Coffee and Cathedrals

You know, I came here with plans to work off another juicy Dorothy Sayers quote. I've been reading a lot of her lately. School starts next week for me, and she's a good author for kick-starting the brain - not an easy read, per se, but nowhere near the brain-scrambling certain ancient Greek philosophers give me.*

Then I sat down at a new booth in a new coffee place. It isn't just a coffee house; technically, it's a restaurant with a coffee bar and a big beautiful silver espresso machine**, with bags of coffee lining the shelves.*** There's lot of semi-finished honey-colored wood, setting off antiqued clap-board walls, and massive windows, a rack of upside-down wine glasses hanging in the corner. The menus are in simple fonts, the furnishings are cared-for and rustic, like you might find deep in your grandparents' house.

I came in here a little tense from not knowing the area and trusting the wisdom of the all-knowing Google Maps, feeling a bit achy and tired from recent weather swings and allergies, and just a smidgen worn from moving to a new place where I barely know a soul. I've been here for fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. There are three, maybe four other customers in here, with a couple infants to boot. Usually, I dislike being in near-empty restaurants. This is pleasant, sort of like bobbing along in a calm lake.

Places are important. So are people, but the way a space sits, what fills it, in what order it is filled, these things matter. Spaces can impact attitudes. Sometimes, it's a subtle effect. I firmly believe the impact of physical spaces and locations is perilously underrated. Another coffee place I've visited was one sizeable open room, with chairs and tables arranged in the middle of the room in a big rectangle. Everything was visible from everywhere, and it all felt very public. It created a distinctly different atmosphere than this place, which has some high booth walls set to create the feeling of a little privacy, not the paranoia someone was always looking over your shoulder to your laptop screen.

If nothing else, think of a cathedral. A beautiful, Romanesque or Gothic cathedral, tall, marble, reaching for the heavens. Now think of the last few church buildings you've visited.

I'm not saying we should abandon the average modern church building, or that there is necessarily anything wrong with those structures. I am saying the architecture matters, the space matters. Craftsmanship matters. Someone deliberated and loved and cared for this space. It is not a feeling I find often, and it is a balm to the soul when I stumble into it.


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*I'm looking at you, Plotinus.

**Which, I've just been informed, is Italian, was the first of its kind to make it to Dallas, and originally priced around $18,000.

***The same kind of coffee used in my coffee house of choice in Waco, coincidentally. It's the little things.