Chapter III

Waiting for the World to Die

Woman is merely a lowly creature whom God created for man as man's helper.-Let God Be True (Watchtower Bible and Tract Society,1946), p. 24

I was a fashion designer and I traveled all over Europe and I had a fabulous career, but it's nothing compared with knowing the joy of Jehovah. I gave it all up, so you have to know this is the Truth.... You're a career girl-you know what it all means; I had glamour, prestige, salary, everything. But I knew I wasn't pleasing to God. Now instead of having a career where I'm making my name known, I'm making Jehovah's name known. My name isn't worth anything. I'm nothing without Him.-Remark made by a female Witness at the "Divine Purpose District Convention," August 10, 1974

Woman is habituated to living on her knees; ordinarily she expects her salvation to come down from heaven where the males sit enthroned. ...This dream of annihilation is in fact an avid will to exist.-Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 600-06

I SLEPT fitfully the night of the day I read the account of Maria Russell's court- testimony. I understood how strong a hold that woman--consigned, by the Witnesses, to an eternity of lovelessness- had on my imagination. Once I thought I heard her voice. "Don't leave me," she said. "Help me." I don't believe in "voices" (words like Yin, Yang, Zen, astral projection, and what-is-your-astrological-sign? send me fleeing from a room as quick as you can say UFO); I put it down to overtiredness.

My brain flashed an unwelcome signal to me. I resurrected the warnings I'd read, over and over, for years and years, in The Watchtower and Awake! magazines. Make mock of Jehovah's Witnesses, the warnings said, and demons will take over your mind. (I even remembered-I hadn't thought of it for years-how, when I was 10 years old, I flew in the face of my elders' strict admonitions and played the Ouija Board-a sure way to invite the demons into your life.) I reminded myself that it would be extraordinary if I didn't, occasionally, get nightmarish nudges from a programmed past (as one might experience pain in an amputated limb), dismissed all thoughts of demon influence," felt maudlin pity for the bludgeoned little girl I'd been, and fell into a troubled sleep.

I dreamed of God as the last link in the food chain, the Ultimate Predator, the Final Devourer. I dreamed He swallowed women up alive. I saw an endless procession of Pastor Russell's offering up women as sacrifices, and I saw the women greet their bloody consummation with a smile.

The official stance of the Witnesses toward women has been consistent. It derives from Paul; "The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God." [I Corinthians 11:3) Sometimes, in their zeal, they achieve black-comedic effects: In Aid to Bible Understanding, a 1971 Watchtower publication, we are told that a female zebra-whose

“characteristic or quality [is that she craves] sexual satisfaction from any quarter"-symbolizes "Israel unfaithfully seeking after pagan nations and their gods." [p. 202)

Russell set the tone. In Studies in the Scriptures, Volume VI, The New Creation, published in 1911, after his divorce, he professed to see sex as an evil necessity, a messy marital obligation that was part of the marriage contract rather than a pleasure and a joy. "Sexual appetites," he said, war against the spirit of the New Creation." (He writes in the spirit of the injunction issued to dutiful, nonorgasmic Victorian wives: "Lie back and think of England.")

"Strength of mind and body," Russell asserted, "by divine arrangement abides with, and constitutes man the head of the family, …it is for the husband to weigh, to consider, to balance, to decide."

A woman with strength of mind was more to be despised than one who had the good sense to remain as passive, humble-silly-as God, in His wisdom, had made her:

Depraved and selfish [women), disposed not only to rebel against all unreasonable and improper headship, but even to dispute any and every proposition, and to haggle and quarrel over it . . . while not claiming to be the provider for the family, nevertheless [attempt] directly or indirectly, to usurp the authority of the head of the home, to take and to hold the control of the purse and of the family. . . . Should . . . a wife gifted with superior talent, judgment and abilities . . .be regarded as the head of the family, and the husband as the helpmate? . . . No. . . . No woman should marry a man beneath her in character and talents-one whom she would not properly look up to as her "head." And no man should marry a woman his superior. (A man married to a) superior woman . . . would gradually lose what little manhood he possessed, gradually drop everything into the hands of his wife, and become merely her tool, her slave, to provide the living and keep her commandments. [This would be] a degradation of his flesh. [If a superior woman cannot] reverence [her husband, she must cultivate humility and submission ]hide her light under a bushel. [Ibid.)

It may be that Charles Russell had Maria in mind, and he probably had himself in mind when he wrote that a husband was "thoroughly justified in considering himself deserted, and in taking up a separate home to which he could take such of the children as had not been thoroughly poisoned by the mother's wrong course" if his wife exercised “petty tyrannies" to make his home "a veritable purgatory." [Ibid.)

Russell professed that he had received so many letters from "the matrimonial furnace of affliction" as to convince him that the single state was better than the married state, Our Lord being the noblest example of those who chose not to marry .

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 for 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-sincerely 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 our fantasies, like gods. They were not 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; 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 them. 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 fulltime 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 nor 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 it, 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.

As the years passed, the Witnesses' attitude toward marriage slowly changed. By the time I was at Watchtower headquarters, in the early 1950’s, missionaries were drifting back across the seas, reuniting, marrying without stigma. Male Bethelites were permitted to marry provided that they, and their prospective mates, had served at Bethel headquarters for ten years. (The first beneficiary of this change of regulations was the man who amended the regulations-Nathan H. Knorr, third president of the Watcher Society.) Young men and women are now warned against the dangers of premarital intimacy. They are encouraged to keep themselves pure for Christian matrimony. They may now marry with impunity. (It is still regarded as somewhat foolhardy to bring children into a dying world. Children are, after all, unpredictable, potential rebels; they divert emotional and financial resources away from God-and from "his organization.")

The Witnesses' response to changing sexual mores in the sexually permissive1960s and '70s has guaranteed that they will not lose all their young people to whimsy or willfullness or spontaneity-that is, to depravity: to the evil world where all sexual appetites are indiscriminately gratified. Better marry-within the organization-than to burn with worldly sexual libertines.

The Witnesses tend now, as they move toward the mainstream, to reinforce the nuclear family and traditional family roles:

In the Christian congregation the family is recognized as the basic unit of Christian society.... Children are commanded to obey their parents, and fathers particularly are charged with the responsibility of bringing them up in the discipline and authoritative advice of Jehovah.

The man used as an overseer in the Christian congregation, if married, must exhibit high standards as a family head, presiding properly and having his children in subjection.... Wives are exhorted to love their husbands and children, to be workers at home, and to subject themselves to their own husbands.

The apostle Paul strongly admonished against breaking up the family relationship, appealing to the unbeliever on the basis of the welfare of the unbelieving mate as well as of the children. He stressed the great value of the family relationship when he pointed out that God views the young children as holy, even though the unbelieving mate has not been cleansed from his sins by faith in Christ....

The inspired Scriptures have foretold a vicious attack on the family institution with a consequent breaking down of morality and of human society outside the Christian congregation.-Aid, pp. 564-65

Still, Paul's saturnine attitude toward marriage--"It is better to marry than to burn" [I Corinthians 7:9]--informs their views. The Watchtower suggests that while sexual desire "can seem quite compelling" in a young adult, "time might show that the Christian could make a success of singleness without being tormented by desire. [TW Nov. 15, 1974] The Watchtower advises its readers to wait till they are "past the period of primary surge of desire . . . to evaluate" the decision to marry or not to marry. Singleness is still thought to be the better course.

(When I was at Bethel, the "Factory Servant"-the overseer in charge of all printing operation summoned all 400 factory workers to announce his decision to marry one of the Bethel housekeepers. He apologized to us for “not maintaining the honored state of singleness" and assured us, with his wife-to-be at his side, that neither his own regrettable personal necessities, nor his wife, nor their marriage would ever supplant or take precedence over his first priority, which was to serve Jehovah as our overseer. His wife-to-be applauded with the rest of us.)

Responding to external realities, the Witnesses choose now to emphasize the horrors attendant upon premarital intimacy, the vileness of "unnatural acts." And their language is no less stringent than one would expect from people who look upon the Sistine Chapel and see, in that unrivaled magnificence, "pornography . . . rampant." [Aw, Jan. 8, 1975]

Masturbation is "unnatural." Mentally deranged people are notorious masturbators. The Watchtower can't resist a jibe at the Catholic Church: "Many mentally disturbed priests and nuns are chronic masturbators." Unemployed persons and prisoners masturbate. If a Witness masturbates 'in a "state of semi-conscious sleep," Jehovah will no doubt forgive him or her: but for added insurance, it would be wise to speak to an elder or (if you are a woman) to a mature sister. [TW, Sept. 13, 1973]

(The sense of guilt nourished by such injunctions is so debilitating that many young men and women do voluntarily turn to their elders for spiritual advice, willingly subjecting themselves to an inquisition and disapprobation. I was a closet masturbator-literally: a closet was the only private place I could find; and although I did not ask for help to redeem me from this evil practice, I was convinced, every time I saw an elder with a scowl, that he had seen through the walls to the heart of my evil.)

It is wrong to look at somebody passionately, or to touch anybody passionately. (When I was at Bethel, men and women were instructed not to hold hands unless they planned to marry. "Holding hands can be a clean expression of affection between persons contemplating marriage. True, it does have a stimulating effect, but this is natural and not necessarily bad." [TW, Jan. 1, 1974] Kissing is acceptable as long as it is a "clean expression of affection" and not passionate.) It is a serious violation of God's will to "excite each other sexually by putting . . . hands on each other's private parts." Fornication refers not just to sexual union between unmarried persons, but "to Iewd conduct such as one might find in places of prostitution. (TW, Oct. 1, 1973] Avoid the occasions of sin: "Ice-skate, play tennis, have a restaurant meal together, visit some museum or local point of interest and beauty." Surround yourself with people.

Oral and anal sex-within marriage, and performed by consenting adults-are perversions: male and female homosexuals indulge in these practices. You don't have to perform a homosexual act to qualify as a homosexual: if you have homosexual fantasies, you are a homosexual in your heart-and God sees your heart.

This is an example of how self-hatred leads to self-abnegation:

I had been a homosexual since the age of eight.... I was a pervert. I can still recall at least 150 males with whom I repeatedly engaged in every kind of sexual perversion.... Actually, by the gay world's standards, I might have been considered only a moderate homosexual since I engaged in immorality with less than three different men each day. Secretly, I knew that my homosexuality was wrong.... I was invited to a meeting of Jehovah's witnesses. . . The idea of living forever in a paradise earth really appealed to me.... It was a question of either serving Jehovah and living or staying "gay" and dying. ... I resigned from all acting engagements, even though it meant giving up many material comforts and much public exposure as an actor. I realized that the atmosphere in the field of acting is simply not conducive to practicing true Christianity or any decent morality. . . . I have married a fine Christian woman. [TW, Aug. 15, 1974, pp. 487-88]

I couldn't have been more than 12 when my friend Milly, a Witness who was two years my senior-and light-years ahead of me in sophistication and daring-invited me to her house after a morning of proselytizing and proposed that we "talk dirty." I acquiesced-partly because it was fun to talk dirty, but mostly because I was regarded by most Witness girls as a smartass goody-goody snot, and I was inclined to purchase popularity at any price.

Talking dirty led inevitably to bed, where Milly showed me "how babies nurse," "how grown-ups do it." Milly slid her finger along my vagina-a favor I was too scared, too rigid, to return. I told her I was scared; I said we shouldn't do it. "Dumb," Milly said. "You don't get pregnant from a girl on top of you." Too scared to protest that that wasn't what I was scared of-Jehovah's wrath was what I was scared of-I allowed myself to be seduced. I didn't enjoy it.

Later, as I was walking home, a man called to me from a parked car. "Do you know where Suzie lives?" he asked. "I'm sorry, no," I said. "That's too bad," he said, "I wanted to suck her pussy." Hearing him but not hearing him, I repeated, "No, I'm sorry." "Have you ever been laid in a car?" he asked. I did hear that, and I ran, convinced that this was a punishment, that I was a dirty, wicked girl who invited lewd comments. I was tortured by the certainty that they-God, the elders, my mother-all knew- and were allowing me to suffer the agonies of waiting before they revealed my wickedness to the world.

I overheard my chiropractor tell a patient that he had to report all cases of VD to the Board of Health. I fled from his office, knowing that he was talking about me: I waited for men in a white truck from the Board of Health to haul me away. Baby-sitting one night, I read the symptoms of gonorrhea in Dr. Fishbein's Medical Home Examiner. A bone spur on the heel was one of the symptoms. I looked at my heels-what was that protuberance?

I couldn't understand why they all waited so long to punish me. I wanted to be exposed; it was better than this endless watching and waiting. In sixth grade, a girl passed mc a note: "Do you want to fuck?-" it said. Everybody knew ! No wonder my mother didn't love me. Even Milly didn't like me. I had thought to buy her approval. Milly refused to talk to me. "I wouldn't study The Watchtower with her," she told her friends. "She's a know-it-all. Thinks she's too good for everybody. " Her malice was transparent to me; I was too bad for everybody. I never told. All that summer, none of Milly's crowd ever invited me to go to Coney Island with them. I spent all my time preaching.

Not all Witnesses are successful in their struggles against their sexual nature. When I was interviewing Witnesses at a district convention at Aqueduct Race Track in 1974, 1 found that while few women were willing to admit that sex, or the Women's Movement, posed any kind of problem for them at all, male Witnesses frequently acknowledged that the prohibition against premarital sex might conceivably create conflicts. Not all Witnesses have become their personae; occasionally, at Aqueduct, most often with men, a hint of jocularity and frivolity entered conversations. It was almost immediately aborted, as they remembered that I was not one of them.

At the convention at Aqueduct, I did find, in the midst of certainty, among 25,000 pain-evaders and happiness- proclaimers, two men who stood out like birds of paradise: Bo Jacks, dressed in poison-green silk, pimp straw hat, platform shoes; and Ron Bookers, resplendent in a white ruffled, sequined shirt. On their partially exposed black-is-beautiful 18-year-old chests hung gold chains and medallions surrounded by sparkling stones. They admitted to being in trouble. Their confusion was refreshing; it felt like something precious. They were trying hard to be Jehovah's Witnesses: their mothers had raised them to be Witnesses, but, "Yeah, sometimes it's hard. It's hard to be a Jehovah's Witness; it's hard, like the Witnesses can’t . . .you don't suppose' to like . . . gotta be good, you can't party, you gotta go to all the meetings, field service and stuff. For a young lady, it's kind of easy, there's nothing to do, you know, she could stay home, she could do her mother chores. But how’re we gonna kill time?…

“Sex? That's the hardest thing in the life. It's hard. You know, I'm not gonna say I never had sex, 'cause you know I do, but I try, you know, to keep it to a certain extent where I can stop. I really want to get married. Therefore it would be legal, I wouldn't have to do it behind doors. You know, you can get kicked out of the Witnesses for having sex. If you're not baptized, you get public reproof. I had public reproof. They find out 'cause somebody tell on you or you tell on yourself; it's suppose' to be you tell on yourself. But like myself, since I'm not baptized, I can't help myself, I gotta have sex. See, the sisters won't have nothin' to do with me, 'cause their parents told them, don't mess with a brother 'less he dressed up in a suit and tie. Well, that's not my thing. Who I have sex with, they call them ‘worldly people.' But I wouldn't marry one of them. You find the Witness sisters, they don't lie, they don't cheat, they was brought up

like a human being....

"I'm trying. I'm really trying."

As Middle American as apple pie (but not quite so Middle American as to enshrine Mom on her kitchen-pedestal), the Watchtower Society reacts to "New Wedding" ceremonies with irritation. Witnesses exchange vows in the Kingdom Hall meeting place, after an elder of the congregation gives an "upbuilding talk" on the appropriate behavior of husbands and wives.

The groom: I _____take you _____to be my wedded wife, to love and to cherish in accordance with the divine law as set forth in the Holy Scriptures for Christian husbands, for as long as we both shall live together on earth according to God's marital arrangement."

The bride: "I _____take you ______to be my wedded husband, to love and to cherish and deeply respect, in accordance with the divine law as set forth in the Holy Scriptures for Christian wives, for as long as we both shall live together on earth according to God's marital arrangement." [TW, May 15, 1974, p. 2751

The Witnesses' attitude toward women is consistent with Russell's misogynistic tone. (it is not really an anomaly that Russell's will specified women as his executors. He could trust them, of course, to execute his will without a murmur: they were his trustworthy servants.)

Although women bear the brunt of door-to-door proselytizing, there are no female elders in congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses (who learned from the example of Maria Russell that it is impossible to give a woman a crumb without her wanting to be invited to the banquet). There are no women in the governing body of the Witnesses, or on the board of directors of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society or its sister corporations.

When there are no qualified male members present in a congregation, a woman may perform duties otherwise reserved for men; she must, however, in that event, and if she is teaching others in the presence of her husband or another male, “wear some form of head covering besides her hair, which she normally always has.” (Aid, p. 725) Besides her hair, which she normally always has. Unintentional humor is attendant upon bad grammar.

A Christian husband is instructed to be mindful of the “limitations and vicissitudes” of his wife and to “consider the opinions, likes, and dislikes of his wife, even giving her the preference when there is no issue at stake.” (Aw, April 22, 1972, p 11; italics mine) The Watchtower fosters womanly dependence with Talmudic specificity: “a married woman who favors having her ears pierced should rightly consult her husbandly head.” (TW, May 15, 1974, p 319) A zealous husband expresses love for his wife by trying to please her in little ways without sacrificing his headship or the best interests of the family.” A woman’s qualities are “an expression of the man’s honor and dignity.” [(Aw, May 22, 1972, p 13] (She is nothing without a male “head,” as men are nothing without Christ.) The Christian woman should be happy to acknowledge her subordinate position by the modesty and submissiveness she displays.

Are the women happy?

If women had complete equality with men, governments would draft women to fight in the fields, jungles and trenches…Would you really want equality with men in digging coal out of a mine thousands of feet underground if men did their share of the housework? Would you really want to spend equal time plowing fields and shoveling manure with your husband if he agreed to help you cook and clean at home?—Awake!, May 22, 1972 p 7.

They profess to be happy.

Irving I. Zaretsky and Mark P Leone (Religious Movements in Contemporary America) believe that women in evangelical religions gain a position of their own in the community without reference to their husbands. (A female Witness who has an unbelieving mate is told to “accept his headship” except in regard to worship. She is to defer to him in all other matters, but not to permit his indifference or opposition to deter her from going to religious meetings, proselytizing, or instructing her children in the faith) Religion, Zaretsky and Leone suggest, becomes an accepted form of activity for women who cannot operate in the secular world because they lack the necessary education or certification. Their religion becomes the “avenue that short-circuits a whole set of life-problems.”

For disaffected women whose experience has taught them that all human relationships are threateningly volatile, capricious, and unreliable, the Witnesses provide an answer. Relate to God. God is a safe lover, a constant lover, a consuming lover. For women who are mired in oppressive poverty— and for a smaller number of guilt-ridden affluent women—the Witnesses provide an answer: Jehovah’s New World will eradicate poverty; He will redistribute the wealth. Explicitly antifeminist, the Witnesses nevertheless provide a vehicle for downtrodden women-their religion allows their voices, drowned by the voices of the menacing world, to emerge. As female Witnesses preach from door to door, instructing people in their homes, they experience a multiplication of their personalities. People listen to them; they are valuable, bearers of a life-giving message. Even the indifference with which they are most often greeted adds to their self-esteem, their self-importance: if the world is indifferent to them, the world is indifferent to Jehovah. For women who are afraid of choice, afraid of the responsibility of freedom, the Witnesses offer this solution: Choose God, and all your choices, all your decisions will be forever made for you. For women who long for a sense of community, "God's visible organization" becomes a family. Sometimes the brothers and sisters squabble, but they are always there, a buffer between the Witnesses and the senseless world, a bulwark against a bewildering and hostile world. The parent-God is always there. Women whose self-hatred is pathological find a congenial home among the Witnesses; they are told that it is desirable to be persecuted, Godly to be hated, proof of goodness to be considered worthless by the world. Women who fear and hate the world are secure in the knowledge that God will smash the evil world for them. They find hope in a world without hope.

Here are some of their voices (these are the voices in which they speak to nonbelievers) :

“I had searched for years to find answers, and the Witnesses are the only people who have answers for the world situation. I think I would have been the kind that would be on the soapbox complaining about my taxes if it were not for the Witnesses; now I understand that I can't do it-God will. Women's liberation? Everlasting life is what I'm concerned about. If Libbers were truly living according to the Scriptures, they wouldn't need to be liberated, because Christian women have all the freedom they need. I can see why a career girl like you would rebel. I'm fortunate. My husband supports me.... He's an unbeliever, but he gives me money for transportation to conventions.... I'm not oppressed. None of Jehovah's people are oppressed. We have a hope for the future."

"I used to be involved in lots of different organizations and clubs, but not anymore. Now I stay home and study the Bible with my children."

"My liberation came when I realized there was no future in higher education because this whole system is dying. I wasn't involved in drugs like a lot the people who are in The Truth now. The opposite of dropping out-being popular-is just as dangerous: I was the captain of twirlers, vice-president of the art club, on the senior-class board, on the community-action committee-you name it. Now I know that I was just calling attention to myself. And I was surrounded by temptations to immorality.... I did volunteer work in orphanages and I worked with retarded children because I loved people. But when I got The Truth, I left college and I stopped all those worldly activities to preach full time; because now I know the real way to serve people who are suffering physically and mentally is to serve Jehovah. . . . My classmates leered at me. But we're told we’re going to be hated by this world, and it's better to be persecuted than to be popular. "

A 40-year-old woman, her green eyes shining with the rich gleam of Iunacy, all ruffles and bows and corkscrew curls, a neat approximation of an Ivory Snow queen: "I'll wait for God's kingdom to get married. Men in our organization have headship. It works nicely; families keep together. Dating-- It's been such a long time. I won't go out with worldly men. But I keep busy and occupied. I preach. I work for a doctor; I like to read books about cancer. I don't watch R-rated movies or read dirty books. I never think of sex. . . . Do you think of it a lot? Probably you do. I don't judge people, though."

A 70-year-old woman with a halting, singsong voice: "I had a very unhappy marriage. My husband would do things that weren't proper, and I was always miserable and I prayed to God that nothing should happen to my husband but that he should go away; so my prayers were answered and he did plumbing work out of town. . . . I used to try so hard to be nice to people, but I was always 'done.' Now that I’ve found the fountain of living waters, I'm not 'done' anymore. . . . I'm not oppressed. I don't need women's liberation because I'm in harmony with righteousness, and I’m with those who are inclined toward righteousness., and I'm not oppressed, and I'm not 'done.'

A 20-year-old woman who believes herself to be dying of leukemia invites me radiantly to join her "in finding real peace and security by becoming one with Jehovah's people. I'm dying,” she says, “but I wiII be resurrected on a perfect earth. Live with me!"

These are the voices the outside world hears. In the daily realities of the women’s lives, one hears a murmur of different voices.

They have fun together. They sing together; they dance together (they may be the only people left, outside of Roseland, who dance the cha-cha-cha). They tell each other mildly risque jokes (never in the presence of men). Sometimes they hold hands when they preach together. They read and underline The Watchtower together, as a form of communion. Drawing courage from one another, they are subtly subversive of its text-particularly when the text refers to their relationships with believing or unbelieving mates: they giggle together about how they can avoid sex without giving the appearance of being delinquent in "rendering their marriage dues." If their husbands oppose their religious will, they huddle together for warmth. They gossip together like girls about the men they'll marry in the New World. If, as I frequently heard women complain when I was a Witness, their husbands were lax in "assuming headship," if their husbands would not "take the lead"-placing in their hands the real power in the family while their husbands wore the face of authority-they would talk about ways of subverting their own strength; or they would heave sighs together, in a sisterhood of tea and sympathy and soon-to-be-alleviated grief. They commiserated with one another; they swapped fantasies of truly dominant men, dreaming together of the transformation of their men in the Edenic paradise for which they long. They take crank cures together-grape-and-garlic cures for cancer, mutual toe massages for everything from arthritis to migraines; they flock to the same chiropractors, the same miracle doctors.

I have never known, really, whether the Darby-and-Joan marriages I saw among the Witnesses were truly happy. Many couples had the appearance of happiness, setting off together with their book bags and their satchels to preach together; speaking-like two-headed animals-in one voice; alluding, sometimes, to shared nocturnal pleasures. I assume-inasmuch as some of the Witnesses I knew were mischievous neurotics, some thwarted ecstatics, some decent good people, some as healthily vulgar as others were prudishly, prudently upright and uptight, some profoundly bitter and others temperamentally sanguine-that their marriages were as diverse as their personalities, though outwardly they all conformed.

I have asked Witness women why, if women are not inferior to men, they are not elders, ministers, shepherds of the flock. I have been answered, "I don't know. I believe in the inherent wisdom of the Bible. We don't have to justify our position with biology or anthropology. God is our Creator and our Regulator; He knows what's best. Our responsibilities are worked out by God; we don't make decisions." Mary Brady, an unpaid clerical worker married to an administrator at Bethel, said (and I think she was telling her truth): "My subordinate role gratifies me. I'm happy to lean on my husband, happy for him to provide my living. He offers me a home; I take care of his home. I get financial and spiritual support. He honors me. I'm not a sex object or a nursemaid. He's stronger, I'm weaker. A relationship of equals is something I do not desire. I have a right to my opinions. But if I had a burning insight, I'd tell it to my husband. Why would I need to share it with anybody else? When men abuse their wives, it's a perversion of headship. Chafing comes from the abuses of God's arrangements. I'm happy. Like," she said, "you can't compare bananas and onions." "Which are women?" I asked, liking her, sensing vulnerability under her steel-gray poise. "Bananas, of course," she answered . . . and then, as she saw the raised eyebrow of the male elder to whom she kept looking for approval, she-surprised and threatened by her own levity-improvised nervously: "Well, Jehovah created all fruits and vegetables to serve their purpose, and we need bananas and we need onions; eating would be pretty dull without onions." Then she asked me if I was a lesbian. "We don't approve of lesbians," she said.

The Witnesses encourage women to exercise a degree of autonomy over their own bodies. Contraceptives are acceptable. Women are encouraged to breast-feed babies (and made to feel slightly guilty if they do not); recent Watchtower publications have endorsed giving birth in one's home.

Abortion, however, is, under any circumstances, murder--even when birth might jeopardize the pregnant woman's life. Diabetes, hypertension, or other grave cardiovascular diseases are not reasons to abort, nor does the danger of giving birth to a defective or deformed child constitute justification for abortion: Jehovah can always undo the damage in His coming New. Order. [See TW, March 15, 1975, p. 191-92.]

Artificial insemination by an anonymous donor is regarded as a form of, adultery; both the wife and her consenting mate will be penalized by expulsion from the congregation. In cases in which a husband's sperm is introduced artificially to impregnate his wife, "They would have to resolve any personal questions of propriety as to the manner of acquiring the semen."' [Aw, Aug. 8, 1974, p. 22]

The Witnesses' feelings about rape can be summed up in the familiar: She got no more than she deserved. Virtuous women don't get raped. They might get killed, but they don't get raped. And if it isn't the rapist's victim's fault, it's the rapist's mother's fault. Rape is on the increase because "Satan, the Devil together with his demons is influencing the minds of mankind" as we approach the end of the world. However, "Womankind must share the blame." Not only do they invite rape by advertising their wares in immodest dress and being arrogant enough to think they can walk alone after 10 o'clock with impunity, but

to begin with, until the age of five or six years ... little boys have their personalities molded largely by women, their mothers.... It is usually the mother that has the most opportunities to inculcate in her son respect for womankind, both by word and by example. But far too many mothers have come short in this regard. Especially and specifically blameworthy are those female relatives, such as an aunt or even a mother, who have used boys as sexual playthings, thereby starting them on a road that leads to their having aggressive feelings toward women. [Aw, March 8, 1974, p. 15]

Women are discouraged from learning to defend themselves; they must scream. Indeed, their only recourse is to scream-if they do not scream, and the rapist has his way with them, they are guilty of fornication or adultery. If they do scream and get raped anyway, they're in the clear. If they scream, and get killed, God will resurrect them. Watchtower publications have testimonials of women who screamed and got off safely; one woman screamed and then told her would-be rapist the story of Noah and the Flood. The rapist and she disagreed about how many years Noah had preached before the flood: he said two hundred, she said forty.

Witness women's determination to rejoice in their subjugation may be attributed to a passion for the absolute. Louis Aragon has said that a passion for the absolute is the same as a passion for unhappiness. I think that is simplistic: I think masochistic and self-rejecting women choose an identification with God or with Christ (and withdraw from the world); this identification fosters narcissism, feelings of superiority and omnipotence-which, in a horrible circularity, lead back, through guilt, to masochistic, self-deprecatory behavior. On the one hand, Witness women are narcissistic and enjoy feelings of omnipotence; on the other, they experience guilt, inadequacy, inferiority, and self-hatred. This schizoid personality formation is intimately self-defeating; but it springs from an avid will to exist: in a world here "marginal" people are expendable, a world dehumanized by technology and bureaucracy, Witness women feel that they count. Even their pain is valuable to them: their pains are the arrows of God. Their blood-suffering belongs to Him. Their religion enables them to make sense of the world-the world where people don't "behave right," where people do one another wrong. ("I was 'done,' one Witness woman kept repeating to me. “Before I found The Truth I was always 'done.' ") It is a way for personally and socially dislocated persons-women, blacks, freaks, junkies, the disenfranchised poor-to improve themselves and their lives, to gain status otherwise denied them. Women who despise themselves project their evil image onto others-onto "evil worldlings" who will (they so frantically hope) persecute them. ("Any one who does not conform to God's standard of moral excellence is wicked, bad, evil, or worthless."-Aid, p. 165 3)

A Witness woman believes she is special, different; she "maintains her integrity in an alien world." She needs the society of "the friends" to validate her existence; and each deprivation she endures draws her closer to “God's organization": when the Watchtower Society forbade Witnesses to celebrate Christmas, or birthdays, the response of one elderly woman was “We felt we were privileged to know things others were ignorant about." When I told my Bethel roommate that I was leaving religion, she said, with anguish, "But where will you go?" Her anguish was for me; it was also for herself-my defection terrified her, it threatened her security. The only way Witnesses can deal with defectors is to abort their love for them immediately. We are carriers of a dread disease-doubt, and disaffection. My roommate, a generous, loving woman, pleaded with me not to leave the only light in the darkness of the cold and brutal world. A month later, when she knew I would not turn back from my decision, she told me I was like a dog going back to its own vomit. When I told her I could not countenance the idea of a God who would kill babies at Armageddon, she said, "You are presuming to be more compassionate than Jehovah." And she refused ever to speak to me again.

Talented women frequently throw away their talents-which serve the Devil and gratify the flesh; or they subordinate their talents to the relentless demands of their religion. Happiness has not come from economic and social rewards, so they seek ultimate happiness, the crown of happiness only the Lover-God can bestow. Worldly success is dust and ashes without the revivifying flame of God's love.

The Witnesses have a stunning ambivalence toward worldly success. On the one hand, they profess to despise it, as they profess to despise materialism and the acquisition of wealth. On the other hand, its glitter fascinates and enthralls them. They have never neglected to try to impress me with the successes of people I knew when I was a Witness: "Remember Johnny D. who was at Bethel when you were there- he makes seventy-five thousand dollars a year, and he has four color television sets." …"Remember Peter and Clara, whom you studied with? Peter has a million-dollar business now." (Peter used to play the trombone with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra; he gave that up-self-indulgence, he said it was-and, I am expected to believe, made a million by accident. There is always the subtle implication that Jehovah had a hand in the manufacture of that million, the very kind of success for which successful "worldlings" wiII be destroyed) When I was a Witness, I heard dozens of stories of famous people who were, if not actually Witnesses, "people of goodwill": Bing Crosby's first wife, Dixie Lee, was rumored to have studied the Bible with the Witnesses-Crosby, according to the Witnesses, was "opposed"; Nelson Eddy had, it was said, once contributed money to the Watchtower Society: Eisenhower's mother, the Witnesses go to great lengths to prove, was a Witness; Gorgeous George's wife was a Witness, they said; and (this is true) Mickey Spillane was a Witness.

Teresa Graves, the television actress who used, in her preconversion days, to wriggle onto Laugh-In with words like RING MY CHIMES and WHITE SALE painted on her beautiful black body, became one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Her job, she said, came second. She found it difficult to reconcile herself to her affluence. Unlike most of the never-never-land people in Beverly Hills, she remembered there was a Watts down there beneath the plateaued swimming pools and the smog; and her social consciousness, combined with a sense of impotence, led her straight to an ultimate solution: She spent as much as 100 hours a month proselytizing, the onIy door-to-door television star. Graves played a cop in the television series Get Christie Love! She would not, however, as a Witness, act in a role that required nudity, or "cleavage." She acknowledged with distaste having once, in her unenlightened past, played a bosomy Countess Dracula in a film called Vampira. But she did not recoil from playing a law-and-order enforcement type person protecting the moneyed classes. "Render unto Caesar" . . .

Watchtower and Awake! magazines frequently have articles contributed by actors, artists, and musicians (always anonymous) who gave it all up for Jehovah (they are usually women); or by Witnesses whose worldly successes left them, unaccountably, fragmented and depressed.

A highly placed television network executive, a former member of New York Media Women, a feminist consciousness-raising and political-activist group [TW, July 1, 1974, pp. 387-93], transferred "the feeling of solidarity, of trust, of love , of 'sisterhood,' " from the Women's Movement to Jehovah's Witnesses when it became apparent to her that Women's Liberation "did not have the answers." "Confused, disillusioned, and saddened" by ideological quarrels within the Movement, depressed that "many of the women I had admired and who were taking over the leadership were lesbians," discouraged because many men walked out on feminist women to find more "feminine" women, disturbed because women were deserting their families and putting down motherhood and child-rearing as atavistic and bourgeois, she opted for a movement that would tolerate no ideological dissension, that answered all her questions definitively, and that delivered her from her terror of sexual differences, of sexual and personal choice. She instructed her lawyers to drop the $2-million lawsuit she had filed against the network after she was fired in 1971, allegedly because she had refused to date her boss, and rested her case with the judge who will resolve all injustices.

(Age quod agis, said St. Wilfrid of Whitby: Do what you do. Laborare est orare, said St. Benedict: To work is to pray.)

Remember those dreadful Walter Keane paintings of wistful children with enormous sad eyes? They were paintings that appealed to custardhearts and uninformed aesthetic tastes; and each tug on the melting heartstrings of an undiscriminating public enriched the coffers of the painter of those sentimental assembly-line vulgarities. An anonymous article in Awake! (July 8, 197 5, pp. 12-15], written as if it were by Mrs. Keane, tells the story of the writer's struggle with alcoholism and despair, her flirtation with the occult and assorted Eastern-inspired fads, her three broken marriages, and her subsequent conversion to a God who will wipe away tears from all eyes. The writer describes a legal fracas and a televised painting to establish whether she or the man who was once her husband was the maker of those teary paintings. She speculates as to why her "art" gave her so little satisfaction, why her financial good fortune satisfied her not at all; and she concludes that what was missing in her moneyed life was Jehovah. Now that she is one of Jehovah's Witnesses, she says, "the sad, lost look of the eyes is giving way . . . to a happier look. My husband even named one of my recent happy big-eyed children 'The Eye Witness'!" And, she says, she'll paint them in half the time she used to require-because Jehovah has given her creative propulsion; she'll spend the rest of her time preaching.

Secular work is only a means to support their preaching. Art does not nourish or sustain or ennoble. Everything must be utilitarian, practical-at the most, decorative. Michelangelo was a pornographer. The Cathedral at Chartres is a Devil place. Their God will destroy all man's art at Armageddon; not a poem or a song man has made will survive that burning day.

A friend of mine who was a Witness for three troubled years tells me that she quit going to Witness meetings because "They made me pinch my Joey…They scolded him from the podium when he was only three years old to make him quiet," Sara says, "and they said he couldn't play with his crayons, he had to keep still and listen to the Watchtower discussion or he wouldn't live forever in the New World . . . so I was humiliated, and I pinched him to shut him up; and then I felt guilty- because how could a good mother pinch her son for God?”

When it is assumed that human nature is basically evil, that a child inherits the sinful nature of his first parents, Adam and Eve, the expression of idiosyncratic views, self-assertion, and rebellion are perceived as a smack in the face of a wrathful God. It falls to the parents-God's surrogates-to bring the evil impulses of the child under holy control. If a 2-year-old doesn't eat his carrots, it is not his parents he is offending, it is God. His instincts must be squashed, because they are evil; his spirit must be broken, because pride leads to a Lucifer-fall. The child is controlled and dominated-in the name of a God of love. The child is disciplined in the name of a judgmental God, from Whom all rewards and punishments flow.

Poor Sara. She was convinced that at a convention of 50,000 people, her Joey was the only unruly child. She may well have been right: meetings and conventions of Jehovah's Witnesses are remarkable for the stillness-the unnatural stillness, the lobotomized good behavior-of Witness children. Their voices are not heard.

The Witnesses are the best child-squashers and-controllers I know. (I don't know how many Witness children get God and their mothers mixed up as I did, but I suspect that I was not the only one who suffered that primal disorientation: how is one to know, if sanctions are said to issue from a remote, invisible Deity but are in fact administered by parents who speak in the voice of that Deity, who is Who?)

The instructions Charles Taze Russell issued for raising children [SS, VoI VI] are as saccharine as the lace valentines of his day; but Russell's flowery language disguises an iron determination to repress all the child's true feelings: "Is my little boy feeling happy this mornlng? Does he love papa and mama and sister and brother and doggie?" [p. 552] (1 once knew a little boy who put his doggie in the washing machine to see how he'd come out of the wringer-and I can't say I blame him. The Witnesses may quote "Train up a child in the way he must go and when he is old he will not depart from it" all they like; I have a feeling that it is of such stuff ax murderers are made.) No verbal or physical aggression is permitted the child; aggression is interpreted as hostility toward God.

Russell instructed parents to "apply suggestion" to their children. There was nothing to be gained and everything to be lost, in Russell's view, by allowing a child to relate directly and individualistically to his environment. The child must relate only to God (and to His representatives); the material world exists only to provide moral lessons. The world is thus stripped of its poetry and its mystery; the child is taught how to see as well as how to feel.

A mud puddle becomes the occasion for a sermon: While dressing a child, Russell advised, "talk about the pretty wee birdies and about the big sun looking in at the window and calling all to get up and be good and happy, and learn more lessons about God." On a rainy day, call the child's attention to "the beautiful rain which God has provided for giving the flowers and trees and grass a drink and a bath to refresh them …and for cattle and for us to bathe in and be clean" and happy and praise Him and love Him and serve Him: "This will be an opportunity for wearing storm cloaks and heavy boots, and how thankful we should be that we have these and a rain-proof home and school." [pp. 550-5 11

The reverse coin of Russell's cheery optimism was the admonition to withdraw affection if the child flouted God's or his parents' imperatives: "I know you didn't mean to be bad, but you will get no good-night kiss tonight. You have failed to please us again. I am so sorry my little daughter failed again, I do not doubt your good intentions, dear." [p. 5 5 3] (Russell practiced this sinister-sweetness behavioral therapy with his wife, whom he refused to embrace or kiss when she acted in contravention of his will, which he equated with God's will; it failed with headstrong Maria, but he never lost faith in its efficacy.)

To play, in Russell's view, was to be immoral: a "desire to be amused" led, in due time, to a craving for "the theater and the nonsense of the clown." [pp. 556-57] Idleness was a sin and a shame. If the mind and the imagination were kept a blank slate, Russell believed, the child's handwriting would cover it soon-with "unclean thoughts, the contemplation of obscene pictures." [p. 542] Of course Russell was afraid of leisure: it is true -that only in leisure can vice flourish; it is also true that only in leisure can art flourish. "[The child] should be encouraged to read such books as would give information and not novels . . . weedy, trashy, dreamy literature, that will do him harm and leave him unprepared for the duties of life." [p. 541]

Not only do we find that people cannot see the divine plan in studying the Bible by itself, but we see, also, that if anyone lays the (Watchtower) “Scripture Studies” aside and ignores them and goes to the Bible alone though he has understood his Bible for ten years, our experience shows that within two years he goes into darkness. On the other hand, if he had merely read the "Scripture Studies" with their references and had not read a page of the Bible as such, he would be in the light at the end of two years, because he would have the light of the Scriptures. --TWT, Sept. 15, 1910 (quoted in Hoekema)

It may be that you disagree with the way matters have been handled in connection with the remodeling or building of a Kingdom Hall. Perhaps you feel that you would have selected a different design, another type of floor covering or a different color of drapes. But are there not many possible designs, many types of floor coverings and numerous colors of drapes? Will a different interior decoration affect our relationship with Jehovah?-TW, July 15, 1974, p. 437

The greatest danger for a Witness child, as for an adult, is to think autonomously. To reason independently is an affront to the God whose ways are higher than our ways, the God one may never question. Fortunately, say the Witnesses, they have been provided with "a visible instrument or agency on earth" through which Christ provides "spiritual food" to his slaves." [LGBT)

Jehovah has graciously provided an instrument or channel to teach his people on earth. (Qualified) That channel is the Watchtower Bible And Tract Society, which, though it makes no claim of infallibility, nevertheless excommunicates anyone who comes to conclusions independent of its own. Everything falls within the province of this “Channel”--draperies or the divine plan, it's all the same: the explanation for everything belongs to them.

(I knew that I was intractable, that I was "hardhearted" and had probably caused God's holy spirit to abandon me, when I found, to my sorrow, that "God's organization" could not explain God to me. When I was a girl, I thought-and the guilt and shame attendant upon this aberrant thought shriveled my soul-that Jehovah was like Mr. Rochester or the absent father in The Turn of the Screw: a felt presence that moved darkly through my life, His motives often inexplicable, His word law, His love mysteriously withheld.)

When everything is given (by "God's organization"), nothing more is required. It was thought to be worse than redundant-it was thought to be a mark of contempt for God's "channel"-for a young Witness to go to a college or university:

“In sending [a child to college] at the present time," Russell wrote, parents "should feel a great trepidation, a great fear, lest this outward polish in the wisdom of the world should efface all the polish of faith and character and heart which they as the parents and proper instructors of the child had been bestowing upon it from infancy and before.” Russell believed that the danger of "rationalistic teachings called Higher Criticism, Evolution, etc." was so great that one should be "content with such education as could be obtained in the public schools and high schools or preparatory schools." With typical American entrepreneurial mentality, Russell pontificated: "By the time [the youngster] has had six years schooling in practical business, the probabilities are that he will be much better able to cope with present conditions than the youth who has spent the same number of years under college training." And with smug Philistinism, he added: "We write with full consciousness that to the worldly minded this advice is foolishness or worse." [SS, Vol. VI]

Since Russell's time, nothing has changed. Parents are still reminded that they must render an account to God, Who has placed in their hands the responsibility to convey His desires to children. They are God-appointed guardians and God-appointed moral censors; and their homes reek with the stale small of religiosity-religion by rote, dogma uninformed by the energy of spiritual passion.

Fathers, for example, are admonished to work with their sons in keeping the family car in good shape. How is this related to the Bible? How indeed? Well, since everything connected with producing the car is in harmony with God's law, keeping it in working order also fulfills that law. A father should point this out as he and his son work together.

Mothers, too, ought to sit down and make a dress with their daughters, for this gives a woman the opportunity to impress upon her child the biblical principle of "doing all things for the glory of God." She can learn economy; she can learn modesty. It is tedious and wearisome and unrelenting. A mother and daughter, a father and son can take no natural joy in each other's presence unless they form a trinity with God.

Parents are instructed to "have such a fine program outlined for their children that little or no time remains for outside associations." [TW, Feb. 1,1974, pp. 84-86) They are also told to determine with whom inside the congregation their children may appropriately associate. This advice seems to be at odds with the Witnesses' obligation to love all their brothers and to eschew judging others; but the rationale for forbidding children to associate with Witnesses who are "strongly influenced by the world in attitude, speech, and actions" is that a parent, in enforcing such sanctions, is not making a personal assessment of an individual's worth, but applying God's standards. This fosters a feeling of omnipotence in parents; and it enables them, unwittingly, to use children as a vehicle for hostilities and antagonisms they feel toward other adults but are not permitted to acknowledge: adults who "have it in" for other adult Witnesses may simply forbid their own kids to play with the kids of parents they dislike. Antipathies and animosities that are rigorously repressed thus surface, disguised by a veneer of sanctimony and spirituality: the parents tell themselves they are acting on a mandate from God; they do not allow themselves-they cannot allow themselves—to understand that they are inflicting gratuitous cruelty, that they are guilty of a failure of love. The suffering that accrues to the outlaw/outcaste child who is a pawn in this duplicitous game (a victim of his parents' unconscious) is fathomless. The child perceives his rejection to be a judgment froin God: God, not the kid next door, has rejected and abandoned him. Forbidden to have worldly associates, rejected within the congregation as unsuitable, "untheocratic”, he is bereft.

David Maslanka, a young composer who was raised as a Witness, tells me that his childhood “was like a dark, airless chamber illuminated by rainbow-colored fantasies. My mother was a 'suspect' Witness," he says; "the other Witnesses thought she was off center, flirting with spiritualism. So they wouldn't allow their kids to play with me. I blamed my mother and I pitied her; and I felt that evil forces were working within me, too. I lived in almost absolute isolation. I used to pray someone would invite me to sit next to them at meetings; no one ever did. I felt despised. When I was 11, my mother was excommunicated because of dabbling with the occult; and, since I had burned my bridges by refusing to have worldly friends, there was nobody at all I could talk to, nobody at all." David still finds it hard, so scarring was that brief and bitter experience, to talk freely: in his intensely passionate music, great blocks of glorious colored sound alternate with great blocks of dark, Rousseauvian silence. His music reminds me of ruined Mayan temples thrusting out of the jungle density and stillness, stone upon stone rising from dark decay, sheer will conquering a ripe darkness illuminated with rainbow flashes of blinding light.

Many Witness kids were forbidden to play with me because I was judged to be too smart for my own good—for their own good (and, I suspect, because my mother's beauty and her highly effectual proselytizing evoked jealousies that could not be expressed). I remember once, feeling sophisticated and daring, using a bobby-soxer word—devastating ("This fudge sundae is devastating"),- and a Witness Mother pounced—she had been waiting. “Only Jehovah can devastate," she said fiercely, the fire of the Inquisition burning in her eyes. And she forbade her daughter, my best friend, to play with me. I was 10 years old. I have never forgiven her cruelty, the tears I shed on her account. She was old and sour- her railroad flat smelled as if a hundred years of poverty had been ground into the walls; she pounded the pavements with her message of life-everlasting, hope-and-joy, her legs bulging with varicose veins, her face perpetually distorted in a grimace of pain: and her husband was deaf-her life was a hollow shout; but I have never forgiven her. Both David and I are unforgiving; David and I also share the same reaction when people like us: We find it difficult to believe. People think we're nice! We are enormously, outrageously grateful for small kindnesses; every kindness comes as a surprise.

The Witnesses have not seen fit to change their views on education. Why bother with Devil-knowledge? Why imperil your standing with the all-knowing God? To what practical uses can a college education possibly be put? For the Witnesses, all knowledge must be practical, utilitarian: At the Watchtower Bible Missionary School of Gilead, established in 1942 for full time preachers, no humanities are taught, and no creative arts. The Gilead school was built on an 800-acre farm that the Society had owned and operated since 1935 to provide food for Brooklyn Bethel; "Kingdom Farm" was located 255 miles northwest of New York City in South Lansing, in the Finger Lakes district of New York, adjacent to Cornell. Witnesses enrolled in the five-month course were also assigned farm chores "to relieve nervous tension. (Gilead means "heap of witness." The property was later sold, and the school moved to a new building constructed for that purpose on Columbia Heights in 1968.) Future missionaries are taught "a course in college arithmetic; instructions on shipping and use of Society's forms and reports; manner of dealing with government officials; the required international law; a course in English and grammar ... the essentials of the needed foreign language." No academic credentials are necessary for enrollment; the principal training given to the tuition-free students is "Bible research and public Bible speaking, and the understanding of Theocratic organization instructions." (JWDP, p. 204) Confrontation with metaphysical, philosophical, theological, or moral problems is avoided, as are sociology and psychology ("Inferiority complexes and superiority complexes," an elder once said to me, "are just different terms for selfishness"); Freud and Marx might never have lived. (Emotional problems are the result of "demon influence.") When morality is legislated, there is no reason to discuss its nuances-there are no nuances. (One reference work, Aid to Bible Understanding, a concordance published by the Watchtower Society, devotes as much space to "grayheadedness" as to "goodness.")

I have, as a consequence of this attitude toward "worldly wisdom," known Witnesses who have not read a single book or magazine not published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society for twenty years. I am still amazed at my own youthful temerity: defiantly, when I was at Bethel headquarters, I smuggled New Yorkers into the building, locking myself into an unused guest room to read them. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters! Salinger, I then thought, would know me, would understand me; and I loved (love) him for that.

Of course I did what I was told and did not go to college. In high school, I took a commercial and then a "cooperative" course-going to school and working in the office of a tool-and-die factory on alternate weeks. I was the despair of my teachers, who pleaded with me to take college-preparatory courses. I protested, rebutted, denied; but in the unredeemed, unredeemable part of my God-possessed heart-that tiny corner which denied Him access-I longed to do what I explained I could not, in good conscience, do. If anyone had picked me bodily, bound and shackled, and deposited me on any campus in the Western world, I would have considered it a deliverance; Mephistopheles could have had my soul for the price of a course in Freshman English. I ached--wanting so much to be One of them, despising my own longings—when I saw book-laden college students. I seldom allowed my mind to know what my heart was doing. Vice was the Flatbush Avenue bus. I rode the Flatbush Avenue bus, pretending to be on my way to Brooklyn College, hoping that someone would mistake me for one of those privileged people free to learn and to explore. And all this time, I believed that I still believed; I preached with fervor and conviction.

My life was a crazy-quilt of conflicted desires. College was the Tower of Babel; I harbored secret longings to go to college. I was gratified when my intelligence was respected by my teachers: I was even more gratified when a schoolmate mistook me for a cheerleader. I loved touching people, soul to soul, when I preached; I longed to rub souls with the world. my infatuation with Academia informed most of my adult life. Two of my favorite places in the world are Harvard's Widener Library and Radcliffe garden. Scholars are like alchemists to me; entering a locked room at the Widener is for me, still, like entering the Holy of Holies. I romanticize. Once, sitting in the Radcliffe garden with my daughter, I tried to force my bewildered child to enter my pleasure. She, of course, had no reason to think she was on hallowed ground; she saw no angels guarding the gates of my heaven with flaming swords, "Mommy,” she said, "It's just a small garden-with weeds."

The Witnesses tied up the whole history of the human race in one knot. My friend Walter Szykitka, who was a Witness for twenty-eight years, explains:

"I was kicked out of the sixth grade for not saluting the flag. Thirty Witness kids from New Jersey, all expelled, went to school in an old hotel in Lakewood, a one-teacher schoolhouse. The teacher was a Witness who’d been to a "normal school" somewhere around 1912. It was terrible. I'd been a good student up to then, and those two years screwed me up. I didn't learn anything. I felt freaky, really bad, ashamed. But I thought that the error was in me. The Witnesses tied up the whole history of the world in one knot. They explained everything.

I didn't allow internal conflicts to surface till I went to Bethel. Then I felt a certain . . . restlessness. I'd go into bookstores and look for clues, for books that might tell me something, satisfy this undefined longing; I wanted something to calm the restlessness. I told myself I was haunting bookstores for "corroborative evidence”. That was bullshit. But it wasn't till I was in my twenties that I could seriously question whether I was prepared to reject a whole world-view that governed every part of my life. I was like somebody that grew up in a fake Our Town, like somebody who has to believe all the American images and myths because those are the only givens; I was like somebody who lived in a version of America that never really existed. I lived a version of my life that never really existed. It took years to absorb the consequences of my thinking and reading.

I had lived my life until the age of twenty-five or -six believing that I was never going to die, or that if I did die in a car crash or something, God would resurrect me and I'd live forever in the New World. I can remember the exact moment when I realized I was not going to live forever. The physical moment: I was working in my office at Bethel and I got up from my desk to go into the file cabinet; I was bending down to get a file, and-it came out of nowhere-I said, Hey, you're going to die one day. And in that one second the knot unraveled.

The Watchtower (April 1, 1975, p. 217] quotes the Australian Journal of Personality, March 1973: "A disproportionately large number of highly creative children were Jehovah's Witnesses. Four children from the total sample of 394 were members of this sect, and all four showed high creative ability. The girl who gained the highest total score on the Torrance [creativity) tests, and the girl who was the only child, male or female, to be included in the top 20 percent of all five performance measures, were both Jehovah's Witnesses." On the face of it, this seems difficult to reconcile with the fact that college students from authoritarian fundamentalist religions have been found, in psychological testing, to have "constricted and rigid cognitive and perceptual functioning on projective and intelligence tests, lower scholastic achievement, lack of creative responsivity with conventional routine aesthetic attitudes,…and generally poorer overall adjustment and achievement in comparison with students in matched groups." [E. Mansell Pattison, Z&L, p. 424] On reflection, however, the Australian statistics yield to another interpretation. The children tested were 12 years old. Sexuality rigorously repressed in puberty conduces to a strongly colored fantasy life. The imagination of very young Witnesses is fueled and fired by the rich imagery of destruction and creation with which they live. It is not surprising that the tension produced by the clash between force-fed dogmatic certainty and inner confusion, and the friction created by the rub of the socially isolated against the world, may be, for a time, creative tension. The tragedy is that creative young Witnesses will not be permitted to explore or fulfill their potential-unless, for them, the knot unravels.

God told Noah that every living creature should be meat unto him; but that he must not eat the blood, because the life is in the blood. -Leviticus 17:10, New World Translation

On April 18, 1951, the State of Illinois went to court to take temporary custody of a child of Witness parents in order to administer a blood transfusion to the dying infant. Six-day-old Cheryl Labrenz was the victim of a rare medical syndrome that was destroying her red blood cells. The doctors' consensus was that the baby would die without blood transfusions. Cheryl's parents, Darrell and Rhoda Labrenz, paid no heed; they were concerned, they said, with their infant's eternal welfare. They were prepared to see her die, knowing that Jehovah would resurrect her and give her everlasting life-and that they would be consigned to everlasting death if they did not adhere to God's laws prohibiting the ingesting of blood. Cheryl became a ward of the Court for the time necessary to administer the lifesaving transfusions.

The Labrenz case was the first of many in which minor children became wards of the Court so that blood transfusions, prohibited by the governing body of Jehovah's Witnesses since 1944, could be administered. (if a hospital administers blood transfusions without parental consent, the hospital and its doctors are liable to charges of assault, or of manslaughter if a minor child dies.)

People ex rel. Wallace v. Labrenz, 411 Ill. 618 (1952). When the situation involved a minor child, decision to overrule the parents' convictions has prevailed. (See State v. Perricone, 181 A 2d 751 [1962]; Raleigh Fitkin Hospital v. Anderson, 201 A. 2d 537 [1964); all cases appealed but denied certiorari by the U.S. Supreme Court.) The majority of cases have been decided in favor of court authorization of blood transfusion, even for unwilling recipients, on grounds ( the State's right to uphold life (United States v. George, 239 F. Supp. 752 [1965). The courts have had to decide whether to restrict religious liberty against an individual's will in order to save his life. In a case heard before the Illinois Supreme Court, it was ruled that religious practices can be infringed only when they threaten public health, welfare, or morals. In dealing with "a competent adult who has steadfastly maintained her belief that acceptance of a blood transfusion is a violation of the law of God," even though the Court may consider her belief unwise, foolish, or ridiculous, in the absence of an overriding danger to society we may not permit interference" (In re Brooks, 205 N.E. 2d 435 [19651). The courts have quoted Brandeis: "The makers of our Constitution . . . conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone--the most comprehensive of rights and the most valued of civilized man" (Olmstead v. U.S. 277 U.S.438 [1928)). In the case of John F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital v. Heston (1971) a court ordered, against the will of her parents, that a minor Witness receive a blood transfusion (which resulted in her recovery). In a decision that was later to be quoted in the celebrated Karen Anne Quinlan case, the court ruled that "there is no constitutional right to choose to die. . . . The State's interest in sustaining life ... is hardly different than its interest in the case of suicide.”

An absurdly literal reading of the Mosaic injunction not to "eat blood,"' together with Paul's instructions (Acts 21:25) for Christians to "keep themselves from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from strangled, and from fornication," is bolstered by the Witnesses with the declaration that blood transfusion dates back to the ancient Egyptians (anything pagan is sinful) and by the seemingly contradictory fact that "the earliest reported case was a futile attempt to save the life of Pope Innocent VIII in 1492. [Yearbook, 1975, p. 222] (If the Church-whose genius it is to absorb and assimilate pagan practices so as to make Christ accessible to all people- does it, according to Witness logic, it can't possibly be right.)

It cannot be said that the Witnesses are not willing to endure grave discomfort, or to die for their beliefs. I have known Witnesses who scurried frantically from doctor to doctor, postponing vital operations in an often futile attempt to find a practitioner who would agree to operate without blood. (I have also been told, in confidence, by doctors that they did at the last moment-when it was apparent that the patient's life was at stake-administer blood transfusions unbeknownst to the Witness, in default of the agreement not to do so.) On the other hand, Watchtower publications are full of testimonials of people who were told that they would die without transfusions-and who, refusing transfusions, nevertheless lived. The 1975 Yearbook [pp. 224-25] cites the case of a woman with an aneurysm in a main artery leading to her spleen; she lost 70 percent of her blood, but survived without a transfusion. The Witnesses, she told her doctors, do not believe in divine healing. However, "because we obeyed Jehovah's command concerning blood, all of us have been blessed." This is a wonderful example of having it every which way: If you are a Witness and die because of refusing transfusions, you will live forever after your Paradise resurrection; the chances are, however-and the Witnesses bolster this with pseudoscientific evidence as to the efficacy of saline transfusions-that Jehovah will "bless" you and you will survive without a transfusion.

During World War II, male Witnesses imprisoned under Selective Service draft laws went so far as to refuse to be vaccinated, regarding vaccination, not illogically, as being no different from blood transfusion. Hugh Macmillan [Faith, pp. 188-90], the elder assigned to visit and counsel imprisoned Witnesses, set them straight. He told the young men in solitary confinement that "All of us who visit our foreign branches are vaccinated or we stay at home. Now, vaccination," he said, with dubious logic, "is not anything like blood transfusion. No blood is used in the vaccine. It is a serum." He advised the jailed Witnesses to act as the prophet Jeremiah had. Jeremiah had told the governmental authorities of his time, "I am in your hands; do with me as you wish; if you put me to death, innocent blood will be on your hands." "They have you where they could vaccinate an elephant," Macmillan said, "and they will vaccinate you all" whether you agree to it or not. "If evil resulted," he told the prisoners "the government would be held responsible" by God. The blood of the innocent would be on Caesar s hands. The Witnesses agreed not only to accept transfusions, but to write a letter of apology to prison officials "for the trouble they had caused." (As one draft resister said to me about Witnesses in prison, "They were the good niggers.") My sympathy is with the Witnesses who were willing to endure solitary confinement and withdrawal of all jail privileges and who listened to the voice of their conscience. Individual conscience, however, was overruled by the voice of authority. The jailed Witnesses were forced to violate their consciences, which told them that vaccine would pollute the bloodstream they had been taught to regard as sacred.

I grudgingly admire the brave silliness of adult Witnesses who are willing to risk the consequence of death by refusing to receive blood. They are analogous, in my mind, to would-be assassins of bad men-who are 'just as brave, just as silly, just as futile, and whose orientation is similarly futuristic. But how can one admire an adult who makes that life-or-death decision for a child? It is apparently a monstrous, unnatural act. But one must remember the brainwashing to which the Witnesses are constantly subjected; they are not monstrous child-haters; they are sad men and women with a mission and an obsession that overrules natural necessities and concerns.

They are surgically prepared by their overseers even to amputate their grief: "Because of the wonderful hope of the resurrection, a Christian is not overwhelmed with tears and grief. Hiss sorrow is not as great or as deep as that upon those who have no knowledge of the hope the Bible gives." [AW, May 8, 1975, p. 23]

To suppress natural grief is to invite disaster. The Witnesses are psyched up to deny their grief. But I have seen Witnesses give way to an excess of grief that was terrifying. I knew a Young mother who lost two small children in one year-one was run over by a car; the other died of pneumonia. The child who was struck by a car might have been saved by blood transfusions. In her fear and terror, his mother-who had been taught to make sense of the world, and who could not make sense of this senseless slaughter-held him (lying in her arms while she argued with doctors about blood transfusions. When her daughter died, six months later, she entered an unnatural calm, a false and dreadful stillness. She began to tell fellow Witnesses that she was sure her children were in heaven, that they visited her comfortingly in her dreams. The Witnesses, frightened by her apostasy-she could reasonably expect, according to their dogma, only to see her children resurrected to an earthly life, heaven being reserved for 144,000 older Witnesses-chided her for expressing heretical views. They scolded; they did not comfort. And yet many of them, many of the people who withheld comfort from a woman driven mad by grief, weren't monsters either. They were afraid of her because her grief threatened the security of their belief She wasn't supposed to abandon herself to grief. So they chose to see her grief as Devil-inspired apostasy.

At Witness meetings, skits (called "demonstrations") are put on offering role models for emulation, exemplifying appropriate behavior. This is one of them, verbatim, written by a man who later repudiated his belief. He is one of the kindest men I know; I have never known him to do a

mean thing; and he wrote and produced this happy-ending bloody call to arms:

B L 0 0 D T R A N S F U S I 0 N

Cast of Characters

FRANK MILLER-One of Jehovah’s witnesses and the father.

DOROTHY MILLER—The mother.

SHARON MILLER-The daughter who needs a blood transfusion.

BILLY MILLER-The son.

DOCTOR GORDON-The doctor treating Sharon.

FATHER O'BRIEN-The Catholic priest who tries to disprove the fact that God's Word is against blood transfusion.

REPORTER-From the local newspaper, looking for a sensational story.

Part I

SETTING: Desk on stage at right, facing left. Two chairs facing audience at left of desk. Off stage at right is cot with blanket. On doctor's desk is telephone and a few papers. As scene opens doctor is seated at desk.

VOICE FROM THE SIDE.. The faith of Jehovah's witnesses has been tested in many different ways in times past and is being tested in many ways today. Recently many of Jehovah's servants have been faced with a new test-blood transfusion. Blood transfusion is the practice of transferring blood from the veins of one person to another. As in intravenous feeding, it is a feeding upon blood and is an unscriptural practice. The way Jehovah's servants find themselves faced with this issue often happens as it did with Brother and Sister Miller.

(Music)

One day, suddenly, their young daughter complained of extreme pains in her chest. They rushed their crying daughter, Sharon, to the office of Doctor Gordon for help.

(Brother Miller enters from left carrying his daughter, Sharon, who is crying. Also entering are

Sister Miller and son, Billy.)

(The voice continues, with characters making appropriate actions):

Doctor Gordon directed that immediately the ailing child be taken into his inner office for examination. As Sister Miller quieted her daughter, the doctor began his examination. Shortly he asked Brother and Sister Miller to go to his outer office while he made a more extensive examination to see what could be done to help little Sharon. Once in the outer office Brother and Sister Miller waited anxiously-minutes seemed like hours-and the next half hour seemed like an eternity, Finally, the examination was completed. The doctor entered and sat at his desk.

(Music---crescendo)

DOCTOR GORDON: Mr. and Mrs. Miller, I'm afraid your little daughter has a lung congestion. She'll have to have an immediate operation.

SISTER MILLER: Oh, no!

DOCTOR GORDON: It's usually not a serious operation but we've run into some difficulty. Your daughter'll undoubtedly need a blood transfusion. But we've checked her blood and it's a rare type. We don't have any on hand here,

SISTER MILLER: (To Brother Miller) Oh, Frank, what're we going to do?

BROTHER MILLER: There's only one thing we can do, Dorothy.

DOCTOR GORDON: Now look, I didn't mean to worry you. We'll be able to get the blood we need all right. The Red Cross will have it. (Dials phone)

BROTHER MILLER: But, Doctor . . .

DOCTOR GORDON: (Interrupting) Now don't worry, Mr. Miller. We'll get the blood all right. (To telephone) Hello? Is this the Red Cross? This is Doctor Gordon. I need two pints of type XX blood for an emergency operation right away. Can you get it to me?.. All right . . . .(To Millers) They're checking now . (To phone) )You have none . . . . .are you sure? . . . All right. I'll call the Central Blood Bank. (To Millers) They didn't have any, but don't worry. They'll have it at the Central Blood Bank.

BROTHER MILLER: But, Doctor . . .

DOCTOR GORDON: (To telephone, jiggling receiver) Operator! This is an emergency. Connect me with the Central Blood Batik . . . and please hurry, (To Millers) The operator is putting the call through now.

BROTHER MILLER: But, Doctor Gordon, I'm afraid you don't understand. We can't let Sharon have a blood transfusion.

DOCTOR GORDON: (Astonished) You can't what?

BROTHER MILLER: We can't let Sharon have a blood transfusion.

DOCTOR GORDON: (Slowly to telephone) Operator, never mind that call. (To Brother and Sister Miller) You can't let your daughter have a blood transfusion- Suppose you tell me what you mean by that?

BROTHER MILLER: Well, you see, it's against our religion.

DOCTOR GORDON: Against your religion' What kind of religion is that?

BROTHER MILLER: It's based on the Bible, Doctor. You see, we’re Jehovah's witnesses.

DOCTOR GORDON: You mean to tell me that your not letting Sharon have a blood transfusion is based on the Bible?

BROTHER MILLER: That's right. You see, in the Bible it says that right after the flood God said no one should eat blood. In Genesis, the 9th chapter and the third verse, he said: "But flesh with the life . . ."

DOCTOR GORDON: (Interrupting angrily) God said! God said! I don't care what God said. All I know is that your little daughter is in there dying, Mr. Miller. We have to operate immediately and she's going to need a blood transfusion. If she doesn't get it, she doesn't stand a chance. . . . (Pleadingly) Mrs. Miller, don't you understand what this means? Won't you tell your husband . . .

SISTER MILLER: (Interrupting) I'm sorry, Doctor, but if God commands that we're not supposed to . DOCTOR GORDON: (Interrupting) What kind of a God is this? I thought God is love. But this isn't love. This is murder!

BROTHER MILLER: Doctor, if you'll only let us explain.

DOCTOR GORDON: (Sharply) I won't let you explain anything. If we give your daughter a shot of Adrenalin Chloride now we can postpone the operation until tomorrow. I want you to go home and think this over and then come back to my office here in the morning.

BROTHER MILLER: I'm certain our answer will still be the same, Doctor.

BILLY: Daddy, Sharon isn't going to die, is she?

BROTHER MILLER: We hope not, Billy. (To Doctor Gordon) We'll see you in the morning, Doctor Gordon.

(Brother and Sister Miller and Billy exit left.)

(Doctor Gordon picks up telephone and dials number.)

DOCTOR GORDON: (To telephone) Hello, Father O'Brien? This is Doctor Gordon. I have a problem and I need your help.... I'll have to perform an operation tomorrow morning on a lovely little girl. But she's going to need a blood transfusion and her parents won't permit it. They're Jehovah's witnesses and say it's against the Bible or something.... No, I didn't discuss it with them very much. He started to recite a Bible verse but I just couldn't stand to hear talk of the girl not getting the blood she'll need to keep her alive. So I sent them home and told them to think it over and come back tomorrow. But I know they won't change their minds. That's why I called you, Father. They'll be here at 10 o'clock in the morning and if you could come over here and talk to them I'm sure you could convince them that God doesn't mind if their daughter gets a blood transfusion. If you come, I'm sure you'll be instrumental in saving a life.... Thank you, Father. I'll look for you in the morning.

Part II

VOICE FROM THE SIDE: Morning came and as 10 o'clock approached the priest arrived. Another visitor arrived, too. A local newspaper reporter came in search of a sensational news story. Then, shortly after 10 o'clock, Brother and Sister Miller arrived.

DOCTOR GORDON: Mrs. and Mr. Miller, I'd like to have you meet Father O'Brien. He's the priest from the local parish. I told him about your religious beliefs and he offered to help if he could. (Exchange greetings) Now, tell me, do you feel any differently today than you did yesterday? BROTHER MILLER: No, we don't, Doctor Gordon. We still feel the same.

DOCTOR GORDON: Just as I expected, Father.

FATHER O'BRIEN: Doctor Gordon told me what a lovely daughter you have, Mr. and Mrs. Miller, and it disturbed me to think that possibly because of some misunderstanding she might lose her life. Now I'm sure there's nothing in the Bible that says God wants us to let little Sharon die instead of saving her life.

BROTHER MILLER: There is if you try to use a blood transfusion, Mr. O'Brien. I tried to show Doctor Gordon yesterday that after the flood God commanded that no one should eat blood. Here, I have my Bible with me and I can read it for you. It's in Genesis 9:3,4: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat."

FATHER O'BRIEN: Yes, but that was a long time ago, my friend. Surely today, when the life of your child is in danger, you can't go back to an ancient law . . .

BROTHER MILLER: But this command was part of a covenant with man that God says is everlasting. Why, 850 years later, when he gave the Law covenant to the nation of Israel, he gave the same command at Leviticus 17:14.

FATHER O'BRIEN: But Christians don't have to abide by those laws, Mr. Miller. Christ did away with that when he died on the cross. The Christian principle is love and certainly nothing could be more loving than for a person to give some of his own precious blood to save another person's life. DOCTOR GORDON: And this is your own child, Mr. Miller. Surely your love for your child is great enough to permit you to overlook . . .

BROTHER MILLER: It's true, the Christian principle is love and the Scripture I just read is from the old Law Covenant given to the Jews. But Christians, too, are commanded not to eat blood, at Acts

21:2 5.

DOCTOR GORDON: Well, I don't think you would be violating that command anyway. You're not really eating food. You're taking it into your veins.

BROTHER MILLER: You know as well as I do, Doctor, that people are fed through the veins. That's eating, because you call it intravenous feeding.

DOCTOR GORDON: But these Bible verses mention animal blood. This is something different. This is human blood.

BROTHER MILLER: At Leviticus 7:26 it says "Ye shall eat no manner of blood.

REPORTER: Mr. Miller, I'm no authority on religion, but doesn't it seem that the life of your child is important.- After all, she's so young and you're making an important decision for her. Do you think you have that right?

BROTHER MILLER: As her father, it's not only my right, it's my obligation.

REPORTER: I don't think it is Mr. Miller. Not when it means her life. We have laws in this country, and I'm going to do all I can to see that the courts of this land use those laws to save your daughter's life. And I know my paper'll back me up to the limit. This is something I think the people ought to know about. I think a religion like yours is dangerous to the people and it ought to be stopped. Where are your principles?

BROTHER MILLER: Now before you fly off the handle, I'd like to tell you what I think about that. When my wife and I try our best to live our faith in the face of such difficulties and you say, "We have laws in this country," it makes us wonder what country you're thinking of. What you need is a history lesson, to learn that this country was founded by people who placed God's law above man's and were willing to die and lose their loved ones to obey God's laws. Your paper has probably written articles and editorials praising those people, and then when persons like you are faced with the same kind of decisions you fail miserably yourselves and condemn others who-try to keep their faith in God-and just to sell a few newspapers. Now, I ask you, where are your principles? And then to have this gentleman (gesturing toward priest) come along, dressed so everyone will know that he claims to be a Christian, and to try to convince us with sweet talk and eloquent expressions of love that we should break Christian laws. You called us murderers, Doctor Gordon, but this man is a traitor-against God-and with no good reason-not even an excuse. You people seem to think that we haven't given a single thought to our daughter's life. I want you to know that we have. This has been the most trying decision of our lives. If you have children you know what I mean. It's out of love for our child that we've made the decision we have. You see, we love our child so much that we're willing to live without her for a few years, now in this corrupt old world, so we'll be able to live with her forever in God's new world.

DOCTOR GORDON: Forever? In a new world?

BROTHER MILLER: That's right. That's our faith, based on the Bible, and by God's grace we're going to keep that faith-regardless of what you, or Mr. O'Brien, or our newspaper friend-or the whole world-says or thinks about it.

DOCTOR GORDON: Mr. Miller, I respect your faith and I'm going to operate on your daughter and do the best I can without a blood transfusion. With extreme care during the operation and the use of blood substitutes there is a slim possibility that she may get along without it.

MRS. MILLER: (going to Gordon to shake his band) Oh, thank you, Doctor Gordon.

VOICE FROM THE SIDE: And so Dr. Gordon operated. And now you wonder how the operation turned out. Well, this story ended happily, The operation was a success and the blood substitutes provided little Sharon with the strength necessary to recover. (Music) As weeks and months passed, Sharon got stronger and stronger, until that day when Brother and Sister Miller, and little Billy, stopped by to see Doctor Gordon-and there was little Sharon, as cute and pretty as ever, waiting for them as though nothing had ever happened.

(Sharon rushes up to her mother and hugs her.)

SHARON: Mommy!

(Then she turns toward her father and hugs him.)

SHARON: Daddy!

BILLY : (Pulling at her dress) Hello, Sharon.

SHARON: Hello, Billy.

(Mr. Miller lowers her to kiss Billy on the cheek.)

MRS. MILLER: Thank you so much, for everything, Doctor Gordon.

DOCTOR GORDON: I was very happy to do all I could, Mrs. Miller.

MR. MILLER: I want to thank you too, Doctor.

DOCTOR GORDON: Mr. Miller, I want you to know how much I admire you. I admire you and your fine family, and your faith in God (shaking hands). God bless You.

(All go to leave.)

DOCTOR GORDON: Bye, Sharon.

SHARON: Bye, Doctor Gordon. (Throws him a kiss.)

(Music Crescendo)

The End.

One of the graphic artists who illustrates The Watchtower and Awake! magazines used to work for Walt Disney; and the happy-family scenes with which those magazines are illustrated resemble a Disney dream of American G-rated life: Daddy (a Ronald Reagan look-alike) sits in slippered comfort in a fat armchair, Bible-or Watchtower publication-in his manicured but virile hand; Mommy (a lacquered Sandra Dee) perches in a Mommy chair in her spotless suburban-tract living room, her impeccably Peck and Peck body inclined in graceful submission toward her mate; and at the feet of this glowing pair sit two fresh-faced Mousekiteer children. They might all have been designed as blueprints for First Families-on spiritual guard even while taking their homey ease.

People believe their own myths; unfortunately, they can't always live them. The Father knows Best ideal toward which the Witnesses reach-happy families sitting down to a pre-breakfast Bible discussion, working together in the door-to-door field ministry, sitting together in scrubbed and pleasant rows at meetings-is a soothing invention.

It is true that conversion to "The Truth" may result in major behavioral changes that can equip marginal people for life in the real world-the world that has bruised and defeated them: alcoholics stop drinking; addicts get off junk; men who are unemployed find work- with a little help from "the friends" (the Witnesses tend to use lazy and unemployed as if they were synonymous) women who were sloppy housekeepers, once taught that cleanliness is part of Godliness, become living advertisements for Kuche, Kirche, Kinder; and children, rigorously controlled, do not (as long as they remain Witnesses) smoke dope, litter, fornicate, or rebel.

These accommodations appear, on the surface, to improve family life; mechanistically, they do. But changing the outer man (or woman) does not-although change does sometimes work from the outside in-annul or change the inner personality configuration that made them Witnesses in the first place. They are dependent for approval and sense of worth on external authority; their sights are fixed on a future that will dispel the pain of the present and make up for the deprivations of the past. They are, in an expression borrowed from the 1950s (in which decade they seem permanently mired), outer-directed.

At conventions, where there is indeed great communal tenderness, they radiate happiness. They look like picture-book families, kindergarten-primer families. But the maggots of their frustrations and discontents-their fear and distrust of the material world, of the present-often eat into their apple-pie lives. Depression among Witnesses is widespread, as are tight-lipped repressed familial animosities for which there is no appropriate outlet. ("Children have emotions. They are not to be shown in fits of anger or pouting. Direct their emotions to useful ends such as singing or playing a musical instrument or dancing. These things also give glory to the Creator. . . . Husbands must rebuke their wives in a spirit of love; and wives must never nag or be aggressively demanding. "-From a speech given at a local congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses)

They seek, by their busy-ness--each family is instructed to have one fulltime preacher-to lock up their discontents in an attic of their minds. Frequently their discontents flare up in odd ways. I have observed families quarreling over such how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin issues as "Will our cats live through Armageddon and live forever in the New World?" (I'm not making that up. One woman who insisted that her cats would live forever was threatened by her husband with public reproof from an elder.) You might wonder who would seek to ask such a question. Someone who has only the future. That people do ask one another such questions, and have bitter fallings-out over them, is proved by this depressing exercise in unreality, a speech at a recent convention of Jehovah's Witnesses in New York: "Brothers, do not ask, 'Will some form of money be used in the New System? What about machinery, such as cars, TV, computers? Will we have them after Armageddon, in God's New Order? Shall I save up money now to buy them? Shall I buy a new car and a new TV so I can start off on the right foot in the New System?" Such speculations are food and drink-and fuel for contentious arguments-among people who have no more questions to ask, since all their questions have been answered

If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; . . . Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people. -And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die. . . . -Deuteronomy 13:6-10

The Watchtower, while it does not go so far as to advocate the execution of idolators, does assure its readers that to testify against a family member whose behavior is antithetical to its instructions is a viable way of protecting the "moral fiber" of God's organization. "Yielding to the influence of a close family member . . . to disregard God's law can only spell disaster. . . . Relatives . . . could cause one to fall in giving God exclusive devotion. . . Anyone . . . taking on undue importance in our lives can lead to our not being exclusively devoted to God. . . . because the object of a person's craving diverts affection from God and in this way becomes an idol." [TW, June 15, 1975, pp. 38 1-82) Every member of one’s household is a potential enemy, a potential threat.

Witnesses are instructed to be "examples" to one another in godly conduct. To objectify oneself, and others, as "examples," to be obliged to regard oneself and others as the personification of a doctrinaire idea rather than as complex, complicated human beings is a reduction of humanity that may lead-has led-to schizophrenia, and certainly, to depressive behavior.

These are excerpts from a five-minute play, ("demonstration") written to be performed at congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses:

Because the God of this world is not Jehovah, this is not a happy world. It is a miserable world, reeking with disillusionment and bitterness, permeated with hatred and jealousy, saturated with disappointment and heartache. But, true to his promise, Jehovah has taken a people out of this wretched world-a people for his name-Jehovah's witnesses. And because they have accepted Jehovah as their God, these people are happy-truly happy. They enjoy peace of mind, receive rich blessings continually from the hand of their God and look to the future with anticipation.

We would like you to meet the Spencer farnily-a happy, theocratic family.

First, there's Brother Spencer. Bill Spencer. Bill is a friendly fellow, and he knows the importance of there always being, a warm, friendly atmosphere around the home. "After all," he says, -what's a home, if it isn't friendly?” Bill has enthusiasm too. Especially when it comes to Kingdom activity . In fact, it's his enthusiasm that helps keep the family so active and alive. He knows this is his Scriptural obligation.

Next, we'd like to have you meet Gladys, his wife. Nice woman, Gladys. Works hard. like a theocratic wife should. Bill takes the lead; she follows. The more you get to know these two and the way they work together so beautifully, the better you like them. Gladys is one who has always had dreams about the future. You know how most women are: A home in the country, a little garden, two or three children running around the place and all that. Funny thing about those dreams, though. Since coming into the truth, all of a sudden they're not important any more. Oh, she thinks about the new world all right. Guess we all do. But she realizes she has a job to do now, and she enjoys every minute of it.

And one of her big jobs is helping train their son, Jimmy. There he is now. He causes them a few anxieties now and then, but generally speaking, he's a good boy.

They have overcome their problems-by following the advice of the Scriptures and Jehovah's organization.

[Scene I of the play has Bill and Jimmy and Gladys sitting at the breakfast table, discussing a Bible text (Jimmy: "We speak the truth to the people. The religious leaders tell lies to the people in church") and reviewing, from the Yearbook, the work of the Witnesses in the Philippine Islands. In Scene II they all go out preaching from door to door together; and before they go together to a meeting at the Kingdom Hall, Jimmy sets the table for the meal his mother has cooked, in a "spirit of joyful cooperation," and they discuss their morning's preaching activities. There then follows a monologue by Bill Spencer, discussing the nature of his happiness.]

The holy God expresses his purpose for good toward his servants by providing them with opportunities to experience progressive states of happiness from one period of joyful existence to another.

How true that is. Since knowing Jehovah it has been just one progressive state of happiness after another.

Before knowing Jehovah our happiness depended on things that might not last until tomorrow. And we never were really happy. We were always hoping for something better. And if we found that what we hoped in wasn't going to come, everything seemed so useless.

[Bill explains that before his conversion, he had looked forward to "getting a job as a doctor at the Glenwood Hospital out on Long Island." There were no openings at Glenwood. So, showing, it would seem to the ungodly eye, a remarkable lack of enterprise and imagination, Gladys and Bill did office work ("And I had worked so hard to learn the medical profession!") while the bills piled up and they quarreled, and little Jimmy, a fifth-grader, threw his clothes on the floor and neglected to learn how to read, and they were altogether miserable. Then a Witness came to call. Bill studied the Bible with him. Gladys wasn't having any. Jimmy continued to throw his clothes on the floor and to forget how to spell his name. In Scene III, Bill offers his woes to his Bible instructor. The Witness tells him how to deal with the recalcitrant Gladys and the delinquent Jimmy.)

Well, I wouldn't try to force her into anything, Bill - If you see that you’re getting nowhere by trying to reason with tier, then don't try. There have been many cases like yours. The Apostle Paul even wrote about split families like that. But be advised that you should just continue to fulfill your marriage obligations and that perhaps in time, with love and consideration and tact, you may win over your mate to the truth. So I'd say, just be a good husband to her and let her see that this message has done something for you, has given you a hope, something to live for, and she may wonder about it in time and want to know more about it.

Show love for your son; instead of hitting him or hollering at him, take him aside and kindly explain to him what he should do and why; there should be some improvement. And also bring God into the picture and tell him what God requires of little boys and what they will receive if they are good.

[Bill decides to give up his career-"my doctor's profession"-because “there are higher principles in life." He begins "to exercise Christian principles in the home…Christian love toward Gladys" (who has not been consulted about his "doctor's profession") "and Jimmy. After a while they began to notice this and it began to have its effects." Bill is happy. Jimmy wants to live in the New World, so he learns to read and picks his clothes up off the floor. Bill buys his wife a mixer, and his kindness inspires her to ask him about his newfound religion. She likes what she hears and decides she wants to live in the New World too. Jimmy sets the table instead of sassing.]

Bill: So Jehovah provided me with another source of happiness. Then it was like learning the truth all over again. But this time it was even more thrilling than before. I was giving to someone else-Gladys. –My wife. It made me happier than words can express. We studied hard. The more Gladys learned, the more she wanted to learn . Then we began teaching Jimmy, too. We began attending meetings together. All three of us. This was real progress. And then we even began going out in the service together. In only a few months we developed into a real happy, theocratic family.

We were serving Jehovah. We even got rid of all our bills, without the doctor's profession . . . . I never knew that one person could experience so much happiness. …”Happy is the people whose god is Jehovah.”

And we were never really happy. The man, no longer a Witness, who wrote this idyll was married to a Witness for three years before he could tell his wife that he was gravely troubled by profound doubts. When he admitted to doubt (he felt he was putting his life in her hands), her response, unanticipated, incredible to him, was that she herself had not believed for two of the three years they had lived together; her faith was a dry husk. During those years of doubt-of torment (the fact that the pap they listened to was corny, tacky, does not lessen the authenticity of their suffering)-they had been in the full-time ministry, living a Gladys/Bill exemplary life; and they were unable to share their core feelings with each other. They divorced their feelings from their actions, and their marriage was a charade. They were strangers afraid of damaging each other. They were each other's "examples." Sex was lousy. They spent their honeymoon playing checkers, and things never progressed much beyond that point. Each assumed the other to be frigid.

When I preached to Irv, he'd say I was full of shit, and I'd say, Well, when you throw pearls to swine . . .and he got so mad: You call me a swine? and he broke tables and lamps . . . .

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, 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 be 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.' " [TW, 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-so they have been told, by their mentors, whom they do respect-they become 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 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 of 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.

Contents

I Personal Beginnings: 1944

11 Organizational Beginnings: (1873-1912) Charles Taze Russell

III Waiting for the World to Die

IV Accumulating Wealth While the World Refuses to Die

V God Can't Kill Arnold

VI In Transition

VII Catholics, Mob Violence, Civil Liberties, and the Draft

VIII The Lure of Certainty

IX The Heroic Opportunity and Adventure: Jehovah's Witnesses Overseas

X Leaving: 1955

Abbreviated Codes for Sources Frequently Cited and Additional Sources

Index

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/26/obituaries/26HARR.html