask myself these questions because I want to draw attention to love as the force that moves everything, but this force can be a creator of harmony or of conflict.

If we are talking about altars, why do we circle around the subject of love? An altar is the place where we lay our love as if it were a part of our lives. It truly is. That is why I speak of love as an offering, because when we love, we offer something of ourselves to the one we love. True love always involves sacrifice; it means that we become givers. When we offer this love to God, who is the great Giver, we are doing the most beautiful thing one can do in life. We give the only thing we have to God, who has given us everything else. And this act is not external, it is internal! The altar on which we offer our love is our heart. Do you understand now why I talk so much about love?

If I were to talk about all the false gods and all the altars, idols of all kinds, earthly and heavenly, a thousand years would not be enough to learn about the huge multitude of worshippers of illusions and deceptions in this world, let alone where it has led them. I just wonder why it is so complicated for us to renounce altars, from a cathedral to a sports car, that we worship, or another person.

Is our love so easily manipulated or is it so accommodating that it can't distinguish between truth and lies? Yes, it is, but we also love to appear before others and show off. Still others, who are more modest in their intentions to connect with something higher, have simply not yet looked inward.

To those who don't quite understand why we're talking about love when we should really be talking about altars, I ask the counter question: What do you believe in?

Because where I plant my beliefs, I want to build my life and hope that the ground will support me and bear good fruit. We all have ideas that we consider inviolable, the truth or even sacred, a totem of our convictions and our beliefs. That is where I have my altar, and if it is not love, then that is where I place my trust. All this to understand that our altars are diverse and form the central place of the temple of our religion. This religion can be science or capitalism, but it is always based on something external, something that I have not been able to experience within myself, but have accepted from others whom I gave the authority to tell me what to believe. It was simply easier.

Lest I go on too long and turn the simple into something so complex that we no longer remember the central issue, I would say to those who love and those who believe without love or with little love, think about whether you are entirely sure you are sacrificing truth and whether that truth of yours will give you lasting inner peace. The general level of anxiety tells me that you’re not.

If we now separate from the group surveyed on the subject of love and faith those who have or visit religious altars, we leave behind those who only worship gold and silver and move on to the central theme, namely the figure of the altar as a symbolic representation of the object of our worship.

This object is usually a deity, an idol of human imagination or the true God. It is a matter of faith and feelings. In the worship of the gods or the God in whom Muslims and Christians believe and who is called Allah or Jehovah-Christ, faith and love are linked.

If we now focus on the religious-spiritual, we also leave Buddhists and Hindus of all kinds, of whom there are many, behind us. Some have broken away from God and become mere philosophers, and the others do not even know him. God is too abstract and infinite for them to feel love for him. They prefer to cling to their local customs and traditions rather than to seek out the truth, which would be to look within themselves.

Let us look within ourselves and not believe that we are better than these brothers, who are victims of very clever impostors who know our weaknesses. They use theatricality and staging to gain our attention and our love.

But it makes no difference whether my altar is a colorful fairground wagon or a sad, unadorned chapel if I believe that only there God will listen to me.

Originally*, altars were simple, unadorned structures made of natural stone on which sacrificial offerings were made as a token of surrender of the goods that God had previously given us, as a partial and symbolic return, as a sign of appreciation and gratitude. No image was worshiped at an altar, nor was prayer offered to it. The believer's gaze was directed inward, to the Spirit of God in the soul, as the life force that animates it. The altar was a collective representation of the connection with God. But God is not interested in any of this. He cares even less about our altars of wood and gold. What He is interested in is our love, and that love cannot be improved or expressed by mundane religious acts or material sacrifices (donations to the church). These sacrifices are null and void in the eyes of God. God is love and wants only our love.

We have returned to love, because where our love for God is, there must also be our altar. And it is not difficult to guess now which is the place and which is the temple. Your body is your temple on earth and your heart is its altar. So make your body this temporary temple so that you can express your love for the One who gave you life here and keep that love alive in your heart.

I believe in God.

This morning I was thinking about the lack of spirituality in our lives, in my own life, and I was tempted to have an altar, even if only a small one, to show that the spiritual, my faith, is a part of it. I was fooling myself a little. I thought that I could show what I feel for God on a piece of furniture with a cross or a picture of Jesus Christ. I believe in God and I feel love for Jesus Christ. But setting up an altar in my house or visiting the altar in the church in my neighborhood will not make that love grow and become stronger, strong like an oak tree that resists the power of the world, which demands my love every day with promises and threats. The world is pure poison, and is becoming more and more toxic because those who rule here are. But to be safe from their poison, which wants to kill my soul, I don't need wood or gold or paint, but a heart on fire for God and his mercy, which I feel in everything around me and as his love in myself.

If in an instant all the temples on earth were to disappear, with all their colorful altars, God would not be troubled or saddened that we no longer have anywhere to pray to Him, as long as we keep our inner temple bright and clean. In our love for God and our brothers and sisters on Earth, we pray the best prayer possible, and I assure you that it is the only one that He and the Angels hear and keep in their hearts with joy and the hope that our love will grow stronger and one day shine like a midday sun.

Thank you, Jesus, for leading me another day along life's dark paths. I was on the verge of going astray again. All my praise and love goes to you, from the bottom of my soul. Amen.




* For an understanding of our origin on earth, I recommend reading The Government of God by Jakob Lorber.