FRIDAY MORNING. A few minutes before 9. The windshield is rain-smeared. Traffic chaotic. I pull over and plug a parking meter.

I walk to the northeast corner of Seattle University and enter the chapel of St. Ignatius, an urban refuge. My multitasking senses are muted with each step. The silence is so thick; the light so diffuse that space seems to compress, as if the room is wrapping its arms around me.

I'm alone with my thoughts.

A young man comes in, the squeak of his wet soles against the bare floor ringing out with each step. He sits in the front pew and stares ahead, but I know he's looking within. I wonder what he sees. My eyes rove the austere, irregular walls and curved ceiling. My breathing slows.

I snap out of it with the appearance of a photo team, one of many that still travel here to take in the stunning light captured and refracted through Bremerton-born Steven Holl's architecture. At first, the photographers respect the praying man, but they get antsy, drawn to the pockets of exquisite light like moths with a deadline. Holl chose "a gathering of different lights" as his guiding concept because it relates to St. Ignatius' vision that a spiritual life encompasses gradations of light and dark.

They irk me, but soon become irrelevant. In marches a janitor, the thick cluster of his keys jangling against his hip as he strides. Work. That's right. I've got to go to work.

The reflection pool, just outside the massive front doors, gives me one last glimpse of calm. But it's raining and windy and the silence is gone, replaced by the whoosh of cars and the rumble of industry around the Capitol Hill district. I'm back in real time. Or was real time inside?

Now, where did I park?