The Jehovah's Witnesses

For all their essential remoteness from all the other aspects of my life, I think I have been mulling over the Jehovah's Witnesses ever since I started thinking for long about anything. This is because of their mystery, and that was probably launched by having an early childhood friend that I seem to remember very vaguely from my kindergarten or 1st grade days.

This kid had parents who were Jehovah's Witnesses, and in that all-Rainbow world to which I was entirely restricted through all the first years, though their attitudes were perhaps heavily over-represented in my mind by those of my all-important mother, that persuasion of his parents was another of a long line of "peculiar" subjects that could be noted but were not discussed, for reasons that, as with sex and as with events deep in my parents' New Orleans past, and as with politics and even music, were never disclosed.

In the years immediately after that, first in a Maryland suburb and later in the D.C. "Inner City," the Witnesses rarely came around, but they still kept haunting the cupboards in one of the back rooms of my mind, and it wasn't until I started living here in rural Virginia that I suddenly saw a lot of them, up close and personal.

I hold counts against all religions, and that keeps me resolutely determined to remain forever disengaged from any of them. Some have more counts against them than others, but I have only one against the Jehovah's Witnesses. That is their requirement for its adherents to go around, at odd intervals, to the houses of strangers to read them things from the Bible. That is something I absolutely could not and would not do.

I know, I know. But for that I would never have met the "Friday Nights Lights" lady. But life has never even thought about affording me more similarly good things than there are stars in the sky.

Everything else about the Witnesses I applaud. They don't seem to make any distinctions among people, by race, creed, color, class, or any of the other ways in which people indulge in their overpowering need to feel naturally superior, which means that a certain number of others must necessarily be inferior. And the Witnesses don't indulge in any obsessions with structures. No huge cathedrals, mosques, temples, synagogues and the like, highly overdecorated, and otherwise filled to overflowing with salutes to utter pomposity. Just the plainest of little buildings with maybe one sign in front telling what it is. Plus they don't seem to have any leaders as such. No bishops, popes, and what not, at least none that you ever hear anything about or from. Leaders may have their uses, but not when you have to hear from them. The Jehovah people just have Jesus Christ and that's it.

So how are they able to hang together with such low-key consistency through the years? What do they do when they're together in their very austere-looking Kingdom Halls? Do they hold services at all? Do they sing, or listen to sermons? Are collection plates passed around? Are the women segregated from the men during their devoltions or readings or whatever they do in there?

To answer these and other questions I have long wanted to visit one of their services just once, and by this time I probably would've, had it not been for one of the banes of being a Baptist, into which I had myself inducted at the age of 12, only to "backslide" permanently a few years later at 16. And that was the custom of having any new visitors stand up and be seen and greeted at the Sunday services. I thought then and I still think I would rather go through having one of my arms broken than to endure the intense embarrassment of that, and I wouldn't want the Witnesses to finally betray themselves with an act of that nature.

And my wife doesn't help in the least, thinking she is encouraging me, by telling me that I should go just once, because they would be glad to see me. --All right. So let's forget the whole thing.