I don’t have any specific references, but over the years I remember reading in the mags and hearing in talks stories of imprisoned JWs who would somehow get a piece of a page of a JW magazine or an article or something like that and pass it around and get spiritually nourished by it as if it almost had a magical or supernatural nature. Does anybody else remember such?
I always thought it just didn’t make sense. For one thing, most of the material in the mags was (and, of course, still is) fluff, so what are the chances that if you got a magazine fragment, you would get anything of substance? What if you were imprisoned in Nazi Germany and you were spiritually starving (as JWs say) and somebody smuggled in a piece of a mag for you, and you happened to get the page with the article “Let’s Send a Greeting Card!” or “An Interview with Mr. Water Buffalo”? Wouldn’t that be spritually nourishing?
It was just so odd to me the way they made the literature seem so critical to one’s spirituality - as already mentioned, as if one was in extreme danger or was extremely deprived if he couldn’t read at least a fragment of a page of the Watchower mag.
I think I heard stories about smuggling in Bible fragments, too, but it was the stories about the literature that always seemed so odd.
Any thoughts?