In my childhood, I expected that church was the place where I would learn about the deep mysteries of existence and have some truly eye-opening, otherworldly experiences. After all, church certainly looked more mystical than my home, my school, or the shopping mall. But the older I got, the more boring and stultified church came to seem. By the time I quit going, in my early teens, I was convinced that religion was little more than hypocrisy and lingering superstition. Still, I always held on to a kind of wistful feeling that there must have been something wonderful hidden away in the recesses of my childhood church — some inner secrets that I had never discovered and that no one in charge had bothered to show me.