I was told that the first time I entered a church was in my mother’s arms. I was just a three-month-old baby. Little did I know then that it was the beginning of a joyous, lifelong association with church.
During my childhood and adolescence I attended that same church—a branch of The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston—as a Sunday School student. We learned about the relevance of the Bible in our lives, about God, and how to pray. I recall once, when I was about nine or ten years old, mentally reviewing the spiritual concepts we’d discussed in class that day during the car ride home with my family. “Remember,” I said to myself, “you are learning them in order to put them into practice.”
Early on, I had realized that participating in church isn’t a passive activity, or a matter of showing up for services or Sunday School out of a sense of duty or family tradition. Nor is it a matter of simply taking on committee work; rather, it’s about yielding to God moment by moment and letting divine Love permeate our thoughts and purify our motives.
