Visions of Glory - A Series

	Visions of Glory Series with Barbara Grizzuti Harrison vignettes of this famous author's life, as reviewed from her out-of-print book, Visions of Glory--A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978
Bethel	"Nobody ever told me that all believers doubt, or that the logical consequence of the possession of free will is to question, or that even mystics have at times felt abandoned by the God they adore; what a lot of misery it would have saved me if someone had told me."

I came to live and work at Bethel—Watchtower headquarters—in 1953, when I was 19. I left early in 1956.

I had had over the years, since my baptism in 1944, little niggles of doubt (and a constant conviction of sin). My doubts terrified me.

Nobody ever told me that all believers doubt, or that the logical consequence of the possession of free will is to question, or that even mystics have at times felt abandoned by the God they adore; what a lot of misery it would have saved me if someone had told me. But the Witnesses couldn't tell me that, because they themselves didn't acknowledge that it was true. To them, faith is total, unquestioning, uncritical, unwavering, and undemanding.

I regarded my irritable intelligence as a kind of predatory animal which, if not firmly reined, would spring on me, attack me, and destroy me.

Since to doubt at all was intolerable, the only solution that seemed possible was to submerge my doubts (to submerge myself) completely. I wanted to be eaten alive, devoured by Jehovah, to spend so much time in his service that my peevish spirit, humbled and exhausted, would no longer have time for querulous doubts. Women are good at turning their desolation to their advantage (or to w hat they think is their advantage); and what I was doing by entering Bethel was making spiritual capital out of spiritual despair, quelling my restlessness by giving it a death in a new life.

And I had other (baser) motives too: There was, for a woman, great spiritual prestige in being admitted to Bethel. It was both glamorous and holy. Men outnumbered women 10 to 1 at Bethel (although, among rank-and-file Witnesses, women outnumbered men 3 to 1). I had nothing against being surrounded by men. Part of the inner circle, circled about by men; I thought that part would be nice.

And I wanted to please my mother, whose standards I knew I never lived up to (I was never sure what they were) and whose ambition for me was boundless, at the same time that her competition with me was fierce. Simone Weil's mother is reported to have said once, with a mixture of exasperation and tenderness, "Thank God you don't have a daughter who's a saint." I had a mother who was thought to be a kind of saint—the Bible Lady of Brooklyn, they called her. It was a foregone conclusion that all my boyfriends would be more charmed by her than they would by me, by her sacrificial gravity, her seductive saintly gaiety, which were all the more alluring because she was beautiful, with wide blue eyes, a mouth that turned down just slightly—just enough to suggest ineradicable sadness (which everybody tried to eradicate). Viewing me as a spiritual extension of herself, she would be pleased, I knew, if I went to Bethel; she would feel validated and enhanced by my choice. And I would be making up to her for having failed to make her happy. I believed, at that time, that I held the power to make her happy. It was not a good thing, I know better in retrospect, to feel. I wanted to make things good for her, to make up to her for all the things she didn't have, for whatever it was she wept for in my bedroom every night. I wanted to get away from that weeping, and from the acrimony that bound her and my unbelieving father together more closely than the most enduring affection.

I wanted to allay her pain, and I wanted her to stop passing her pain onto me. I really did believe that I was the agent of her happiness; I don'' know through what subtle instruction or self-delusion I came to believe that. (But I do know that when, years later, I read, in one of the works of the saints, that God wants us, obliges us, to be happy, my first angry reaction was followed immediately by understanding: of course He does, because if you're unhappy, all you can do is make someone else responsible for your unhappiness and pass along your terrible pain. It makes perfect sense to me that God forbids us to despair.)

And I wanted to get away from my father, whose bewilderment took the form of rage, who wept for me (not for himself), and whose tears I rejected and despised. I was in an alliance with my mother against him—an unnatural alliance: my inclination, till my mother and I joined forces against him, was to find him irresistible. It was an unholy bonding; and while, at the time, I dismissed my father as negligible or feared him as a monstrous "Opposer of The Truth," there must, I think, have been part of my nature that recoiled against the pitiless, hard person I was when I was with him. I wanted to get away from all of it—the fights, the yelling, the tears, the recriminations' and the whispered secrets. I didn't want to hear my mother's whispered secrets; I didn't want to be her girlfriend, her "sister." (She signed her notes to me Connie. And when she was mad at me, she mailed her notes to me—though we shared not only the same apartment, but the same bedroom—and then handed them to me when the mailman came, with a hard suffering face that I feared more than I feared the judgment of God.) If my mother insisted on going out preaching Christmas Eve, I didn't want to be around to entertain my father's rages and then to defend her when she returned. I didn't want to fight with my father with her holding my hand, urging me on; I knew there was something sick and unholy about what we were doing. (When she introduced herself to my friends, she said, "I am Barbara's relative." She never called herself my mother.)

I took the only escape route I knew. But if you had asked me then, I would have said; "I came to Bethel to serve the Lord." And I would have meant it. Many of my motives were obscure to me. But I did want to love God. (I didn't understand that the will to believe is not quite the same as belief itself.)

I thought I loved God. I loved the idea of loving Him. I knew I loved Arnold; I had loved him since I was 15, when he was my high school English teacher who had held my hand in school assembly when I didn't salute the flag. Being at Bethel prevented me from walking down his street every day, hoping for an "accidental" meeting. But it didn't prevent me from fantasizing about him—from dreaming that he would be converted and that we would live together happily ever after in the New World.

I told Nathan H. Knorr, then the Watchtower Society's president, about Arnold—which was pretty stupid, because I must have known what he'd tell me, and I must have guessed I'd disregard it. He told me never to see Arnold again. If he had told me that I could never see my mother or father again, I might have obeyed him; but Arnold was my mother and father, and I couldn't not see him.

There were three public telephone booths at Bethel, unventilated and airless and smelling of the sweat of 500 bodies; like all the doors at Bethel, these had no locks; and I'd call Arnold from one of the booths when my craving couldn't be denied, and we'd arrange to meet. Once I got to his living room and I heard his beloved Schubert Trout Quintet or one of the Beethoven quartets he always played for me, there was only joy. A guilt hangover the next day took the form of headaches, a steel vise around my head. (And the guilt had nothing to do with sex—there was no sex; I was guilty for loving him.)

So I carried all this baggage to Bethel with me—my love for Arnold and my doubts; but I went, nevertheless (I really believe this), in good faith. I meant to stay forever. Before I had been there two years, I knew I would have to leave.