Laura Chester: I was finishing a novel called Kingdom Come down in southern Arizona on one of my holy spots, which is the San Raphael valley. It's like the last frontier, an open cattle range that's been undisturbed and is now protected. I was staying out on a small ranch there and the next door neighbor, who had come over to have dinner with me, had built a small temple. I thought it was so curious, and I said, "Why would you build your own little temple?" And Lori Mendez, who is a Mexican American woman, and her husband, Earl Niichel, said, "Well, you know, God is so good, we wanted to do something in return."
I was invited to visit. It was a little Rosicrucian temple and it just had such a special feeling about it. I had been in a monastery earlier that day, St. David's, and the contrast between a big public tourist attraction and this little pueblo-style private temple . . . we walked in, and the only light was from the skylight above the altar and you could smell rose incense. There was this incredible feeling of peacefulness in there. I just sat there and was taken in by this wonderful feeling.
I continued my journey down to Baja, where I met my son, Ayler, who was camping with his school class on the island of Espiritu Santo, which means holy spirit. I met up with him and we drove to Todos Santos, which means all saints. I met another woman there whose main home was in the Chiricahuas mountains of Arizona. At the time, I was in the process of converting to Catholicism and my friends had teased me about converting. She said, "Well, you know, I converted also. I even built my own chapel. I thought, "That is so strange, to meet two people in one week who have their own private chapel."
While I was in Todos Santos, I had a dream. I had been kind of upset with my son because he had taken a rental car and didn't come home when he was supposed to, and I prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is something I had never done before, but somehow, being down in Mexico, it gave me a feeling of peacefulness. I woke up the next morning with the title, Holy Personal . . . which also felt very much like a gift. It was the first step of this feeling that I was being directed to do this project. It wasn't necessarily something that just came from me, like most of my projects. This seemed, somehow, like a gift. So I carried that with me for a while. I went back to Massachusetts. It was Easter, and I did convert that Easter. Later, I opened an Easter paper and there was a big article on Michael Dowling in South Boston, who had created a root cellar chapel. It was at that point that I thought, "Well, this has gotta happen. I have to pursue this." So I went from there.

TMA: Then you went on and created your own sacred space.

LC: That's true. That same Easter day about four years ago when I decided that I had to do the book, I also decided with my husband that it would be wonderful if we could build a chapel together. He's not a Catholic; he doesn't go to church with me, but he was very much into the idea of building our own little chapel. Our chapel is only eight feet by 13 feet. We designed it together and he built it with the help of a mason and another friend. It really is a little jewel.

TMA: How did you come to make the trek across the country to the various places that you photographed and wrote about?

LC: At the point of deciding that I would go forward with the book, first I spoke to my good friend, Donna DeMari, who is a high-fashion photographer who travels all over the world, and I asked her, "Is this something that would appeal to you?" I really respected her art, and she and I are good traveling companions and friends. She was interested in working on it with me. So I said, "Well, you do all the visual part and I'll do all the arranging. I'll try and pull together different two-week trips, and I'll do the taping and transcribing of the interviews and then create chapters from that.

So then, I first called Michael Dowling, and he was interested. He even said that he doesn't return phone calls from most people, but he really liked the sound of this book. We went on and we interviewed the Stefanopoulos family who had a small Greek Orthodox chapel in New York state, and bit by bit . . .

The woman who had the chapel in the Chiricahuas, she said, "You have to meet this woman, Patsy Lowry, who is in Arizona. She has this straw bale chapel that is so beautiful." So I called her, and she told me, "Well, you have to go see Ra Paulette's Sandstone Cathedral" So I started thinking, "Let's put together a southwestern trip." I called Cornerstone in Santa Fe, where I am right now on this book tour, and Cornerstone gave me the name of a very well known santero, or saint carver, Ramon Lopez. I had a long talk with him, and he gave me the names of other saint carvers who ended up in the book. It was like this network. I started calling people in the northwest and they would know of something in the south. I just had to persist and make call after call and follow every lead until I felt like I had a good two-week trip. Then I had to plan how to visit all these people, and work into everybody's schedule. It was sort of a feat of planning, quite a challenge at times.

TMA: I see that many of the chapels are Christian and even Catholic looking, but many are not as well. Can you give us little thumbnail sketches of some of your favorites?

LC: One of my favorites is Patsy Lowry's in Elgin, Arizona. Her whole impetus is also very much akin to the Hopi and the Native American. A Catholic priest came and blessed the chapel in a ceremony. It's one instance of these small private chapels which often go beyond the strict norm. Her own spirituality is more expansive and brought everything into it. Her whole spirit kind of informed the way she decorated it. The chapels that moved me the most were like spiritual artworks, that connection with the art of people who could bring not only the artwork but things that meant something to them in their personal lives. In her case, it was built on Brophy Ranch. She had a lifelong friendship with the rancher Bill Brophy and his whole family and children who had died. Little shrines within the chapel honor the people in the family who had passed on. That was one of my favorites.

I think also the Sandstone Cathedral was so unique it was inspiring. Also, it was completely devoid of any icon, which was in direct contrast to Patsy Lowry's. His was absolutely pure form. It was this feeling of honoring the earth inside the protective, sacred inner space that he had carved out of the earth. Patsy Lowry told me about Priestess Miriam's voodoo temple in New Orleans. When she first brought this up I really veered away from it, feeling a sense of prejudice against including something like voodoo. I thought, "A lot of people who might pick up this book might be put off by that." Yet I wanted to examine my own prejudice concerning voodoo. When I met and spoke with Priestess Miriam, she completely transformed my prejudice. That was another amazing space, and she was an amazing person. I feel like I really captured her sensibility in that chapter.

Another one of the deep south chapels that was one of my very favorites was Hermon Dennis's chapel, the All Is Welcome Temple in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He's an old black, self-taught minister, and he turned a school bus into a chapel. His whole life story was so incredible and he was such an amazing person. He was like an outsider artist who brought in every little bit of junk and transformed it into this amazing artwork. He had an incredible story to tell.

I could go on and on. Dunston Morrissey, a Benedictine hermit in Sonoma who built the Wine Cask Chapel is a really inspired, deep thinker who influenced me. And Eulogio and Zoraida Ortega were a couple of my very favorites.

TMA: And there's a stupa, a Tibetan prayer tower, somewhere in the northwest?

LC: Yes, I became very good friends with Jerry Wennstrom who built it for his wife, Marilyn Strong, in Puget Sound, Washington. They're an amazing couple who have done so much dreamwork and Jungian psychology as well as offering different courses and spiritual guidance to people. He's also an artist. Curious how so many of these people are artists. Not everybody, but perhaps the ones that spoke the most to me. He's very much involved with the Native American experience and the Medicine Wheel. They had an inclusive kind of spirituality, not boxed in like "I'm whatever and everybody else is wrong in what they believe." It was more like, "We're wide open to anybody who wants to come here." That was more the attitude.

TMA: Do you feel like most of the people with these sacred spaces felt the same way?

LC: I wouldn't say all. The Greek Orthodox family is fairly strict Greek Orthodox, so in their case it was more in line with their beliefs. But even in the Scandinavian stavkirke in Wisconsin, the couple who designed and built that carved symbols from all the world religions over the doorway. That was more the attitude of most of most of the small chapels. In the Rosicrucian temple they also had little niches, one for Native American, one for Tibetan Buddhist, another Hindu . . . it was a very inclusive sensibility. Others would be non-denominational, like the C-Ranch Chapel which was a roadside chapel that was open for anyone to come in. It's a beautiful space to come into and worship in whatever way you want to.

The Moonlodge in northern New Mexico was built by a women's collective and their spirituality was also very inclusive. We happened to go there right after Yom Kippur, and there was a wonderful night of atonement, a night of singing and dancing and sharing. They said that they rotated their leadership. One person might want to sing gospel songs, one might want to do chanting and meditation, the next week they would study Stations of the Cross and the next they'd sing Jewish songs. The direction came from whatever the different members wanted to bring to the others.

TMA: I think you've compiled a really a great overview of what's going to be a much larger movement. I've been very encouraged by the global meditation movement and I believe it really is what brought about the end of the Cold War. Now what we need is the same sort of global consciousness directed towards healing the planet and reconnecting with the Mother. My thoughts along those lines are to help foster the creation of community sacred gardens. It dovetails nicely, I think, with what you have discovered and put into your book.

LC: I remember the Harmonic Convergence and that feeling of being part of people all over the world praying at that same moment and the power of that. I feel like it would be wonderful if there were more of that . . . if all over the world, people could pray for peace in certain areas, or for consciousness of healing the earth. Maybe the Internet will have an effect in organizing that. I created a website which is called www.laurachester.com, and hope that I can get people to connect.

It was like there were these golden strands connecting all these people all over the country, and now it feels like this intimate group of friends that I've developed. You can see how quickly you can go from being an individual to being connected with these other people who in turn are connected with so many people involved with spirituality. That could blossom out into a worldwide prayer impetus, whether it's meditation - I really don't see that much difference between meditation and prayer, it's just whatever you want to call it.

TMA: Directed consciousness.

LC: Right.

TMA: Is there anything else you'd like to say?

LC: Just that it was such a wonderful trip meeting all these people. To me that was the treat of working on this book: that there are always all these individuals and families to get introduced to, whether they're Jewish or German or Scandinavian or whether they're Episcopal or Catholic or revere the Mother Goddess or whether they're black or white, it just feels like it represents what's best about our country. The diversity and feeling of accepting and honoring that diversity. I hope that when people read it, they'll be able to join me on the pilgrimage that I took.

TMA: I think you've caught a wave that's going to be very, very big, You've caught it very early, and you've done a very nice job of it.