My Christian Science Background

I suppose that many people get their religion at least initially from their parents, and I am no exception.  My father’s mother was a Christian Scientist.  I’m not sure how this came to be since none of her relatives, nor her husband were of that persuasion.  Perhaps she adopted it because of some experiences she had or from some neighbors.  It doesn’t matter, but it would be interesting to know.  Because she had divorced when her children, my father and his sister, were quite young, she was the sole influence on their choice of religion.  As a result, they both became Christian Scientists as well.  (Note that I’m not going to try to define this religion here, that’s a subject that is not pertinent to my eventual story.)

Both my father and my aunt met their future spouses through the young adult ministry of the Mill Plain Union Church just a few blocks from where they lived with their grandparents on Radcliff Avenue in Waterbury.  But by then they were in their late teens or early twenties and their religious persuasion had already been pretty well set.  They belonged to the CS church in Waterbury, and it was into this church that they also brought their spouses and their eventual children, including myself.

The 1950’s and early 1960’s were the height of the CS religion.  The Waterbury church was thriving.  In the basement there was a nursery, a preschool room which was separated from the rest of the elementary students by a heavy curtain door which drew across, and the elementary student Sunday school.  The high school students had their own room on the 2^nd floor.  The adults met in the sanctuary.  (I should explain that the structure of all CS churches was that you attended Sunday school up to the age of 20, then you went to the church service which met at the same time.  Adults did not have any Sunday school service.)

There was no youth group or any social life associated with the church, and the leaders in the church service were a pair of lay “readers” instead of trained pastors.  Also, eschewing medical treatment for the most part, there were CS “practitioners” to whom you could go if you needed assistance in either physical or spiritual problems.  The Waterbury church drew its members from not only Waterbury, but many other towns around it.  So while there were many young people at that time, the only ones from the town of Wolcott were myself and my siblings and my two cousins from my Aunt Dot and Uncle Bob.

One of the other nuances of the CS church is that they really don’t want to have anything to do with the medical profession.  Since all school students had to have a yearly checkup with the school nurse in the fall, each year my parents would fill out a little blue card which stated their religious objection and I turned that into the school office and thus avoided this contact with the school nurse.

The only immunization that I got as a child was the smallpox vaccination which was being given to eradicate this disease.  I’m not sure how my parents agreed to that – perhaps they were not yet strong enough in their faith at the time – I don’t believe my siblings ever got such a shot. 

Apart from my birth, I only had one other encounter with the medical profession while growing up.  When I was going to Boy Scout camp one year I tripped over a root while running down the hill to go to the evening campfire and fell quite heavily.  I wasn’t going to say anything, but the person with me told the scoutmaster and he sent me to the medical tent.  The person there suspected that I had broken my collar bone and called my parents to come and pick me up (this was a Saturday night).  My dad came to get me and I spent the next 24 hours in bed.  Evidently my parents had quite a discussion between them on Sunday as to whether medical treatment was necessary.  I think my mother won the case.  At any rate, on Monday my dad was driving me to school (I thought), but at the turnoff to the school he went right instead of left, then informed me that over his objection he was taking me to the hospital to get checked out.  ER procedures were not much different then than they are now, so it took most of the day before I was seen.  As it was so late, they kept me over night and I was released the next day with a figure-eight bandage around my shoulders, an appointment for follow-up visits with the doctor, and an excuse note to be let out of PE at school for the next several weeks.  We only went to the first follow-up visit, then just ignored any further treatment. My collar bone healed on its own.

Our reliance on spiritual solutions for any physical ailments also meant that I never took any medication, even aspirin.  As a result, I never learned how to swallow a pill and developed such an aversion to doing so that even today I cannot take pills without either crushing them up and taking them as a powder with applesauce, or crunching on them first.  Habits learned so young are very hard to break.

For a while in my high school years there was a movement to establish some sort of youth program.  There was a smaller CS church in Bristol and they organized what was called a “Youth Forum.”  We met at the home of Mrs. Yetkey and there were perhaps a couple of dozen high school-aged CS young people in attendance at their once-a-month meeting.  My Aunt Dot was one of the organizers – this comes into the story again a few years later. 

I had no exposure at all to any other religion, no interaction with any other church, and so I believed all that I was presented with.

As I approached the end of my junior year of high school I needed to decide where I wanted to go to college to continue my education.  I was thinking of some sort of math/engineering field.  I could have gone to the University of Connecticut like many of my high school classmates, but I wanted to make a break and go elsewhere.  In the end I applied to, and was accepted, at five different colleges/universities.

As a fallback, I did apply to the University of Connecticut, although it was my last choice.  I also applied to the University of Massachusetts – just a little farther away.  I did not visit either of these two schools.  The other three we visited as part of our family vacation during the summer of 1965 when we took a month and toured the United States.

One stop was at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, a mid-sized school with a good reputation in engineering.  It was a pretty nice campus, located in Lewisburg, PA, along the Susquehanna River north of Harrisburg.  My final two choices were influenced by my religion.

There was (and still is) a CS college outside of St. Louis, MO, called Principia College.  Much smaller than all my other choices, it is only for Christian Scientists and would have continued the somewhat isolationist policies that I grew up under.  While it was a very nice campus, there was no engineering major and it seemed a bit too small for my liking.  So it was not my first choice.

The final choice was Michigan State University – at the opposite end of the size spectrum from Principia.  But there was a CS tie there too, and my cousin Bobby [Hill], who was four years older than I was and from whom I got all my hand-me-down clothes, was the connection.

Background on MSU and Asher

In 1946, eight young veterans, all Christian Scientists, returned from WWII to continue their education that had been interrupted by the war.  Wanting a place to live where they could also practice their religion, they found a place at the home of a Mrs. Asher in East Lansing.  They thrived in this atmosphere and more students continued to do the same each year.  In 1955 another home for women also opened.  Finally, in 1965, they built a separate large dormitory-like building about a half-mile from campus that could house a total of about 100 students.

My cousin Bobby was one of the students who had lived in the smaller men’s Asher House.  He would be graduating from MSU in 1966, after being able to spend his final year there in the new Asher House and thought that I might like it as well.  I was uncertain about going to such a large University (the total campus population in those days was 44,000, including 7000 freshmen, and I was about to graduate from a high school with a total senior class of about 160).  I thought that I would be “just a number” at such a large university, but we agreed to make MSU one of the stops on our vacation that summer.

I was hooked.  The small environment of Asher House met my needs and provided the appropriate relief from the large university environment.  Also, the out-of-state tuition at MSU was actually slightly less than the in-state tuition at UConn (excluding transportation costs).  So, while I was accepted at all five schools, I chose to go to MSU.

My cousin Bobby got married that summer and was living a few towns away from East Lansing, so I was not influenced by him during the years I lived at Asher House.  But living under that influence, and attending the local CS church (i.e. CS Sunday school until I turned 20, then the church services), I was still not exposed to much religion outside of CS.

Continuing the story hinted at above, during the summer after my freshman year, my Aunt Dot decided to play matchmaker.  There was a girl, Edie Salinas, who had attended the by now defunct Youth Forum in Bristol.  My Aunt and Uncle had also switched their membership to the Bristol CS Church and knew the families there quite well.  My Aunt decided that Edie and I would make a perfect couple.  She invited me to go to a movie, Ben Hur, which was showing in a local theater that summer.  Unbeknownst to me, she also invited Edie and had us sit together in the darkened theater.  While Edie was a nice girl, and I might have enjoyed dating her, neither of us appreciated being so obviously thrown together by my aunt.  So, we just enjoyed the movie and mutually decided to not see each other again as that would only encourage my aunt.

Here I need to introduce another thread to the story so you can how it twines together with my story.

My wife’s religious background

My wife grew up in the EUB (Evangelical United Brethren) denomination.  The small church near her, North Bay EUB Church, was a three mile walk from her house, but she attended faithfully during her growing up years.  Later the North Bay EUB Church merged with the Horton Bay EUB Church (about a five mile walk from her home) and then the EUB church merged with the Methodist Church in the mid-1960’s to form the United Methodist Church. 

The denomination as a whole was becoming more and more liberal, but the former EUB churches in Northern Michigan still clung to their conservative roots.  Since the pastors in the churches are appointed by the denomination, the denomination was sending a continual stream of new seminary graduates, with the latest in liberal thinking, to these small churches to “convert” them.  At one very vulnerable point in my wife’s life, when she was asking some serious questions, the pastor’s answers did a great deal to destroy the fragile theology that she held.

After graduating from high school, she had a job working in Kilwin’s Bakery in Petoskey.  The owners, Don and Katy Kilwin, took an interest in her.  It was at Don’s recommendation that she began taking classes at NCMC (North Central Michigan College) and then entered the EIP (Education Internship Program) at MSU because of a connection through a relative of theirs.  Don and Katy were also Christian Scientists and so Donna had begun going to church with them as well.  It was because of all this that when she had to spend a quarter (10 weeks) on campus at MSU in the spring of 1970 that she stayed at Asher House.

I was then in graduate school at MSU.  Without going into a lot of detail, I fell in love with Donna the first time we met. By the end of the quarter we were “pinned”, over the summer I visited her nearly every weekend, and at the end of the summer were engaged, then married the following summer. As a result, we were two Christian Scientists when we married.

During the year that we were engaged, I was becoming a little disenchanted with CS myself and was visiting other area churches – I tried Lutheran, Baptist, even Catholic, and a non-denominational church near campus.  CS was no longer satisfying, but I didn’t know what I was looking for or even where to look.  I knew that I was not comfortable with the liturgy in those that were more formal, but nothing was meeting my needs.

When we married and moved back to Connecticut in 1971 it was obvious that the CS church had shrunk drastically since the early 1960’s.  Of the total membership in the Waterbury church, there were only two other individuals besides myself who were younger than my parents.  The nursery was used so infrequently that when there was a child visiting, they had to disinfect all the toys and wipe off the mold that was growing from disuse.  The Sunday school rooms downstairs were no longer used and the ones upstairs were not much better.  It was not something that I felt comfortable going back to.

By this time, Donna was also feeling the need to get back to her “roots” and began shopping for a church which met her needs. Without going into a lot of detail, we eventually decided to both attend another church in the area. I have never looked back.

(Continued in part 2)