REST IN SACRED SPACES

We’re at the spa today.

It always makes me reevaluate the idea of something being ‘sacred’, or, a ‘sacred space’ - brimming as the place is with Romano-Greek-infused notions of rest.

The Graces are upstairs, locked in a sisterly embrace. There are sculptures of Hera and Hestia, offering fruit, and the walls are replete with painted nymphs carrying amphorae. For the Romans of course, the boundary line between sacred and restful was much more subtle: the spa and the temple were one.

Sacred really means just ‘set apart’ I believe. Some things are to be treated with such delicacy, such honour, that they’re deliberately kept away from everyday life - undiluted like the finest of wine or the purest waters. That’s perhaps the heart of what we’ve learned to call holiness - that calling to be apart from the everyday.

I find myself wondering whether we’ve all lost a little bit of that distinction. After all, we carry our phones everywhere - even to our ‘sacred spaces’ these days. These things (and, full disclosure, I’m using one right now) do have a terrible habit of opening portals to the underworld, despite also being rather useful. It’s a quandary for certain.

Anyway. We’ve rested and eaten, read, slept, and chatted. We’ve laid back under the artificial stars and gazed at the very real clouds in the outside area. We’ve closed our eyes too and let the slumbering ambience of the tepidarium engulf us - well I did. I snorted myself awake in there, embarrassingly. 

It’s all a good feeling - the art, perhaps the sacred art of rest. It’s not perhaps ‘worship’ as the Romans would have seen it, and it’s not traditional holiness in the way that the word ‘sacred’ implies it might be to our churchified way of thinking. But there are elements. Even God built rest into creation; a kind of hardwired necessity for all living, breathing, spiritual things.

You know what? That’s alright with me.