WHEN I RETURNED TO CHURCH after a 15-year absence, it was to a Sunday service at a small Christian Science Society. How small? Well, that day I was the only person in the congregation and one of the Readers doubled on the piano, accompanying the hymns. I sat in the back, my eyes unexpectedly filling with tears as we sang the words of the poem, "Mother's Evening Prayer," by Mary Baker Eddy, which begins: "O gentle presence, peace and joy and power; / O Life divine, that owns each waiting hour ..." (Poems, p. 4).
Those old, oft-sung words could not have been more perfect to describe how I felt and what I'd been through since I had ceased to attend church so many years earlier.
I had made it home.
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