Dear Virginia About Religion in my Life

Dear Virginia About Religion in my Life

thank you for sharing your history with church.

My father's background with church was the CHURCH OF ENGLAND. I have believed his church background was Episcepalen (spelling?)

I just Googled that and found out what I have known to be true perhaps has never been true completely, just my understanding since childhood

Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that evolved out of the practices, liturgy and identity of the Church of England following the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century

My mother's with CHURCH of SCOTLAND

According to a Google search

The Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland is a Christian denomination.

As a family we NEVER attended church services beyond weddings and funerals.

The family story was that the minister of the church, they attended during WWII before Pearl Harbor Attack and the US entrance into the war, preached trying to tell the congregation what to think about world events. My father would not tolerate that. He had become an independent thinker and mostly a self-educated or taught man and refused to attend church regularly from then on.  

When they moved into the first and only mortgaged and owned home where I was born and raised we lived

"TOO FAR AWAY FROM ANY CHURCH" 

and my father worked 6 or 7 days a week and needed sleep more on the Sundays he was home than church PREACHINGS. Plus my mother no longer drove and we only had one car for decades.

I began attending a Methodist church with a friend from my block in Detroit with his mother, when I was 12 or 13 for a couple years

Then when I got married the first time I began attending a Methodist church on the west side of Detroit where my first wife and parents attended and occasionally her brother and his family attended.

When our first son was born I chose to be BAPTISED, which I had not been before and to become very active in the church functions.

I eventually began serving as an usher (rather than sit in the pews throughout the entire services), began regularly attending the Men's Wednesday Morning Prayer meetings, especially when I was working as a beginning architect-in-training with the firm of the architect who designed the church. My first wife and I started the young couples group and I eventually served as the Sunday School teacher and Sunday night Youth Leader for the junior high age children 12 to 14.

I began to develop a friendship with the junior minister and during that period I considered leaving architecture out of frustration of the reality of the practice of architecture compared to the fantasies I was taught as a student to become a minister.

Bigotry of members

Games People Play

and hypocrisy

and racism

All those ended that fantasy dream

Later when we moved to Florida we became relative regular attendees at Methodist church in Boynton Beach where we lived. I developed a friendship with the associate minister, who was mostly retired. On my birthday in 1976 I received the architectural contract from the senior minister and the building committee to turn the straight nave into a cruciform sanctuary.

My first REAL architectural project through my own firm after losing my job in West Palm and Palm Beach due to the economic disaster of that time in Florida.

I had moved out of our house that March

and no longer was attending services.

Since then I have visited many religious centers

studied a variety of books about religion

searching while developed my own spiritual beliefs and life philosophies.

I have done much like the famous people whose autobiographies and/or biographies had also done.

I searched for my own answers

Leo Buscalgia - author of LOVE and WAY OF THE BULL (his search)

Eat, Love & Pray

Steve Jobs

Frank Lloyd Wright

and many others' searched influenced me over time.