REJECTS. That's the word we saw stamped here and there on the corrugated metal sheets that formed the walls of the ramshackle shack my teenaged daughter, Emily, and I entered one morning last August. A band of unfinished plywood lined the lower half of the room. Two 40-watt light bulbs hung from thin wood rafters. Their soft glow mixed with gray daylight that filtered in through two windows and an open door. We heard the bing bleats raindrops on the metal roof mingle with a rooster's crow, the honks of geese, and bleats of goats outside. Colorful laundry hung on clotheslines stretched along the sketchy grass yards of adjoining metal huts. The melody of a familiar hymn emanated from an old computer. And we knew.
This was Church.
In a way neither of us had ever felt before—really felt—we knew we were in "the structure of Truth and Love."Science and Health, p. 583. At this Sunday service of the Christian Science Society, West Nairobi, in Kenya, East Africa, we sat in the first row. We sat on children's school chairs. So did the other 18 people attending the service. Thomas and David, the First and Second Readers, sat at a plain table. They stood up to read the Bible Lesson. Thomas read with stirring power. David, plams flat on the table, leaning straight-armed over his book, read fast, direct. (Talk about the harmony of counterpoint!) We sang hymns to that computer loaded with Concord software. We sang the solo together. A plastic bag, the one from the Reading Room in Boston that I had used to bring Sentinels and Journals, was passed around for the collection.
