Visions of Glory
Miles, Jack
leaves one man dead, Linda's narrative resumes in the same dry, philosophical vein as before. "Nobody's perfect," she comments. "'There was never a perfect person around." The loss of innocence...
...0 death, where is your sting...
...To this difference in _practical eschatology, there corresponds a strongly marked differ-ence in religious mood...
...The Brooklyn of the Jehovah's Witnes- ses is now in the same predicament...
...That there need be no bowing to necessity because there exists no neces- sity to which to bow...
...Primitive Christianity became early Catholicism because Paganism, whatever its sober beauty, was simply no longer an option...
...By one reckoning, the Jehovah's Witnesses have incorrectly predicted the End of the World seventeen times...
...the bluestocking asks of the slum...
...She tells of a fatal heart attack at a Witnesses meeting, in which the Witnes- ses' sole preoccupation was with what the police rescue squad would think of their comportment...
...Does either Scripture or tradition encour- age the Christian to regard physical real- ity itself, much less any single city, as eternal...
...But even granting that there is a difference between the excite- ment in the Watchtower office and the excitement of ! Corinthians 15, we may recognize a larger difference between those two taken together and the holy serenity of Roma Aeterna...
...Jehovah's Witnesses, as Hamson tells it, divide mankind, as early Christianity did, into "sheep" and "goats" and allow their preoccupation with this dis- tinction to distort their simplest emo-tions...
...This is scarcely to distort them: they see themselves in rather these terms...
...We may smile too...
...Perhaps, but then what kind of joke was it when Paul's predictions did not come true...
...In a memorable moment in Visions of Glory., two young Watchtower workers cheer together for Armageddon: .9 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...
...What other explanation can there be for the survival of Christianity in the face of so massive a refutation by events...
...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...
...Most of all, they believe in Ar- mageddon, the imminent and violent End of the World...
...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...
...We are always vaguely aware that Maleck's characters are playing out their story against the background of an ulti- mate moment in American history...
...This will be instantaneous, in the twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet sounds...
...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...
...I say it was the overwhelming power of the central Jewish and Christian intui- tion, the intuition which most sharply distinguished those groups from classical paganism and today distinguishes them again from eastern religion...
...Still, for this reader, it as the author's religious story that kept her book going...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK...
...For us," St...
...The deeper question is, How did Rome get that way...
...It is her imagination merely that the film depicts...
...rallying in Yankee Stadium...
...The challenge that faced her was like the one that brought early Catholicism into existence...
...Her book is an investigation, not an entertainment...
...They refuse blood transfu-sions...
...Paul wrote, "our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes the Savior we await...
...Brooklyn, where Bethel, the Witnesses headquar- ters is located, reckons in instants...
...namely, how to give new expression to a religious intuition larger than the forms that had first carried it...
...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...
...There is much to see and hear...
...They decry the Vatican as the fountain of evil...
...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...
...The mood of Rome is grave, shrewd, unhur- ried, unenthusiastic, undiscouraged, un- surprised, undeterred, unexcited...
...It is not a portrait of an era, but only of a single individual, Linda...
...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...
...The life and legend of Marfa Eva Duarte de Perdn provides an apt case- in-point...
...Wouldn't it be wonderful if it was Armageddon...
...No kind of joke, obviously, and just as obviously, some kind of refutation.9 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...
...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 notori- ous 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 ca.ses, forc- ing the Court to broaden the mean- ing of the First and Fourteenth Amendments...
...The loss of innocence which she resists by talking this way, as if she had already lost her innocence and nothing could really surprise her anymore, is not hers alone...
...And if it did not, we must ask after the reason...
...marching from door to door...
...They insult the flag...
...Let the phrase Rorna Aeterna stand for this scandal...
...Eternal...
...Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, feature writer for Esquire...
...Books: WITNESSES AND CATHOLICS H OW can people live like that...
...Whatever their mo-tives, we are very much in their debt...
...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...
...A bad joke...
...22 December 1978:819...
...That novel, despite its lip- smacking relish for human and religious grotesquerie, finally rings false...
...Rome got that way in a reaction, perhaps an over-reaction, to early Chris- tian predictions that never came to pass...
...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...
...She was one of them for eleven years, from 1944 to 1955, con-verted at the age of nine with her mother, who is a Witness to this day...
...The theophany that concludes the Book of Job, whatever rise it may say, does not say that Yahweh and Job are, finally, fellow- prisoners...
...Its message is I Eva, the saint and/or ex-whore not: "This is it," but rather, "This-- however temporarily in-evitable-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...
...Rome reckons in centuries, as the saying goes...
...For him, the laws of nature are no less subject to abrogation than are the conventions of society...
...We see the Witnesses in American prisons, Nazi camps, in new kinds of trouble in Africa...
...And seeing themselves so, they do see something scandalously true about the Roman church...
...the religious bluestocking, believing or un- believing, asks of a group like Jehovah's Witnesses...
...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...
...But Days of Heaven is not an allegory about history...
...Ms., Saturday Re- view...
...How can people think like that...
...God exists, but God is freedom itself...
...And when this corruptible nature has put on incorruptibility, this mortal nature immortality, then will the words of Scripture come true: Death is swal- lowed up in victory...
...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...
...Maybe it's Armageddon...
...The theophany on Calvary is backlit by the resurrection...
...New Republic', and others knows how they can...
...This is what makes it such a splendid movie...
...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...
...They resist the draft without condemning the war...
...What was it that kept the early church alive to make the transition to early Catholicism...
...Harrison, VISIONS OF GLORY: A HISTORY AND A MEMORY OF JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES Barbara Grizzutl Harrison Simon & Schuster, $12.95 [413 pp.] Jack Miles though extremely harsh in her criticism of the Witnesses, never condescends to them...
...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...
...One hears, as it were, the bluestocking mother's rakeheli son telling tales of vul- gar belief to shock her but telling them for no reason other than that...
...The primitive Christians did not cut much bet- ter a figure in their day than the Jehovah's Witnesses do in ours...
...It Commonweal: 818 will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible...
...And the answer to that question is part of the answer to the ques- tion, Why did Barbara Grizzuti Harrison become a Catholic...
...Even the bizarre numerical speculations of Charles Taze Russell had their parallels--in fact, their antecedents--in the Book of Revelation...
...The ultimate refutation...
...I laughed and laughed and laughed, because they sounded so much more like Batman and Robin anticipating a caper with the Joker than like de- cently awed men awaiting God's final judgment...
...As machines begin to encroach on nature and doughboys go off to the First War, there is, as I mentioned earlier, a general fall from grace in this film...
...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...
...Do you think it's Armageddon...
...It is impossible to speak of the history of civil liber- , ties in this country without speak- ing of them...
...the intuition, namely, that things need not be as they are...
...I EVrrA, FIRST I.AM: A BIOF.,RAPIiY OF EVA PERdN John Barnes Grove Press, $8.95 |oseph A. Page T HERE is something about Argentina that breeds excess and dissolves re- straint...
...Though the causes of this phenomenon may be difficult to pinpoint (geographic isolation, the Latin temper- ament and inexhaustibly fertile soil are among the candidates for blame), its manifestations litter the historical land- scape...
...Death, where is your victor...
...How can people think like that...
Vol. 105 • December 1978 • No. 25
