By Mary Otto
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page C01

On Faith appears the first Sunday of each month.

On a secondhand table in his Capitol Heights apartment, Bill Janey keeps three worn Bibles, a vial of oil, a few photographs of friends, a tiny candle and a box containing a prayer list. Janey, a Pentecostalist, said he thinks of this spot as the bottom rung of his ladder to God.

Meggie Byrne meditates in the basement of her Colonial in Bethesda, in a rec room turned prayer room. Her shrine is a table draped in fabric and dominated by a burnished statue of Buddha and seven bowls, which she fills with water every morning as a reminder of Buddhism's most profound teachings.

At her home in Howard County, Maria de Fatima Cruz de Lacerda displays a statue of a white-robed Lady of Fatima, her patron saint, near her bed. But she performs her daily devotions at a bedroom table filled with figures of female deities drawn from Buddhism, Hinduism and other faiths.

The three Washington area residents follow different spiritual paths, but they share a deep belief in maintaining a home altar. A tradition in ancient cultures, the home altar has flourished in recent years among Americans who find that it powerfully expresses their intensely personal spirituality, religion scholars said.

Some home shrines are designed and maintained in accordance with formal religious guidelines. But many others are eclectic, highly individualized collections of objects. John McGuckin, an Orthodox priest and professor of early church history at Union Theological Seminary in New York, said he has seen altars that combine figures of saints with running shoes and photos of boyfriends.

In rural parts of medieval Europe, home altars were kept by Christians who could not easily travel to church for communal worship, McGuckin noted. But in modern times, the altars' popularity has less to do with physical distance than with the spiritual gulf that separates many people from organized religion, he said.

"Today it's not so much that they can't walk to church. There are intellectual problems," he said. "They've retreated back to their little village. It might be a 14th-floor apartment, but it's their own little village."

Lacerda, 52, who was born in Brazil and raised Catholic, no longer attends church. The altar she has built in her bedroom symbolizes an amalgam of personal beliefs and experiences that have brought her closer to God, and it provides her with a more intimate and meaningful form of worship than any religious institution could offer, she said.

"Organized religion . . . gives you the recipe for God, but it overlooks the kitchen and the tools, the onions and the garlic," she said.

In addition to her pantheon of divine females, Lacerda's altar includes candles, incense and a bowl of sand lined with dimes. The sand is from Hawaii and was consecrated by a Native American spiritual leader, she said. As for the dimes, she calls them "my 10-cent miracles" -- coins that fate has dropped in her path at key moments since she immigrated to the United States as a teenager. One of them washed up on a beach at her feet while she was praying.

Sometimes she adds flowers, a rock or a feather to her altar.

"God can be a very personal aspect of who you are every moment," said Lacerda, who lives near Ellicott City. "An altar is a response to that."

By contrast, altars in churches are impersonal, she said: "The altar is for the priests. It's not for you."

Peter Kowalzik, whose online business, Sacred Source, sells devotional items, said he has had a steady increase in interest in home altars, and the Web site features photos of dozens of altars that customers have set up.

The store carries more than 500 "multicultural Goddess statues and sacred images," according to the Web site, and is organized by religion, with a menu that includes links to "Gnostic," "Norse" and "Wiccan and Pagan," among other categories.

"A lot of your pantheist customers -- Wiccans and Pagans -- are centered around the Celtic Wheel of the Year," Kowalzik said, and they change their home altar according to the season.

Nancy Brady Cunningham, author of "A Book of Women's Altars," one of several books about altar-making, gives lectures and consultations on the subject. Cunningham said the impulse to create an altar is not so different from a sports fan's desire to arrange posters and memorabilia of a favorite player or team in a certain way, or an office worker's need to put an inspiring photo and fresh flowers in her cubicle.

McGuckin said he worries that many of the people designing their own altars and rituals are "inventing it as they go," and he argued that training and guidance from an expert are essential to anyone's spiritual practice.

"Where you draw the line between magic and superstition on one hand and prayer and worship on the other has been a concern of Christians for a long time," he noted.

But some of those building home altars are returning to an old tradition rather than forging a new path.

Mexicans, for example, have been setting up home altars for centuries. The Mexicans living in territory annexed by the United States continued to do so in the mid-19th century even though the English-speaking Catholic Church discouraged the practice. These altars were usually kept by the woman of the house and often included photos of dead relatives and a statue of the family's patron saint.

By the 1950s, some Mexican Americans had abandoned their home altars, and others had taken out some of the most familiar icons -- replacing the Virgin of Guadalupe, for example, with a more European depiction of the Virgin favored by the church hierarchy.

Now a young generation of Mexican Americans, with the support of church leaders, has revived the more traditional home altars, said Lara Medina, who teaches at California State University at Northridge. Moreover, she added, Chicano artists have embraced altar-making as an art form, which has raised the tradition's profile among Americans from other ethnic and religious backgrounds who see the work in museums, books and art galleries.

Buddhist home shrines are another old tradition. Buddhists believe that meditation and the placement of offerings at home shrines are important in bringing the religion's compassionate teachings into one's daily life.

Byrne, a physician who was raised Catholic and later converted to Buddhism, said the shrine in her basement in Bethesda serves as a daily reminder of her spiritual direction. It also is used by the small group of Kadampa Buddhists that Byrne leads in weekly meditation sessions.

"Buddha does not need water bowls," Byrne said, referring to the seven bowls that she fills each morning. But by placing such offerings at the altar, "you are learning to give," she said, and "by giving, we are letting go of our preoccupations about ourselves."

A Buddhist shrine typically includes a Buddha statue, candles, an incense burner, an altar cloth and offerings such as flowers or food. But personal variations are not uncommon.

Dhondup Dighng, 33, a vendor at Eastern Market and the son of Tibetan refugees, has an altar at his downtown Washington apartment that includes a small model of the World Trade Center. Dighng explained that he lived in New York at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and put the model on his altar so he would remember the victims in his daily prayers.

Dighng begins each day by bringing the Buddha a cup of hot buttered tea, in keeping with his Tibetan heritage. He apologized to a visitor for the artificial orchids on his altar. He used to buy fresh flowers but realized he could not afford the $10 cost, as much as he makes in two hours of work, he said.

Janey, 40, said he worships at the altar in his Capitol Heights apartment every morning at 2:30, awakened by the spirit that calls on him to pray.

Raised a Catholic in Bowie, he left the church as a teenager but rediscovered his need for religion 18 years ago. He found a new religious life in Pentecostalism, and members of one church taught him to keep an altar at home and pray there daily.

Janey still attends church regularly. But lighting the tiny candle on his home altar creates a more intimate atmosphere in which to speak with God, he said. Sometimes he weeps at the altar, and sometimes he prays in tongues, feeling he is in direct contact with God.

"That's what the altar is for," he said. "That intimacy that allows you to go beyond the veil."

By creating an altar, he said, "you are creating holy ground."