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
UnevenlyYoked	Barbara's mother was a Witness, her father was not. What the "unbeliever" and the child go through in the process.

Pain is multiplied when one member of a marriage is not a Witness. Because women outnumber men among the Witnesses, the likelihood is that the unbelieving mate will be the husband. The believing woman is told that she may be the instrument of her husband's salvation. This places an intolerable burden upon her: She cannot but feel superior to the man who is scheduled for destruction, while at the same time she must act as if the man who despises or is indifferent to her beloved Jehovah is, by Divine arrangement, the head of her household. She is constrained from leaving her mate, even if he is abusive; she is, in effect, the caretaker of his soul. She may seek divorce only on the ground of adultery. The Witnesses used not to regard homosexuality as a scriptural ground for divorce; they have in recent years enlarged their definition of adultery to encompass homosexual infidelity. At one time, bestiality was a ground for divorce. (Women were victims of doctrinaire semantics: "Bestiality is not the same as adultery or fornication."—Aid to Bible Understanding, p. 217)

A woman asking whether she might justifiably secure a legal separation from a husband who beat her was told, in the columns of The Watchtower (May 1, 1975), of another Witness whose alcoholic husband abused her— beat her, slapped her, kicked and punched her—for twenty years: "The Bible's truth enabled her to endure and to he a happy Christian." This happy Christian had frequently to barricade the entrance of her barn, cowering with her eleven children, when her husband arrived with blood lust in an alcoholic rage. After twenty years of this, her husband, according to The Watchtower, quit drinking, "improved in controlling his temper," and began to accompany her to meetings. "Marriage mates should strive to remain together despite marital problems resulting from human imperfection." The Watchtower pointed out that in addition to being derelict in her spiritual duties to an unbelieving mate, a woman who chose to leave him might also find herself having to work to support herself; her secular work might "consume time now used in spiritual activities." The Watchtower did not neglect to suggest that the abused woman might be responsible for her victimization: "Do you nag or provoke him? 'A leaking roof . . . and a contentious wife are comparable.' " [Watchtower, May 1, 1975, pp. 286-87]

Can a woman live like this with any degree of self-respect? Women live with men they hate. Because there is no comfort for them anywhere else— they have been told, by their mentors, whom they do respect— they come increasingly dependent upon the Watchtower Society. They are God's foundlings, turning to "His organization" for the warmth and support the Watchtower Society has assured them is available nowhere else.

Opposition from their mates allows women to feel martyred and to gain status within the organization. Their increased worth within the organization compensates for their domestic suffering.

I think of the years I spent feeling contemptuous of my dear father, of his impotence in the face of the contempt of his wife and daughter. He was our head, our master, we were told, in all things but worship. But our whole life was worship! His nominal "headship" was as empty as our treacly declarations of submission. My beautifully gregarious father could have no friends of his own in our house: they drank and made dirty talk and defiled. Our friends were always there, at his table, in his living room, preaching at him or indifferent toward him, glaring at him when he helped himself to food, a small revenge, as we were saying Grace. His presence was tolerated.

He argued pugnaciously with the Witnesses, who provoked him to impotent rage by fielding all his questions with rote reiteration of Bible texts; his rage increased geometrically as they refused to be provoked to answering rage, never sacrificing their studied demeanor to the urgency of passion or anger. My father thought that was inhuman; "Stone-wall Jehovahs," he called them. "Your God is no better than Hitler," he said. "The whole world is a concentration camp—everybody's going to the ovens but you." "We love you," they replied. "We want to help you." But their love was for my mother; she grew sleek and beautiful with it, while my father raged.

He packed his bags frequently to leave. My mother did not want him to leave; he was the means of her financial support—and she was preaching one hundred hours a month. He threatened so often to leave that my brother, when he was 7, packed his suitcases for him, snot and tears all over his face, and dared him to leave us. He did not. (I never saw my brother cry again.) My mother and I would go out to preach on Christmas mornings, leaving my father alone, bereft and windily angry. We told ourselves we were doing God's will; his very opposition was proof of it.

My father wanted once to take me to the country for a weekend; and I— wretched child that I was—refused to go unless I could take my Watchtower study books with me. We were both adamant; neither of us would yield. My brother tells me how my father spent that weekend: driving wildly, blindly along mountain roads, courting his own destruction. I had won.

One Christmas Eve, when I was alone with my father, who was drinking dully, steadily, there was a poltergeist phenomenon in our kitchen—cups and saucers and plates and pots spun wildly around and settled with a thunderous crash while he went on drinking. It was as if the universe had wheeled drunkenly in protest and settled at his feet. (I do not think I am imagining this. I think I had an awful hunger for my father's love.)

My mother was my "sister" in the faith—and God's surrogate. How she wanted and needed a perfect, "theocratic" child. So often I displeased her. Days of heavy silence were her reproach. In her silence and mine she wrote letters to me, when we lived together, and posted them, and handed them to me when the mailman came, her face averted from my gaze. They were the words she could not say. (Now we have no more words.) And we were rivals for the love of God, and allies against my father. And rivals for the love of men. Every man who came to see me was seduced by my mother's lofty spirituality, by the faint fragrance of suffering and martyrdom that accompanied her. I was imperfect, available flesh; she, removed from the arena of sexuality, was pure, untouchable spirituality. It was never any contest. (All this my father watched.) I admired her, I envied her, I was jealous of her—my mother, my sister (we are each other's failures). I have wanted so often to tell her I love her; the words are locked in my throat. I lack charity. I have wanted to hear her say she is sorry (for our loss, our defeat, for failing me). I have wanted to tell her I am sorry (for our loss, our defeat, for failing her). But we have no more words.

I was over 30 before I felt I had any right to my father's love. He gave it freely when I asked; I had only to ask. When my father lay dying, we thought, of a massive coronary, I said, reaching down to touch his wired chest, "Daddy, I'm so glad the last years have made us friends." "We were always friends, Bobbie," he said. "It was just that we didn't always know it." I felt as if I had entered my childhood at last, reclaimed what I had wantonly thrown away. I had sacrificed him for God, stolen from him and from myself the best love I had to offer and to receive. My friendship with my father has been healing, redemptive; it has made me whole. He has forgiven me those sorry years. That amplitude of spirit humbles me.

At a convention of Witnesses, I watched a Bible "drama" that was meant to illustrate the danger of rebellion against Jehovah. The highlight of the production came when a small child, whose mother and father had been among 14,700 Israelites destroyed by Jehovah for insurrection against Moses, sobbed wildly for his dead parents: "Oh, Mommy, oh, Daddy, why did you do it? Why did you sin against Jehovah?" A voice from the wings thundered: "Don't cry, my dear, though your heart is breaking.... We must not mourn for those who are punished. We must not cry for those Jehovah kills." That drew ecstatic applause.

As I left the convention grounds, feeling pity and anger, and remorse (there was a time when I had been able to tolerate the idea of a vengeful Jehovah's destroying my own father), I ran into a free-lance photographer whose extraordinarily beautiful and gentle face invited confidence. "They're telling people to rejoice in the destruction of their own families!" I said to him. But it turned out that he, a former acid-head from a poor Cuban family, was, although "not a baptized Christian," studying the Bible with the Witnesses. "I don't know," he said. "The world is so bad.... If I didn't have this, what's my purpose in life? What am I doing with my life? The world is full of such bad things. Corruption and all. People aren't kind.. . The Witnesses made me give up my beard. I liked my beard, but the elders told me it was wrong, and I figured, Christ gave his life up for people he didn't even know, so what's a beard?"

"But how do you feel when you know old friends of yours, maybe even members of your family, are going to be destroyed at Armageddon?" I asked this sweet, shy man. In a dead voice, he gave me the history of the world—Adam and Eve, the ransom, the signs foretelling the end of the world. His face had nothing to do with his words. His face was creased and earnest with suffering. "No," I said. "Please tell me what you feel." "Well," he said, "I try not to think about it too much. Well, really . . . sometimes I think . . . other people are human beings too. I guess I feel some pain. I'm struggling to accept it.... It'll be nice when the earth is clean, when there isn't any more death and suffering. Jesus was kind.... I try to think that even though certain people I love are going to perish, I have to be happy because God says I should be. Though sometimes, like when we have family gatherings, and I have so much fun, you know . . . I think . . . well, it hurts. I think about it a lot. Like, my mother . . ." And he began to cry.