Slow thinking in a fast world
(Also low-key Vegas travel trips.)
Occasionally I will get desperate texts from friends asking if they can introduce me to their friends who are in Vegas for conferences or shows, completely overwhelmed. Might I point them to a nice pool or coffee shop or vegan restaurant, anywhere off-Strip that is peaceful and serene? I always say yes, I’d love to help. For starters, forget about the pools. That would be like trying to read near the main stage at Coachella.
There is a secret spot on the Strip for reflection though. It’s intended for spiritual seekers but also accommodates those who may be introverts in need of respite, or people like me who crave time alone to think deeply and sit with complexity.
I want to say a little more about this because contemplation is marginalized in our culture. It’s not what we measure on standardized tests, and it isn’t the quick wit that plays well on social platforms. Categorically, we value speed and efficiency over depth and ambiguity, and we mark sharp, self-assured thinkers as leaders, so I’ve had to get a little protective of this cognitive style in myself. I’ve had to get intentional about nurturing it, too. Like slow food or fashion, this is in praise of slow thinking.
Guardian Angel Cathedral isn’t a marriage chapel like you might imagine. There are no Elvis impersonators, no limos, no margaritas: it’s the real-deal for devout Catholics, tourists and locals alike. It has a steeply pitched roof that extends almost to the ground, and inside, the space feels as giant as any casino, except it’s filled with history and story and ritual instead of slots and cards and perfume masking stale cigar smoke. Located on the north end of the Strip off of Cathedral Way, the Encore towers above it to the south, and Resorts World flashes mansion-sized advertisements for Zouk nightclub across the street. To the north is a janky shopping plaza with a hookah bar and a mini mart hocking souvenir t-shirts, shot glasses, and liquor. Vegas is a city that likes to make everything new: we prefer our history to be innuendo and nostalgia, not architecture, so even ugly anachronisms stand out. But this one is interesting and beautiful.
The cathedral is open daily to tourists, hospitality workers, or anyone who wants to sit in silence with their thoughts, no questions asked, amidst the creaks of doors, the shuffling and whispers of people in prayer, and the white noise of traffic outside.
I’m practiced at contemplation. You have to be, as a writer, spending time with your thoughts and language, whether in a coffee shop, or on a hike, or at a desk. I cherish my time alone, but not because I’m an introvert: that’s a clumsy default label describing one’s social orientation, when what I’m speaking of is a cognitive style. But this is tough to articulate. Usually I tell people I am a “systems thinker” and they get that. A friend recently said that I write philosophy. In a sense, yes, but that’s not exactly it either because slow thinking is nonlinear, resistant to definition. It’s meditative, but not meditation; augmentation, not argument. It’s more about deepening awareness, and striving for and resisting integration and connection at once.
My first time at the cathedral was as a writer. What I didn’t expect was the way the space would influence the quality and content of my thoughts, so I kept returning. I’m fascinated by the church’s architecture and origin, secular stories that feel sacred to remember, and they feel alive to me there.
The cathedral was built in 1963 to accommodate chefs, bartenders, and dealers on the Strip who wanted to attend Sunday mass after their Saturday night shifts. A food and beverage manager at the Sands and Desert Inn first approached the church about this, and for several years the ragtag congregation of hospitality staff met in a showroom of the Royal Hotel and Casino. Then philanthropists donated land and money to build a church proper. Typical Vegas, some of them had complicated business dealings and identities, including “Mr. Las Vegas” Moe Dalitz, who was a gangster, and a philanthropist, and Jewish.
The architect was Paul Revere Williams, “Architect to the Stars.” Williams grew up an orphan in California, his parents having succumbed to tuberculosis. He knew, from a young age, he wanted to be an architect and defied the odds to become one. (“Who has ever heard of a Black architect?” was what people said to him.) He built houses for the who’s who of Hollywood, including Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Many of his homes were in neighborhoods that forbade Black residents. In addition to the cathedral on the. Strip, he also designed another Catholic church, a residential community in a Black neighborhood on Vegas’ westside, and the lobby of the La Concha Inn, which is now the lobby of the Neon Museum. I think about Williams every time I open the Guardian Angel door, which I believe to be the original.
A few years ago, a colleague who is Catholic told me that he and his daughter would sometimes go to church together, that they find respite in the ritual. I was surprised by this but also felt a pang of longing in the moment, like I wanted that for myself. It was similar to how one might feel drawn to Maine or the Boreal Forest—an intuitive, visceral sensation, a yearning for a place you’ve never been yet somehow still miss.
The longing might have been connected to a profound experience I had in a church several years ago. In 2023, I visited the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana. The Whitney was a working plantation from 1752 to 1975, producing indigo, sugar, and rice, and now it’s a nonprofit that educates the public on the history and legacies of slavery in the U.S.
It was a hot, humid day in July when we toured the plantation, including the Big House, two slave cabins, and memorials dedicated to the people who were forced to live and work there. The tour takes about an hour and concludes in the Antioch Baptist Church. I sat in an old wooden pew in that church and processed what we had experienced. When my thoughts reached a crescendo of overwhelm, I silently pleaded—to myself, to any transcendent force in the universe—that history not repeat itself, or that when it did, I would find myself on the right side. Is it possible to transcend the thinking of our time and come to see how we fall short? It wasn’t lost on me that I was asking this in a building representing the very powers that have instigated and condoned evil acts for centuries.
I am not Catholic; I am not Baptist. I’ve never been either. I do believe this outsider identity affords me a degree of freedom in their houses of worship because I’m not reckoning with the entanglement of a personal past. And while I thrive in the identity of the outsider, I wish there were more places designed to sit with the self in context of the world: we’ve packed so many of our museums and monuments with facts and stories and dates, imploring us to remember and learn rather than wrestle or reconcile.
For now, the cathedral is my respite. Wayward tourists wander through with cameras on straps, but not as many as you might imagine. Most people come to participate in a private ritual. The Hispanic women who move with arthritis and cover their black hair with lace. The servers in restaurant t-shirts, silver-haired couples, and old men. I am a bit of an anomaly—the police officer assigned to guard the church thought I might be a movie star.
Several times I’ve had the entire sanctuary to myself. The first time this happened, I walked to the front where I hadn’t yet dared go, past the framed portrait of Pope Leo on an easel next to a wooden cross, past a tiered display of red candles (not actually candles but lightbulbs, which struck me as so fitting for Vegas), past the metal collection box anchored to the ground with a label that says “POOR,” and into a tiny room with just a few wooden pews and light streaming in through the stained glass windows. It’s curious how your thoughts change when you’re in a smaller room. Mine became more personal and intimate, and I began to speak them out loud like a confession to no one, and my tentative inquiry evolved into a quiet, spitting rage. I ranted over political realities and the wars of the world, the suffering and starvation of children, how democracies are falling apart, how we’re harming the planet, how we are cruel to people we don’t understand, immigrants and trans identities, and how. we are afraid and rigid and narrow-minded as individuals and societies.
This, it turns out, is addictive too. I’ve become aware of how much I’ve needed this, to rage, to sit with and within the contradictions in old systems we’ve built—systems filled with abuse and power, including the church but also education, and government, and philanthropy, how all of them disappoint us, cast us aside, and how they’re all filled with moral contradictions. That this is seemingly the human condition.
There’s something else about that room. There’s a mosaic tile mural of the Son of God flanked by angels ascending into heaven, so when you rant or pray in that space, you can’t help but make eye contact.
I see that the problem is us. The problem is us. Without cloaking it in the nomenclature of sin and redemption, a cosmology or any one tradition, I can see how we’ve arrived here. In those moments when the anger subsides, and I start to feel a peace sweep through me, I think about the conventional, earthly wisdom, sometimes attributed to Albert Einstein, but also seemingly now part of the public domain, that says you can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them. Then I know it’s time to go. Afterwards, I stop for a cup of coffee and to scribble notes at the Peppermill up the street. I sit at the bar between tourists, couples or girls on a friend trip, and we chat about what brought them to Vegas and what it’s like to live here. I recommend making this a part of your ritual, too.
“Essentially we’re all just stories. And those stories are not just maintained by individuals; they’re maintained by institutions. When we change the stories we tell ourselves, we can change institutions.”—Claudia Rankine
Usually I share images I took, but mine are nothing compared to the way Janna Ireland captured Guardian Angel in her documentation of Paul Williams’ work.
"I want to say a little more about this because contemplation is marginalized in our culture. It’s not what we measure on standardized tests, and it isn’t the quick wit that plays well on social platforms."
Love this post so much. I needed this moment in the cathedral with you. This permission and vote for contemplation. I used to open my lit classes with a lesson on contemplation so that students would understand that even in our fast-food-algorithmically-jacked-up world, thinking takes the same time it always did. It was comforting to find this homage to it on a Monday.