Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

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Witnesses and Catholics

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SOURCE: “Witnesses and Catholics,” in Commonweal, Vol. CV, No. 25, December 22, 1978, pp. 818–19.

[In the following review, Miles contends that although Harrison was extremely harsh in her portrayal of the Jehovah's Witnesses in Visions of Glory, she never condescends to them.]

How can people live like that?” the bluestocking asks of the slum. “How can people think like that?” the religious bluestocking, believing or unbelieving, asks of a group like Jehovah's Witnesses. They refuse blood transfusions. They insult the flag. They decry the Vatican as the fountain of evil. They resist the draft without condemning the war. Most of all, they believe in Armageddon, the imminent and violent End of the World. How can people think like that?

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, feature writer for Esquire, Ms., Saturday Review, New Republic, and others knows how they can. She was one of them for eleven years, from 1944 to 1955, converted at the age of nine with her mother, who is a Witness to this day. Visions of Glory presents the Witnesses' history as a series of digressions from a memoir of the author's conversion to “The Truth,” as Witnesses call their faith, through her apostasy, and on, nearly twenty years later, to her conversion to Roman Catholicism. Both the memoir and the history are full of color, confusion, and pain: wonderful material for a novel, you might say, but to novelize this kind of material is so often to eviscerate it. One thinks of Robert Coover's The Origin of The Brunists, which is set in the same coal-mining country where Charles Taze Russell founded Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1870s. That novel, despite its lip-smacking relish for human and religious grotesquerie, finally rings false. One hears, as it were, the bluestocking mother's rakehell son telling tales of vulgar belief to shock her but telling them for no reason other than that. Harrison, though extremely harsh in her criticism of the Witnesses, never condescends to them. Her book is an investigation, not an entertainment.

The Jehovah's Witnesses are of greater public interest to Americans than any other religious group of comparable size, for one good reason: in their notorious resistance to the draft and to the pledge of allegiance,

they won 150 State Supreme Court cases and more than 30 precedent-setting Supreme Court cases, forcing the Court to broaden the meaning of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. It is impossible to speak of the history of civil liberties in this country without speaking of them. Whatever their motives, we are very much in their debt.

Harrison tells this story and kindred ones in chapters entitled “Accumulating Wealth While the World Refuses to Die,” “Catholics, Mob Violence, Civil Liberties, and the Draft,” and “The Heroic Opportunity and Adventure: Jehovah's Witnesses Overseas.” We see the Witnesses in American prisons, Nazi camps, in new kinds of trouble in Africa; marching from door to door; rallying in Yankee Stadium. There is much to see and hear, Still, for this reader, it as the author's religious story that kept her book going; and as her personal journey has led to Catholicism, so perhaps the meaning of the Witnesses as a group may be found in their opposition to Catholicism. This is scarcely to distort them: they see themselves in rather these terms.

And seeing themselves so, they do see something scandalously true about the Roman church. Let the phrase Roma Aeterna stand for this scandal. Eternal? Does either Scripture or tradition encourage the Christian to regard physical reality itself, much less any single city, as eternal? “For us,” St. Paul wrote, “our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes the Savior we await.” The Jehovah's Witnesses seize on texts like this one (Philippians 3:20) as proof that this world is not eternal but temporary and indeed soon to pass away. To this difference in practical eschatology, there corresponds a strongly marked difference in religious mood. Rome reckons in centuries, as the saying goes. Brooklyn, where Bethel, the Witnesses headquarters is located, reckons in instants. The mood of Rome is grave, shrewd, unhurried, unenthusiastic, undiscouraged, unsurprised, undeterred, unexcited. The mood of Brooklyn, by contrast, is one of extreme excitement—in a word, of suspense—and of the fellowship that only shared suspense can create. Hear Paul again:

Brothers, I will tell you something that has been secret: that we are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed. This will be instantaneous, in the twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet sounds. It will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible. And when this corruptible nature has put on incorruptibility, this mortal nature immortality, then will the words of Scripture come true: Death is swallowed up in victory. Death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?

In a memorable moment in Visions of Glory, two young Watchtower workers cheer together for Armageddon:

… a sudden black storm blew up, and two of the men with whom I shared proofreading tasks raced to plateglass windows and said, “Oh boy! Maybe it's Armageddon. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it was Armageddon? Do you think it's Armageddon? Wow!” I laughed and laughed and laughed, because they sounded so much more like Batman and Robin anticipating a caper with the Joker than like decently awed men awaiting God's final judgment.

We may smile too. But even granting that there is a difference between the excitement in the Watchtower office and the excitement of 1 Corinthians 15, we may recognize a larger difference between those two taken together and the holy serenity of Roma Aeterna.

The deeper question is, How did Rome get that way? And the answer to that question is part of the answer to the question, Why did Barbara Grizzuti Harrison become a Catholic?

Rome got that way in a reaction, perhaps an over-reaction, to early Christian predictions that never came to pass. The Brooklyn of the Jehovah's Witnesses is now in the same predicament. By one reckoning, the Jehovah's Witnesses have incorrectly predicted the End of the World seventeen times. A bad joke? The ultimate refutation? Perhaps, but then what kind of joke was it when Paul's predictions did not come true? No kind of joke, obviously, and just as obviously, some kind of refutation. Still, men and women who had once learned to look at the world as if it would soon end could never see it again in quite the old way. Primitive Christianity became early Catholicism because Paganism, whatever its sober beauty, was simply no longer an option. The apocalyptic form of the Christian faith, though not undertaken as an imaginative exercise, had had this permanent an impact upon the imagination of the Greco-Roman world.

What other explanation can there be for the survival of Christianity in the face of so massive a refutation by events? The primitive Christians did not cut much better a figure in their day than the Jehovah's Witnesses do in ours. Even the bizarre numerical speculations of Charles Taze Russell had their parallels—in fact, their antecedents—in the Book of Revelation. If then the Jehovah's Witnesses ought to break up their act (“We regret that due to circumstances beyond our control, the Armageddon previously scheduled for this hour will not be seen”), then so ought the early church to have done. And if it did not, we must ask after the reason. What was it that kept the early church alive to make the transition to early Catholicism?

I say it was the overwhelming power of the central Jewish and Christian intuition, the intuition which most sharply distinguished those groups from classical paganism and today distinguishes them again from eastern religion; the intuition, namely, that things need not be as they are. That there need be no bowing to necessity because there exists no necessity to which to bow. God exists, but God is freedom itself. For him, the laws of nature are no less subject to abrogation than are the conventions of society. The theophany that concludes the Book of Job, whatever else it may say, does not say that Yahweh and Job are, finally, fellow-prisoners. The theophany on Calvary is backlit by the resurrection. Its message is not: “This is it,” but rather, “This—however temporarily inevitable—is not it.” And “This is not it” seems to me to have been the intuition that remained alive in Barbara Grizzuti Harrison during the twenty years that lay between her apostasy from Jehovah's Witnesses and her conversion to Roman Catholicism.

The challenge that faced her was like the one that brought early Catholicism into existence; namely, how to give new expression to a religious intuition larger than the forms that had first carried it. Jehovah's Witnesses, as Harrison tells it, divide mankind, as early Christianity did, into “sheep” and “goats” and allow their preoccupation with this distinction to distort their simplest emotions. She tells of a fatal heart attack at a Witnesses meeting, in which the Witnesses' sole preoccupation was with what the police rescue squad would think of their comportment. Self-righteousness stood between them and their own grief and love. When she broke with them, with their apocalyptic dream, their vision of glory, she found herself liberated into grief and love, physical and spiritual.

And yet as she doubles back now to question her years with the Witnesses' dream, so the Catholic church might well double back to question itself about the time when not just a few Christians but every Christian believed that the world was about to end. For had there been no such time and no germ of truth in such a mistake, then there would be, today, no Catholic church, just as, if there had been no germ of truth concealed in Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's years as a Jehovah's Witness, she would not have written this book.

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