Is Boston a spiritual city? I consider the question while I stand in a sardine tin pit at the House of Blues before Magdalena Bay’s most recent show. Thinking for a moment, I realize that I am communing with some 2,000 Bostonians at that moment. A sold-out crowd of college radio pilgrims fresh from the Green Line now stands together, trampling empty beer cups and eagerly facing a not-yet-illuminated altar oozing with stage fog. Above the stage, a row of spiritual symbols looms down at the audience: a Star of David, a hilal, a calligraphic om, and in the center, a symmetrical hamsa. Against the venue’s jubilantly painted interior, these emblems make a certain amount of aesthetic sense. By backing them with decorative swirls and warm-toned patterns, the venue announces itself as a place of tolerance and celebration—a site for gathering with the random fellow concertgoer and enjoying the alchemical wonder of a great live set.
If the spiritual space is one where we come together and celebrate, the House of Blues becomes its own little cathedral. The wide auditorium stands as the nave, the stage in place of a chancel. Instead of galleries and arcades, the theater is flanked by bars and merch tables; in the place of a choir loft, balcony seats; and where the central crucifix might hang above the congregation, there’s a glittering disco ball. The city of God looks a bit different, a bit less stuffy, here at the House of Blues, but a music venue is not a church, even when filled with thousands of devotees.
Understanding that decorative and performative arts can be a manifestation of spiritual belief and reading into how these spaces are formed, decorated, and used can give a hint to just how the city’s spirituality has reoriented itself for modern life. The individuals coming to each respective space are searching for the same thing: an opportunity to connect with those around them, and hope for a chance encounter with something bigger than themselves—the passing glimpse at wonder which helps life and its modern pace make a bit more sense.
Being a city with a great deal of religious history, Boston is littered with spiritual structures. Founded off a search for religious tolerance by a paradoxically intolerant Puritanical sect, the port city quickly became home to a number of parishes and congregations, many of which still practice in the original buildings they erected. Walking north up College Avenue from Davis Square one rainy morning, I pass by a number of churches. In the short five blocks to my destination I see the squat, red brick Somerville Community Baptist Church, the white clapboard sides of Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the soaring medieval-esque stone tower of Holy Baptist Bible Church. With gray-brown exteriors and aged hydrangea bushes out front, many could pass as typical New England homes if not for the rickety spires sprouting up beyond the tree tops and the yellowed plastic marquees out front. Gothic fonts and weathered front doors persist through each building’s many years of practice and celebration, staring out at the busy Boston streets as history passes by.
On this rainy morning, I journey to the former Second Unitarian Church of Somerville. In the early twentieth century, a group of Unitarian households in West Somerville raised a bake sale and gathered funds to purchase Lot #198. Together they built a church in 1909. The original structure was plain and functional—white stucco exterior over a wooden frame that accommodated two hundred members in a center nave lit by stained glass windows. In his 1964 book Protestant Worship and Church Architecture, James White discusses the traditional formula for a church building. He considers a church structure as a balance of liturgical and emotive elements. The liturgical elements have a function necessary to worship, like the baptistry or the altar, while the emotive elements operate as decorative additions contributing to the overall aesthetic experience of being within the church, like the glory of a stained glass window or the majesty of the Sistine Chapel’s painted interior. The original Unitarian church built on Lot #198 focused on the liturgical, keeping with the sparse Bostonian tradition of pushing faith as practice to the forefront.
Being a Unitarian church, the community welcomed speakers and thinkers from all over the globe including Swami Paramahansa Yogananda, who in 1920 introduced Indian philosophies as well as practices of yoga to the United States, welcoming interfaith dialogues to the city. But the Second Unitarian Church building was not designed for Yogananda’s spiritual practices, and non-Western religious groups were soon to develop and decorate their own homes in the city.
One such space is the Cambridge Zen Center, which was created in 1973 under the guidance of Zen Master Seung Sahn. The center’s current home just off Cambridge’s Central Square appears almost completely residential from the outside. Approaching by foot, the blue-gray clapboard home, with its white-trimmed windows, is bordered by well-kept strips of lawn. Taking off your shoes on entry, the center opens up as both a residential and spiritual space. Each room is utilized to fit the exact needs of the community. There’s a large living area warmed by a central pellet stove; a communal kitchen lined with jars of grains and beans; a mud room with respective cubbies for each resident’s shoes. The grandest space, just off the central living space, is the dharma hall. Bowing upon entrance, a ceremonial bell and books of chants lie to my right. The hall is mostly empty, the hardwood floor punctuated by cushions that can be arranged to seat however many guests have come to sit. At my far left, toward the back wall, an altar stands with a glittering statue of Buddha.
As a spiritual space, White’s liturgical and emotive systems of classification fall a bit short when discussing the Zen Center, as the space is used for more than just spiritual practice. It’s also a place of living and working, so the minimal decoration found throughout distinctly reflects the practices of Zen, and in turn, supports the living of daily life. A theological diagram sits above the dining room table. There’s a framed photograph of a smiling monk on a wall that observes the brewing of morning tea from his frame and inspires a thoughtful tying of my shoelaces as I depart for the week. Here, the daily exercises of life take on the importance of liturgical ceremony. All things to be done with care and consciousness. When coming together as a group in the dharma hall, there is no split between nave and chancel, clergy and congregation, but rather a loose circle of attendees. The center’s use and decoration of space points to the blend of life and spirituality. Instead of coming to the space in a planned encounter as one might with a church or the House of Blues, the Zen sense of spirit can apply to each and every action throughout the day, a present tense, a conscious way of living as it appears through the adornment of those walls.
The Cambridge Zen Center and the House of Blues support their communities well. A good spiritual space is one where people can celebrate and be together. In both contexts, these spaces use decoration and architecture to signal their beliefs to the community and gather people together. Here you can dance together; here you can pray together. But what happens when the spiritual mission is much more individualized? And can the act of decoration be spiritual in its own right?
As I finish my walk to Lot #198, I approach the multicolored, multi-faced facade of the Museum of Modern Renaissance. Looking not left nor right as I jaywalk, I lock eyes with a heavy-browed painted face peering down at me from above the museum’s front door. The building itself is the same plain frame constructed by the Unitarians in 1909, now adorned and painted with bright splashes of storybook color. Above the leering face, two symmetrical roosters soar upward to a smiling sun, waves of orange rays descend down to a curly declaration: “THE MUSEUM OF MODERN RENAISSANCE.”
By the 1930s, the Unitarian congregation was losing membership and the building was eventually sold to the Caleb Rand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF). The IOOF bought the building as it was and used it for many years before passing the property to the Somerville Temple Associates in 1963. By 2002, the building was ready for its final, grandest transformation, and the Masonic temple was sold to Nicholas Shaplyko and Ekaterina Sorokina, Russian artists who began to transform the space into the museum as it appears today.
The Museum of Modern Renaissance is peculiar. Approaching it as an art space is not entirely fruitful, seeing as the museum is the couple’s personal home and only open by appointment, for occasional yoga classes, or during Somerville’s annual open studio hours. Instead, the museum is a personal temple for Shaplyko and Sorokina, a canvas in which they live and work. Shrouded in mystery, it stands like a color-soaked temple just a few minutes’ walk from Davis Square.
Coming into the space nervous, a bit late, and sweaty from my power walk, Shaplyko welcomes me from his station near the front door. Upon introductions he is quick to guide me down past the welcome sign to the lower-level kitchen and then through the dining area and library. Every inch of the space is packed with color and has a distinct feeling and theme. The Blue Fantasy bathroom is painted as a porcelain pot in ornate blue and white motifs, a teapot whimsically serving as the sink’s faucet. The library, even on a rainy day, is lit by a painted sun—its rays fanning out like flower petals, the edges of the design moving into abstract mandalas on the neighboring walls and ceiling. All around the museum are images of gods, creators, and deities, but the sun in the library feels the most powerful. Maybe it’s a personal preference for books and the color yellow, but I feel as though the sun’s curling smile oozed warmth. These painted walls most certainly had things to say.
Shaplyko brings me finally to the Paradise Retreat toward the back of the house. We sit in plush couches draped with layered textiles, and on each surface stands various decorative tchotchkes from all over the world. Here, as the rain patters the skylights above, Shaplyko explains the history and philosophy of the museum. After purchasing the property in 2002, the couple began to gradually transform the space into a house of the muses. Each room has a theme, and nearly every surface hosts a painting created collaboratively by Shaplyko and Sorokina. The couple does not use preliminary sketches; each mural becomes an energy net, catching each subconscious design expressed through an instantaneous hand. Each piece begins with a black background. White reflects energy, Shaplyko explains, black absorbs.
The museum, as it stands, is surely a place of energy. The Grand Hall has replaced the nave where the Unitarians once prayed and is decorated with 57,000 murals covering 5,200 square feet. They feature delicate combinations of animated folklore and creation myths from around the world. On the front wall, three haloed angels gaze down at the open floor space, holding a glowing strand of light between them. The narrow spaces between each stained glass window are filled with characters in painted niches: a bearded man with staff and scroll, a clarinet player adorned in eastern European costume, three bulls icily watching, three tigers baring their teeth. The pews have been moved to the edges of the room allowing visitors a place to sit while they gaze upward at the work around them. Finally, in place of an altar, there is a grand piano, which Shaplyko uses to emphasize the importance of performance to the space. It’s a house of the muses after all.
For the Museum of Modern Renaissance, the spiritual is intensely personal. Painting and the act of creation is the ceremony, Shaplyko and Sorokina the celebrants. As a visitor there are no liturgical expectations other than walking around with craned necks, interpreting each painting and decoration as it appears to you. The aesthetics of the museum are the spirit of the place and the varied cosmologies splayed over the museum’s walls are joined by a simple through line of being rendered in paint. The walls and sculptures hum with life, together welcoming the visitor to imagine their place in the cosmos a bit differently. If this whole painted universe of the museum’s interior can come from two skilled pairs of hands, then maybe our world, with all its unexplainable complexity, is held together by some energy so elusive it can only be referred to in paint.
Standing as a building with such layered spiritual history, all of Lot #198’s lifetimes are inhabited by passionate believers who work to give their communities places to be. The modern American city is far from pious and devoted, so in coming to any space to practice, pray, paint, and celebrate, each Bostonian takes their best crack at making sense of the deluge. Having faith—whether in clergy, myth, Zen, or Magdalena Bay—just like any pilgrimage, is the work of an individual, but along the way you’re sure to find people to join. Picking up the paintbrush and finding a reason to believe is the first step. Making things and imagining the world as it could be is a generative course of action. Creation, a spiritual process. Look around at the spaces the city joins together in, and better yet, imagine new ones. Luckily, there is no proper way to practice spirituality, so long as we keep joining and imagining together, this city will be filled with spirit.
