First Glimpses of the Contemplarium
An initial sketch of an institution to meet moral-existential needs
The need
Picture these situations:
Five months after your parent’s funeral, you want a quiet place to light a candle and contemplate the loss, away from the rowdiness at home.
You’re about to make a difficult choice that you think will hurt your friend. You want to discuss your options with someone you trust.
Your community just lost somebody in a tragic accident, and folks feel a need to grieve the loss together.
You are feeling guilty for something that you did and need to talk it over with somebody who can keep it confidential.
These are all moments of moral or existential need, junctures in life where people find themselves in a head-on encounter with their values, identity, or sense of purpose and meaning — in other words, the things that most ultimately matter in life. These junctures call for care and support, yet very often, people face them vulnerable and alone.
Until the past few decades, our societal landscape had clear institutions for these moments: the majority of people in the U.S. affiliated with religious institutions that would be their go-to sources of moral and existential support. But for our increasingly secular and pluralistic society today, these institutions have become less clearly suited for the job.
My vision is to create a pluralistic, secular, public space — let’s call it a Contemplarium — where people, regardless of religious belief or identity, can receive and offer moral and existential support. Embedded and trusted in the community, it will embody a renewed form of public life where we, in all our diversity, can find passage together through our common human journey.
Some rough brushstrokes
Let’s evoke the general feeling of a community that has a Contemplarium. It’s a community that can be contemplative and reverent together in a shared, public setting — where folks from all walks of life can see each other at their most humanly vulnerable and humble.
In the U.S., we mostly don’t have permanent spaces like this—even our religious institutions have a “privatized” feel, built for believing members more than the public. But when I lived in Taiwan, the pervasive presence of public temples (A–C), which served as public spiritual utilities of sorts, left a deep impression on me.
I think something like this is possible in the U.S.—in fact, Apple Stores are famously modeled after temple layouts (D). Imagine a world where we reclaim that format for a storefront Contemplarium ...
This could be a nonsectarian space where people come and go as needed, engaging with curated artefacts like candles (E and H), “community tables” (F, but secular), or even contemplative labyrinths (G). In the back, professionals and volunteers offer care through small groups, counseling, and event programming. The space’s ethos is marked by a sense of service and humility, and visitors trust in consistently meaningful experiences.
Of course, the vision is ultimately not the place, but the people: regardless of whatever physical or nonphysical strategies manifest, the vision is a community that feels more tightly knit by a shared trust and an ability to see each other at their most fully human.
Why now?
I believe we are grappling with a decades-long shift in our institutional landscape for addressing moral and existential needs. Our society is remarkably bare of places to turn for these needs, and where you do find them, barriers to access are high and institutional trust is low.
In another time or place, you might turn to a religious leader at a local church or temple for moral and existential support. But in the way our religious landscape has evolved, moral and existential care and support is reserved for – and indeed only really works for – those who buy into certain requirements of belief and membership. Combine this with the rise of secularism and the decline of religious belief, and you get a meaning-making infrastructure that is ill-suited to meet the needs of today’s pluralistic public.
Meanwhile, psychotherapy is an important part of the solution for improving our mental health and well-being. But with its origins in an often individual-focused, patient-physician paradigm of disorder and treatment, its location inside the current healthcare system, and its shortage of licensed therapists, the institution of modern psychotherapy in its current form is not necessarily enough to meet all of our needs.
Finally, the patchwork of para-therapeutic services that has arisen in the past few years – exemplified by “influencer” therapists and life coaches – is more subject to the demands of scroll-zone commercialism than the complicated, communally-embedded, difficult practices of moral and existential care.
Multiply this longer-term trend in the institutional landscape with recent upheavals we are all still living through: the persistence of Trumpism and the pandemic. Both accelerate what I think we all recognize as a weakening of our collective social fabric. But these crises have also opened new opportunities. After the pandemic, we see a common longing for local human connection that offers an opportunity to reimagine how our neighborhoods’ social fabrics can meet moral and existential needs. Similarly, the defense of liberalism in the Trumpian era has made it clearer that we need opportunities for spiritual rest and recuperation to feed struggles for justice.
Let’s explore
We are at an inflection point: we can build a world where our neighborhoods progressively become more lonely, alienated, and cold, or we can build a world where we share our common human journey with the neighborhood around us. I hope we can build the latter.
I’ve shared here just a hazy, initial sketch of what the Contemplarium might be or look like, just to get the conversation started. Over the next while on this blog, I will dive into more detail on the history of institutions that meet moral-existential needs, how we’ve ended up where we are, and what I see as the future.
Subscribe below to join me on this journey, or feel free to reach out to start a conversation!
About Seanan @ the SF Contemplarium
I’m a minister-turned-designer building the SF Contemplarium: a new civic institution tending to the hearts and spirits of San Franciscans through contemplative public spaces, programming, accompaniment, and community-building.
The goal is to build a contemplative “third place" where the neighborhood can celebrate, mourn, and honor our common human journey together, no matter who they are or what they believe.
I’m looking for collaborators and co-creators! Would love to chat at seanan@sfcontemplarium.org.