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
Leaving	"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."

When I left the Witnesses, I told myself that if I had to spend the rest of my life alone (believing that in all the important things, I would always be alone), the leaving would still have been worth it. I could not foresee the consequences of leaving; but I knew that the act itself was necessary, that I must not try to anticipate the consequences, and that the consequences of not acting would be worse than anything that might happen to me afterward. In all the years that followed, I never found reason to regret my decision, even through all the inescapable desolations and humiliations, the hurts and wounds that life inflicts upon us all. I vowed to accept as truth only that which I knew to be true, and to live—"convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human"—with only that which I knew to be true. I expected to live and die without certainty, without the absolute, and without absolution.

(Sometimes there was pure joy in remembering why I had left. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at night, seeing that skyline burning hot and icy, the skyline that defined and was a symbol for the world—" This is mine, all mine"—I rejoiced; I had chosen it; I loved it (I love it). And sometimes when making love. Or decorating the Christmas tree with my children— squabbling, hassling, but alive and juicy, in love with whatever was human and whatever was magic. At those moments, I remembered the years of deprivation, but only to exult in the riches of the present. The past was like a bad dream. The nights of Gethsemane were lived through; there was always a morning.)

I was (am) often false, frivolous, silly, negligent. I read, when I was 35, the diary of a 17-year-old girl who swore "never to compromise," and I loved her: I was that girl, and I had compromised, and had been compromised. But I had never expected it to be easy. And I could tell myself that I had performed one tremendous, courageous act: I had left a religion that was small and peevish and meretricious to take my lumps and my joys where I found them. Where I found them. Nothing further I might ever do would equal that one deed; but it had been done. It was the source of my pride, and of my self-love.

And there were lovers and friends and comrades, brothers and sisters, along the way.

I learned to live with periods of self-loathing, self-doubt. I understood that my nature was too passionate and too intense for comfort—my own, or other people's—and that I had nothing and nobody to bring that passion and intensity to. But that was the price of being fully human: I had learned to live without God. Cynical and charming (and hungering), luckier than most, I made my way.

I thought, in fact, when I began to write this book, that (barring pleasant, but not earthshaking, surprises) the story had ended.