Door-to-Door
[In the following review, McCarthy provides a mixed review of Visions of Glory.]
Just after I had read this book, Visions of Glory while I was sitting one evening with friends watching the sunset over Nantucket Sound, a young man carrying a brief case appeared in our midst. He was a Jehovah's Witness.
It was a curious coincidence. He seemed quite literally to have sprung from nowhere. One moment we were laughing and talking among ourselves; the next minute he was there demanding to be heard. He was to me the very embodiment of the Witnesses with whom Barbara Harrison lived and worked for 12 years and whom she describes in this “history and memory”: painfully neat in appearance, persistent in the face of our host's irritation, and faintly censorious of our apparent ease and enjoyment of the present moment.
The Witnesses, she notes in her introduction, are known to the public for their aggressive proselytizing and are generally perceived as drab and eccentric people. For the most part they are drawn from the deprived in our society. Entering into the sect, they gain certainty, a community, formulae for behavior which will gain them acceptance, and a belief which gives them a sense of superiority over those who are, in the eyes of the rest of the world, more fortunate. But the end of this world is coming; a new and perfect earth will be formed; only the elect will inhabit it.
“There is a kind of ruthless glee in the way Jehovah's Witnesses point to earthquakes, race riots, heroin addiction … as proof of the nearness of Armageddon,” Harrison writes, and, near the end of the book, tells of two young men with whom she shared an office running from window to window at the approach of a big storm, and crying, “Wouldn't it be wonderful if it was Armageddon?” Sure of their own survival, they could rejoice at impending doom, and I could see our uninvited visitor doing just that. Yet I also wondered just what it was about life in the pleasant little resort town that had led him to join the Witnesses.
This latter reaction of mine is the measure of the success of Harrison's study and reflection on her own life as a Witness. In seeking to come to terms with her own experience she has given a great deal of thought to what she feels little thought has been given—“the comment their existence makes on the larger society.” No one can read this book—in which she has earnestly examined her own and her mother's conversion by a Witness when she was a child of nine, her subsequent life with them, and her difficult breaking away and its aftermath—without wanting also to understand as she seeks to understand. The task she assigned herself in writing this book went far beyond her own experience:
To examine one prophetic, apocalyptic cult is to explore the existential experience to which human society is bound at any given moment … Jehovah's Witnesses may be regarded as people seeking religious renewal and liberation in order to heal deep personal psychic wounds—people who contain and channel their craziness in a ‘crazy’ religion, but the form their religion takes may also be seen as a response to social and cultural realities. To look closely at the psychology of a single all-consuming religion is necessarily to examine human nature, while to understand its ideology and to trace its historical genesis and development is to gain insight into the contradictions, necessities, and turmoil of the society and culture that gave it life.
It is a large order. In her effort Harrison has evidently added to the rather scant sociological and theological literature on the Witnesses by extensive interviewing of, and correspondence with, former Witnesses like herself. In consequence, it seems to me, the book as a study is strongest in the light it shows on the alienated segments of society from which most Witnesses come, as well as on the psychology of those who live their life. Moreover, she makes apparent the intellectual and emotional costs of both conforming and breaking away. Her weakest area, however, is in comparative religion.
There is fascinating information about the self-contained world the Witnesses have made: from the farms and printing plants worked by volunteer labor to the yacht in New York harbor, from the monastery-like dormitory rooms of headquarters workers to the penthouse apartments of the leaders. There is also a very useful chapter reviewing the court cases by which the Witnesses, with the defense of their own rights to proselytize or to refuse military service, strengthened the civil liberties of us all.
There are, it must be finally noted, two books here under one title. Inter-twined in the research and reflection is the passionate personal testament of Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, a testament imperfectly rendered because it is at times rendered only in allusion and by indirection. This is understandable because her experiences since she left the Witnesses have been various and intense, her new allegiances many—to lovers, friends, children, to feminism, the peace movement—and her conversion to Catholicism so surprising and so recent. (It occurred when she was midway through this book.) It is to be hoped that she will gather all this into a new book and that the style which seems to be evolving throughout this book will then be sure and wholly her own.
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