The bustle of holiday pressures comes to a peaceful lull inside the glass walls of the Menil Collection's Byzantine Fresco Chapel, a dreamy place to ponder grace this Thanksgiving weekend.

The frosted glass chapel, hidden inside an unglamorous blocky building in the Houston museum district, guards a piece of history shaped by thievery and mercy. At the center and most heavenward part of the structure, rests the only intact Byzantine fresco of this size and importance this side of the world. The 13th-century artifact portrays a sad, but redemptive Christ, Virgin Mary and archangels gazing downward at humankind. The piece seems to float in the heart of the chapel blanketed by a circular cloud of glass.

Years ago, it was nowhere near its illustrious state. The fresco was seized by thieves in the 1980s, smashed into pieces and smuggled out of Turkish-occupied Cyprus to be sold off piece by piece. The fresco pieces were later rescued by the Church of Cyprus, Dominique de Menil, a namesake for the Menil Collection, and put through a two-year restoration.

This weekend, whisper a few prayers beneath Christ and his angels, or rest in the beauty built to enchant visitors into a new spiritual realm.

If the chapel doesn't fit your religious preference, take a short stroll on the Menil Campus to the Rothko Chapel, a crossroads of faiths and ideas. The temple, built in 1971, hops with spiritual ceremonies weekly and fills with meditative souls of all backgrounds daily.

Inside, giant abstract ebony paintings by Russian-born American painter Mark Rothkocreate a sense of emptiness, quiet the senses and engage the spirit. Round, black cushions make it homely for mediators, solid pew-like benches ideal for sitting, praying or staring upward at the oculus in the center of the ceiling. The place is a powerfully blank canvas for any spiritual path to find stillness and God, whomever or whatever it may be to you.