Article May 30, 2005 Issue

religion-and who we are

By Lyle Young

I WAS RAISED in the United Church of Canada, the country's largest Protestant denomination. As a child, I loved Sunday School. But as a teenager, I began to see a lot of hypocrisy in organized religion. So for about a decade, I was a defiant agnostic.

Happily, God's feelings weren't hurt by this. In fact, eventually, through divine grace, spirituality became more important to me than anything else. After attending services in what are known as Christian Science branch churches for three years, I became a member of The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist.

One of the challenges for me in joining a church was to square my own spirituality and spiritual experiences with an external organization. I intuitively loved the teaching of the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. But the Bible, which is the very bedrock of the Church of Christ, Scientist, is a set of documents drawn together centuries ago, and most of it was written centuries before that. The compilation of the Bible was a historical process, external to my own perceptions. What did that have to do with my inner thoughts and spirituality? I asked myself.

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