Visions of Glory

freyd

Visions of Glory Chapter 1

.........."In 1944, when I like ______ was 9 years old, I became one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Whatever effects the Supreme Court's ruling may have had on children of Jehovah's Witnesses in Brockton, Massachusetts, it is certain that nobody thought to enforce the Court's ruling in Brooklyn, New York. After my baptism at a national convention of 25,000 Witnesses in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1944, I became an ardent proselytizer, distributing The Watchtower and Awake! magazines on street corners and from door to door, spending as much as 150 hours a month in the service of my newly found God-under the directives of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the legal and corporate arm of Jehovah's Witnesses.

As I had been immersed in water to symbolize my "dedication to do God's will," I became, also, drenched in the dark blood-poetry of a religion whose adherents drew joy from the prospect of the imminent end of the world. I preached sweet doom; I believed that Armageddon would come in my lifetime, with a great shaking and rending and tearing of unbelieving flesh, with unsanctified babies swimming in blood, torrents of blood. I believed also that after the slaughter Jehovah had arranged for His enemies at Armageddon, this quintessentially masculine God-vengeful in battle and benevolent to survivors-would turn the earth into an Eden for true believers.

Coincidentally with my conversion, I got my first period. We used to sing this hymn: "Here is He who comes from Eden/ All His raiments stained with blood." My raiments were stained with blood too. But the blood of the Son of Man was purifying, redemptive, cleansing, sacrificial. Mine was proof of my having inherited the curse placed upon the seductress Eve. Mine was filthy. I examined my discharges with horror and fascination, as if the secret of life-or a harbinger of death-were to be found in that dull, mysterious effluence.

I was, in equal measure, guilt-ridden and-supposing myself to be in on secrets of the cosmos-self-righteous and smug. I grew up awaiting the final, orgasmic burst of violence after which all things would come together in a cosmic ecstasy of joy-this in a religion that was totally anti-erotic, that expressed disgust and contempt for the world.

My ignorance of sexual matters was so profound that it frequently led to comedies of error. Nothing I've ever read has inclined me to believe that Jehovah has a sense of humor; and I must say that I consider it a strike against Him that He wouldn't find this story funny:

One night shortly after my conversion, a visiting elder of the congregation, as he was avuncularly tucking me into bed, asked me if I was guilty of performing evil practices with my hands under the covers at night. I was puzzled. He was persistent. Finally, I thought I understood. And I burst into wild tears of self-recrimination. Under the covers at night, I bit my cuticles-a practice which, in fact, did afford me a kind of sensual pleasure. (I didn't learn about masturbation-which the Witnesses call "idolatry, "because "the masturbator's affection is diverted away from the Creator and is bestowed upon a coveted object" [TW, Sept. 15, 1973, p. 568], until much later.)

So, having confessed to a sin I hadn't known existed, I was advised of the necessity for keeping one's body pure from sin; cold baths were recommended. I couldn't see the connection, but one never questioned the imperatives of an elder, so I subjected my impure body to so many icy baths in midwinter that I began to look like a bleached prune. My mother thought I was demented. But I couldn't tell her that I'd been biting my cuticles, because to have incurred God's wrath-and to see the beady eye of the elder steadfastly upon me at every religious meeting I went to-was torment enough.

I used to preach, from door to door, that an increase in the number of rapes was one of the signs heralding the end of the world; but I didn't know what rape was. I knew that good Christians didn't commit "unnatural acts"; but I didn't know what "unnatural acts" were. (And I couldn't ask anybody, because all the Witnesses I knew began immediately to resemble Edith Sitwell eating an unripe persimmon when these abominations were spoken of.) Consequently, I spent a lot of time praying that I was not committing unnatural acts or rape.

Once, having heard that Hitler had a mistress, I asked my mother what a mistress was, (I had an inkling that it might be some kind of sinister super-housekeeper, like Judith Anderson in Rebecca.) I knew from my mother's silence, and from her cold, hard, and frightened face, that the question was somehow a grievous offense. I knew that I had done something wrong, but as usual, I didn't know what.

The fact was that I never knew how to buy God's-or my mother's-approval. There were sins I consciously and knowingly committed. That was bad, but it was bearable. I could always pray to God to forgive me, say, for reading the Bible for its "dirty parts"; for preferring the Song of Solomon to all the begats of Genesis. But the offenses that made me most horribly guilty were those I had committed unconsciously; as an imperfect being descended from the wretched Eve, I was bound, so I had been taught, to offend Jehovah seventy-seven times a day, without my even knowing what I was doing wrong.

There was guilt, and there was glory: I walked a spiritual tightrope.

I feel now that for the twelve years I spent as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, three of them as a member of the Watchtower Society's headquarters staff, I was living out a vivid dream, hallucinating within the closed system of logic and private reality of a religion that relished disaster; rejoiced in the evil of human nature; lusted for certitude; ordered its members to disdain the painful present in exchange for the glorious future; corrupted ritual, ethics, and doctrine into ritualism, legalism, and dogmatism.

I was convinced that 1914 marked "the beginning of the times of the end." So firmly did Jehovah's Witnesses believe this to be true that there were those who, in 1944, refused to get their teeth filled, postponing all care of their bodies until God saw to their regeneration in His New World. (One zealous Witness I knew carried a supply of cloves to alleviate the pain of an aching molar which she did not wish to have treated by her dentist, since the time was so short till Jehovah would provide a new and perfect one. To this day, I associate the fragrance of cloves with the imminence of disaster.)

More than thirty years have passed, but though their hopes have not been fulfilled, the Witnesses have persevered with increased fervor and conviction. Their attitude toward the world remains the same: because all their longing is for the future, they are bound to hate the present-the material, the sexual, the fleshly. It’s impossible to savor and enjoy the present, or to bend ones energies to shape and mold the world into the form of goodness, if you are waiting only for it to be smashed by God. There is a kind of ruthless glee in the way Jehovah's Witnesses point to earthquakes, race riots, heroin addiction, the failure of the United Nations, divorce, famine (and liberalized abortion laws) as proof of the nearness of Armageddon.

The God I worshiped was not the God before whom one swoons in ecstasy, or with whom one contends: He was an awesome and awful judge, whom one approached through his "channel," the "divinely appointed Theocratic organization"-the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. The Christ in whose name I prayed was not a social reformer, nor was he God incarnate, the embodiment of the world's most thrilling mystery, God-made-man. He was, rather, merely a legal instrument (albeit the most important one) in God's wrangles with the Devil. All the history of the world is seen, by Jehovah's Witnesses, as a contest between Jehovah and Satan:"

Much more to read.....http://www.exjws.net/vg1.htm

Hortensia

this was the book I read long before I read Crisis of Conscience. I had stopped going to meetings some time before, but when I read this book it took me out of the JW mindset and I could finally see the organization was wrong. It wasn't me - it was a crazy religion. It helped me reframe my life so that I could go forward a lot happier. When I finally read Crisis of Conscience I had been out a long while and it didn't have the effect that Visions of Glory had for me.

VoidEater

I haven't seen this before - the writing is riveting, brilliant, immediate - thank you...

snowbird

Oh yes, I read it too - with a dictionary within arm's reach.

It was a riveting read. I could relate to her cognitive dissonance that eventually lead to a breakdown because the same thing happened to me.

You simply cannot suppress a person's spontaneity and curiosity without expecting disastrous results -which is exactly what the WTS is doing.

Sylvia

compound complex

BTTT - Thank you, freyd ... I was happy to find this on www.freeminds.org; if I'm not mistaken, the entire book is online.

CoCo