O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling. Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy; and I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God. (Psalm 43: 3-4)

Sacred space is any place that has been set apart. It is a place separated from the prosaic. It is a place dedicated to the profound.

Fernando and Gioia Lanzi have explained, "The Latin sanctus is the past participle of the Latin verb sancire, which means precisely to make something sak, that is, to bestow reality and validity on something, or to acknowledge the real existence of something... It follows that the root sak—and the words deriving from it in the Indo-European languages—refers to the foundation of what is real."

A sacred space helps us step away from the noises and illusions that can distract us from the real. A sacred space helps us engage the fundamental reality that is within us and without us.

Fernando and Gioia Lanzi are co-directors of the Centro Studi Per La Cultura Popolare in Bologna, Italy.