Sacred space hidden in plain sight
Emanuel Swedenborg was the 18th-century rationalist who believed in angels. At 53, he had a series of spiritual encounters that led to his most famous work, Heaven and Hell, in which he described angels this way: “They have faces, eyes, ears, chests, arms, hands, and feet. They see each other, hear each other, and talk to each other. In short, they lack nothing that belongs to humans except that they are not clothed with a material body.”
Swedenborg was a scientist and inventor as well as a psychic and Christian mystic, and influenced the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Blake, Carl Jung, and Helen Keller. Swedenborg was never interested in founding a church, but after his death, in 1772, reading groups devoted to his work sprang up and spread to America, where several churches were built in the 1800s.
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Address 2107 Lyon Street, San Francisco, CA, 94115, www.sfswedenborgian.org, +1 415.346.6466 | Public Transport Bus: 1 (California St & Baker St stop) | Hours Daily 9am–5pm; Sun service at 11am| Tip The nearby historic Clay Theater (2261 Fillmore Street), one of the oldest single-screen, Art Deco theaters in San Francisco, shows mostly foreign releases and art-house films, along with a monthly midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
In 1895, a Swedenborgian church was constructed in San Francisco in the heart of Pacific Heights. The great American poet Robert Frost regularly attended the Swedenborgian Church Sunday School as a youth. “I know San Francisco like my own face,” Frost said late in his life. “It’s where I came from, the first place I really knew. You always know where you come from, don’t you?”
The church, surrounded by a high wall, has the most lovely garden, which includes various trees chosen for their symbolic value: a redwood tree, an olive tree, a Japanese maple, a Lebanese cedar, an Irish yew. It all has less the look of a church than perhaps a meditation center or urban monastery. It’s one of the earliest examples of the Arts and Crafts movement in San Francisco. The architect was A. Page Brown; the draftsman, Bernard Maybeck. The design was influenced by painter William Keith, who did several of the murals inside, and the naturalist John Muir. The roof is made from reddish madrones from the Santa Cruz mountains. The gate is usually open to view the garden.
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