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
Celibacy	Witnesses frown on marriage in the 40's.

When I became a Witness, in 1944, marriage was frowned upon. In 1941, at a convention in St. Louis, Missouri, J. F. Rutherford, Russell's successor, combining evangelistic fervor with vaudevillean flair, said that a woman was nothing more than (as Kipling had put it) "a rag and a bone and a hank of hair." (The women in the convention audience, I am told, applauded fervently.) Marriage, it was implied, was "selfish"; it kept one from entering the full-time service of the Lord, afflicted one with "tribulations of the flesh." (We were, on the other hand, told that "forbidding to marry" was one of the signs of the end of the world, and that the celibacy imposed on priests and nuns by the Catholic Church was wicked and Satanish; voluntary celibacy, however, among us, was proof of total commitment to Jehovah.)

I remember a family of Greek Witnesses: an imposing matriarch; a pale, insignificant father; two daughters, Olivia and Thea—one beautiful, the other plain. (Plain Thea played the opening and closing hymns on the upright piano at meetings in the Kingdom Hall; everyone felt sorry for her— and liked her better, and treated her more kindly than they did Olivia.) People gossiped about Sister L., the mother: She'd been overheard telling her beautiful daughter, as they watched a bridal party pass by, "See that bride? That's what I want for you." Olivia, it was rumored, whenever a male Witness from headquarters was invited to her family's private house or supper, would plant herself in front of a window with an open Bible in her hand, so that she could be found enchanting—a picture of spiritual and physical beauty to entice men.

The fact that the L.'s lived in a private house was not insignificant: In our largely working-class South Brooklyn congregation, very few people lived in private houses. Class animosity was never allowed to rise to the surface—brothers and sisters, we all "loved" one another—but class animosity would find expression in backbiting, in whispered conversations about somebody or other's not being sufficiently "theocratic," or dedicated to Jehovah. It was remarkable how many people who lived in private houses were "untheocratic."

My own family had a kind of Depression mentality. My father, a printer, and a member of the very strong Typographers Union, made a decent enough living, but he tended to be somewhat profligate (he liked to play the horses). There was never enough money for frills. We went to a "poor people's dentist"—the kind who charges $2 for every visit and keeps you coming back forever, so that in the end, you wind up paying thousands of dollars. We had a 25-cents-a-week insurance policy. My mother spent hours of her days comparison-shopping—finding the market where the broccoli was 3 cents cheaper. We bought cheap clothes. My underpants were, to my intense humiliation, always falling off—in the subways; once in school when I was reading a paper on the auditorium stage—because we bought the cheap kind, the kind whose elastic turned into a gluey, stretchy mess when you washed them.

My mother and her friends judged other Witnesses (in spite of the constant exhortations to be nonjudgmental) on the basis of their profligacy. If you used heavy cream or Kleenex, you were self-indulgent, a Bad Person. We were both suspicious and envious of anyone who had more money than we had. We asked God to forgive us our failures of love. We maintained our do-gooder, passive mentality, behaving "nice" in front of the people we mistrusted, suppressing our genuine emotions; anger and hostility—even when appropriate, provoked by petty meannesses, or by the controlling wrath of an elder who was attempting to buttress his own sense of worth— merely evoked a Christian smile. Aggressive behavior was not allowed us. We never fought it out like gentlemen. We needed to believe we belonged to a sacred society—even though the people inside it frequently behaved like horses' asses. Inside, we seethed, we burned. We turned our hostility against the alien world.

We all knew men and women who'd "given each other up" in order to serve Jehovah. We regarded them with a kind of awe. People known to be in love but determined to deny their love never sat in the same row of hardbacked chairs at meetings; the air around them, as they studiously avoided each other, was charged with electric tension. We all knew, and honored, men and women who set off for missionary work in foreign countries to put oceans between them and their temptations. They pledged their troth to wait for the New World to marry. For us younger Witnesses, they were the soul of romance.

Our South Brooklyn congregation was not far from Bethel, Watchtower headquarters. We felt about young male "Bethelites," whose characteristics we lovingly rehearsed, as other young girls might feel about glamorous, unattainable movie stars. They moved through our lives, and in slur fantasies, like gods. They were mat permitted to marry if they wished to remain at Bethel. Often they dated girls from local congregations—took them to a roller-skating rink, danced the tango after dinner in parents' homes. Those dates were like being courted by a handsome slave in the service of a jealous king, or a sailor in a foreign port. Cinderella was always left on her doorstep; Prince Charming never returned to reclaim her. When I was 13, a beautiful young man with a Southern accent that turned me to jelly took me to see Jane Wyman and Lew Ayres in Johnny Belinda at the Brooklyn Paramount, and then we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, holding hands and talking about God. He talked; I, practiced in the art of humility and not knowing how to combine humility with something called "personality," which the Witness girls endlessly discussed, listened, occasionally uttering a monosyllabic response. He never took me out again: there were other girls who knew better than I how to combine "submissiveness" with charming artifice. But even for those popular girls who had "personality," there was always an underlying sadness. The Bethelites took them out (kissed them sometimes, usually chastely, sometimes scandalously); the young women groomed themselves, as young women do, for romance, but nothing, they knew, was likely to come of it. Young women charmed; but their charms could not seduce. They had a powerful rival—God.

When two Witnesses did marry—usually after months of clandestine |meetings and hot, claustrophobic secrecy—we spoke of them wonderingly, critically. We were jealous, and couldn't admit it. They had violated an ethic that was all the stronger because it was not an absolute imperative; they had broken an unwritten law. ("Martha's getting married," we would say, in tones one might use to say, "Martha's having an abortion!") Once I saw my uncle kiss a woman from the congregation in a dark parked car. I Felt fear and excitement and guilt—their guilt, my guilt for having seen hem. My mother told me, reluctantly, her back turned, her rigid spine expressing infinite displeasure, that my uncle and the woman were to be married. Both families kept the news secret.

When two Witnesses got married, we watched to see how great the evidence of their "selfishness" would be: Would they pioneer (work as full-time proselytizers) together? Would they have children right away? If they did pioneer, their having married would be—with more or less charity— more or less forgiven (although, of course, we knew they were doing it. No one, then, talked much about it). If they had children immediately, they gained a reputation for foolishness or "immaturity"; how could one, selfishly, have children in a world so close to dying? If they neither pioneered or had children, it was clear that they had married for "selfish purposes"—to do it. Some Witnesses, marrying, felt compelled to say they were marrying "for companionship"—the implication being that they were not doing , or at least not doing it a lot. Whether or not a newly married couple had a double bed was a subject of consuming interest. Young Witness girls weaseled their way into a lot of bedrooms—we were like a roving Hays Office—to see if the marital bed was twin or double; if a bed was double, it thrilled and alarmed us.