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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 |
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Charity and Goodness |
Witnesses are taught to avoid the charities of the world. |
A young woman who had been a full-time field worker (a "pioneer") came to Bethel headquarters after her husband had died of a sudden heart attack and her son had, accidentally it was supposed, hanged himself. She was put to work in the laundry room, operating a giant press. She was a perpetually smiling, sweet, singularly unassertive woman who seemed to have put her personal tragedies behind her. One day, her glasses slipped off and were smashed in the press. She began to howl and scream and cry that immemorial cry—"Why me?" Her roommate reported that she cried ("Why me?") in her sleep. She was judged unstable. She was given a Greyhound ticket to her parents' home in the Northwest. (I do not know what has become of her.)
An old man, who had been at Bethel for thirty years, grew senile. His senility took the form of his muttering obscenities at the dining-room table. He was given two "warnings," which his hardened arteries obviously couldn't assimilate, and then ordered to leave. He had no resources, financial or emotional. He was last seen begging in downtown Brooklyn.
In both these cases two factors are at work: The Watchtower Society has no charitable institutions to handle emotionally disturbed or mentally ill persons; and disturbance and illness are seen as evidence of the Lord's displeasure. There is no place for people in terrible trouble to go.
Fred Franz, at that time the Society's vice-president, told me once that he had been on board ship with a young Japanese missionary who was manifestly disturbed—babbling and incoherent. "I thought," Franz said, "I could cast the demons out of her, but Jesus said that his apostles should not practice that gift after His death; so I didn't presume." The missionary jumped overboard and died.
Needless to say, Jehovah's Witnesses have no lock on arbitrariness, arrogance, or unkindness. Every religious order has its horror stories. But because there is no institutionalized charity among the Witnesses, giving is individual, and not giving may be justified on theological grounds. (I am blurring definitions purposefully: I mean giving in the sense of spontaneous goodness, Christian love; and I mean giving financially. The two are not unrelated.) Misfits, the unattractive, the aberrant can be regarded as waste products of the Devil's world, not as fellow sufferers.
(p.126)