Quick! What did Johnny Appleseed, Helen Keller, and Jorge Luis Borges have in common? Haste! Where in the City of St. Francis do the shadows of Robert Frost, William Keith, and Bernard Maybeck stroll in the same, small space?

And the answers are: a passion for Emanuel Swedenborg; at the corner of Lyon and Washington Streets in the Swedenborgian Church.

What? Who? Where?

The baptismal font in which Robert Frost was baptized

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a modest man who had little to be modest about. This “mountain peak of mentality,” as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle christened him, born in Stockholm, mastered nearly all the sciences of his day: mathematics, geology, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, astronomy, and anatomy. His spare time he devoted to bookbinding, clock-making, and engraving. He designed a machine gun and marketed a fire extinguisher. Oh, yes, he played the organ and spoke nine languages, too.

During the last twenty-seven years of his life, Swedenborg devoted himself to the study of religion and the search for its truth. Several years after his death, poet William Blake and more than ninety other seekers gathered in the Chapel of the Great East Cheap in London to form a Swedenborgian Church, aka the Church of the New Jerusalem.

It was in 1867, probably on an auspicious spring morning, that the Reverend Joseph Worcester debarked in San Francisco bearing a distinguished heritage. His father had founded the Swedenborgian Church in Boston.

Fast forward to March 17, 1895, when today’s church was dedicated. It celebrated its centenary on March 19, 1995, and became a National Historical Landmark in 2006.

The Swedenborgian hides out at 2107 Lyon, behind walls of textured gray concrete that shelter its garden from the street. No trumpet blasts announce the entrance; no chorus of Corinthian columns. A subtle portico invites you to turn left into the garden where Swedenborg’s beliefs in the joining of mind and spirit to nature are evidenced in blossoms at the feet of sky-stretching trees: a cedar of Lebanon, two rough-barked redwoods, a stately Irish yew.

From the garden, one steps into the sanctuary, styled by Worcester “the poetry of architecture.” It is a distillation of the American Arts & Crafts movement: natural simplicity, sense and sensibility, a rejection of Oscar Wilde’s notion that nothing succeeds like excess.

Worcester gathered a coterie of creators around him: his first western friend John Muir; architect A. Page Brown (who went on to bigger things, like the Ferry Building); draftsman Bernard Maybeck (of the Palace of Fine Arts); Willis Polk; Julia Morgan; Frederick Law Olmstead; painter William Keith—all that crowd. Perhaps no place in San Francisco reveals as much talent per square foot as does this small space, as intimate as a living room.

(Flashback: the architectural magic had begun in 1876 in the East Bay hills of Piedmont where Worcester designed and built his dream home, a shingled bungalow with unpainted redwood interior that Maybeck called “a revelation.” Jack London wrote The Call of the Wild there.)

As you enter the shaded interior out of full sun, your eyes will be drawn first to a round stained-glass window above the chancel where a dove in a garden scene quenches its thirst from a fountain. The designer was Bruce Porter, he of the gardens at Filoli estate in Woodside, among other wonders.

Below the window, a gnarly Sierra cypress signifies the persistence of life over hardship, and six large stones represent the six long-term ministers who have watched over the church.

The Swedenborgian gardens with entry to the sanctuary at left

Arching above the nave, eight madrone tree trunks, weather-twisted and still dressed in bark, support the ceiling: one might have stepped into the glen where Worcester found them in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1894.

All you see and contemplate is asymmetrical—intentionally. The slate and maple altar (by Tedd Colt, 2006) sits off-center; the chandelier above it (Maybeck) is suspended slightly right of the altar. A skinny window over the choir loft is medieval amber glass from Westminster Abbey, threaded together from broken pieces given to Porter while one of the windows was being repaired. A second Porter stained-glass window on the garden side shows St. Christopher bearing the Christ child across a river.

Left of the altar, a giant clamshell serves as baptismal font. Robert Frost, considered the fount of rural New England poetry, was baptized there; his father was an editor at the old San Francisco Evening Bulletin.

Reverend Worcester eschewed conventional pews, preferring parishioners to “draw up a chair,” in this case, a handmade, maple Stickley, its seat woven of tule reeds from the Sacramento Delta. (The minister splurged on these, paying $4.50 each when pine would have cost only $4.)

The rumor is that Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the art-addicted mother of William Randolph, financed the chairs, though the gift was intended to be anonymous. Near the front row stands Mrs. Hearst’s other gift to the church, a bronze copy of the famous Nuremberg Praying Madonna, sometimes attributed to Peter Vischer.

On the north wall hang four great landscapes by Keith, said to depict the unending cycles of nature.

Leaving the sanctuary and the quiet garden, we step into the familiar streets of San Francisco. They seem the same as they were two hours or so ago; perhaps it is we who have changed.

Georgia I. Hesse was the founding travel editor of the Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, a job she enjoyed for many years. She is now freelancing.