Here it is, it took me two days to write and therefore nobody should actually be able to read it.
The purpose of writing a story like mine down serves two purposes. First, I must find a coherent understanding and explanation of the events that have befallen me. Second, I hope that my story helps others in some way, to let them know that there is indeed "light at the end of the tunnel." The process of leaving the Witnesses is a painful one, one that has ripped apart families and has hurt countless people. However, I am living proof of the fact that not only can you, the reader, survive such a maneuver, you can thrive because of it.
It is currently 4 am, here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the city where I was born and raised. This city is the spiritual birthplace of the movement that became Jehovah's Witnesses. The history of this religion and its development from a loosely connected group of Bible Students to the highly organized, tightly controlled phenomenon that it currently is has been well documented elsewhere, most notably in Raymond Franz' Crisis of Conscience. I do not intend to go through it again. However, this story is as tied to the city of Pittsburgh as I am, because I feel that when the religion moved its headquarters from Pittsburgh to New York, it lost some of its valuable identity - it was making moves for corporate reasons, not religious ones, which is the crux of its current problems.
I was born on November 23, 1977, the first child of a Witness couple. My father had been exposed to the teachings of Jehovah's Witnesses in high school, during a class debate on evolution. My father chose to defend the side of creation, not out of sincere conviction, but rather a desire to avoid sitting through his regularly scheduled class. Also on the creation side was a young Jehovah's Witness. The sincerity and depth of his fellow student's conviction, and the copious amounts of research that the student brought to the table, stuck with him all through his college years. Upon his graduation from the engineering program and subsequent move to Pittsburgh, my father sought out Jehovah's Witnesses.
He married my mother, a young woman with a teaching degree, before coming to Pittsburgh, and he told her of his plans to seek out these people. They studied with H.R. Dawson, a notable and widely respected Jehovah's Witness who later became City Overseer for the Pittsburgh area.
This was in the early seventies, which has been described to me as an exciting time to be one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and my parents were right in the thick of things. My father quit his job as an engineer to become a full-time pioneer minister, trying to fulfill quota requirements like100 Watchtower placements a month, and turning in a report of 120 hours of field service every thirty days. I remember my mother once saying that my father burned himself out trying to do this, because his basic honesty and sense of fairness wouldn't let him count time spent in the car waiting for others to finish up.
Having inherited that same basic honesty of purpose and action, I can firmly say that it is impossible to fulfill those requirements without cutting corners, showing a certain relaxed attitude towards what counts as time in service and what doesn't. When you are responsible for counting your own time, and verification is impossible, then why not help yourself out, especially when the penalties for failing to meet these requirements is so severe?
Therein lies a seed of conflict with the Watchtower organization. The organization treats its followers like workers in a giant factory, each little worker churning out numbers in a dizzying array of categories. These numbers are collected, added, divided, approved - and then published as evidence of the organization's spiritual prosperity.
These numbers are often imaginary.
Hence, there is a sense of hypocrisy, of time wasted, of energy and effort spent to no gain. This sense, I believe, permeates the entire organization. Millions of magazines are published and sent to local congregations, who take the responsibility of distributing them to the public. This distribution often involves leaving them in the doors of not-at-homes, or dropping a pile in the local laundromat. The magazines left are often discarded without being read.
The wasted effort is unreal.
But back when my parents were coming in to the truth, and first enjoying the newfound sense of identity and belonging that neither had found in their previous religious experiences, the effort spent seemed logical, because the Society was hinting strongly that the end of the world was coming in 1975. Why? Their logic is tenuous, and again, documented better elsewhere. Suffice to say that my parents made sacrifices, including putting off having children, until after 1975. The whole organization was seized with the feverish desire to see Armageddon and the New System, and the growth was exponential. With such a simple, clear cut, and apocalyptic message, it is no wonder that the movement saw such frenetic growth.
There was much room for advancement - and my father found himself gaining more and more responsibility as an elder in the South Hills congregation. My mother worked to support him in the pioneer effort - and recounted to me the amazing effect of that time.
The year 1975 came and went, of course, with no noticeable cessation of the iniquities of the world. My father was exhausted, I think, and went back to work as an engineer. He was certainly fortunate to have something to fall back on. My mother quit her job, and they decided to have babies. Thus, I was born, a child of the Disillusionment.
Although disappointed, they threw themselves into the work of raising Witness children. My brother was born two years after I was, and for a brief time we were the model Witness family. My father was an elder on various committees, thanks to the influence of H.R. Dawson. My mother stayed hoome, auxiliary pioneered from time to time, and prepared me for school.
At this point it seems natural to discuss my natural gifts. If I seem arrogant, let me explain. I do not think too much of myself. I'm just a human. However, this is not a dinner party where modesty would dictate that I hold my tongue regarding my talents. This is my personal expiation of all my guilt, my anger, my fear, and my hard work. Ergo, I should tell myself and you exactly who I am.
(In Jesus' illustration of the talents, for instance, would it have done the slaves any good to ignore the gift their master had given them? To pretend, even to themselves, that they had not been given it? No, such an act would class them with the evil slave, who buried his talent and ignored it. This illustration is apt, because the money he gave them, while sizeable, would not have constituted an unbearable loss for the owner of such an estate. What Jesus was trying to show was that these gifts are given in order to test our ability and willingness to use them properly. So, any of our talents has no great value when set against the Supreme Intelligence that gave it to us, but rather serves to educate us in the arts of self-governance.)
I have great intelligence. In the sense that I am able to assimilate facts from disparate sources, combine them, and then distill them onto paper or public speaking parts, I have met very few who think like I do. I'm not the most intelligent person I've ever met, not even close. Nor is intelligence a single faceted thing. There are areas of aptitude where I am sorely lacking - musically, for instance. But academically, especially in the areas of theology, philosophy, history, science and literature, I have a voracious appetite for information, and a profound ability to get to the heart of a complex matter and restate it in simple, easy to understand terms. A natural born teacher, if you would.
I learned to read before I went to kindergarten, and the first time I can remember putting words together, when the neurons fired correctly as I stared at a page and the letters swam into place to form phonetics and then words, was at my mother's side, reading Proverbs chapter 6. From then on, it was an explosion of learning, as I devoured first the children's side of the library, then moved in to the adult's side. I read about dinosaurs, about history, about American politics, and about the inevitable decline of human institutions.
The meetings, I recall, were excruciatingly boring. I was given privileges at an early age, including microphone handling. I was baptized at the age of twelve, on June 30, 1990. But while the others would be studying the Watchtower, I would be reading the Bible as a diversion. My memory, which would later serve me so well as I acted on the stage in later life, was causing me some problems. It was too good, too accurate, too ready to pick up on the things in the Bible that have caused such problems for writers like Voltaire and Nietzsche.
Couple that with the fact that my brother was having problems which would later be diagnosed as incipient schizophrenia - a disease which tends to blossom under the pressures of adolescence - and you have the recipe for what the Watchtower society calls "spiritual shipwreck." For my father was busy tending to matters of the congregation, my mother was taking care of my brother, and I was left alone. Eventually, when my sister was born as a "midlife surprise" I found myself babysitting her a lot.
My father's work as an engineer took us all around the world. The corporations he worked for would often send him and occasionally his family across the world. We went to Sydney, Australia for almost a year in 1985-6, and Sheffield, England for seven months in 1993-4. So, I got to meet a lot of Witnesses from all around the world, and can testify to the generally even character, the usually gentle and meek personalities that have collected under this organization's banner.
Here lies yet another huge dissonance within the organization. The best Witnesses are the ones that the general congregation views with suspicion as being "unspiritual." The ones that are shunted to the side, "marked" as being potentially bad association, are the ones that generally think more about spiritual things - that don't just "go with the flow" in the organization. Worse, the ones at the top of the congregation, that generally get the privileges and responsibilities, are the ones that have either not thought about the theological quandaries of Witness dogma, have managed to suppress such thoughts, or worst of all, have no spiritual views at all and are using the position to accentuate their personal power over others.
The gentle ones, the ones who seek each other out for association, who try to help others, continually run afoul of various authorities in the Society's hierarchy. These powers view with suspicion any activities that are not supervised and directed by the Society itself. Gatherings to go roller skating, bowling, to listen to music, even to eat a meal in large numbers are frowned upon as potentially leading to "revelries." Meanwhile, these gentle ones that try to follow the Bible's advice to "upbuild" one another are routinely driven into a state of inactivity by the sheer time commitment and the stupifyingly boring program of "education" demanded by the Society.
All this was something I observed and learned from as I got older. I generally squelched thoughts of disobedience, seeking only to have a good relationship with God and to serve him to the best of my ability. I was faithful about commenting at every meeting. I studied on my own. I went out in field service at least once a month.
Time passed, as it always does - and then a lightning bolt of change struck the congregation! College was permitted! For most of its history, the Watchtower and Awake magazines have condemned higher education as a snare of the Devil and a waste of time, as the end was right around the corner. The Society, needing to justify the change in policy before a vast number of people who had set aside their personal goals to "seek the Kingdom first," said that the changing economic conditions might require higher education in order to find part-time work. The goal, however, of working secularly only part-time while continuing to pioneer for the Society, was presented as being supreme.
So my parents, worried about my future, sent me to college at the University of Pittsburgh. My intent was to major in Computer Sciences, get a job, and move on with my spiritual life. In retrospect, I wonder if my parents' willingness to send me to school was in part due to their memories of the failure of 1975, my father's experience with burnout during his own pioneer days.
In any case, I was given what many young people these days aren't - a free ride through college. I commuted from home to the big, urban Pitt campus in the Oakland section of town.
The huge change from high school to college cannot be overstated in my case. I went from a rather small suburban school, where everybody knew everybody and my stand as a Witness marked me as different in a small crowd, where I suffered the persecution (in my mind, at least) similar to the apostles; to a huge city campus where my religion was not even the strangest of the vast array of belief systems presented to me. Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, neo-Pagans, psychics, evangelicals, Hare Krishnas, B'hai... the list went on and on. I was bewildered to learn that most of these people had barely heard of Jehovah's Witnesses. What about the worldwide preaching work? I thought. What about Armageddon? How could these people possibly be judged adversely when Jehovah's Witnesses haven't even reached one tenth of them? The idea of God slaughtering all these people, most of whom were tolerant of my own personal choice in the area of religion, struck me as being incredible lunacy, the height of arrogance.
The second crack in my wall of conviction appeared with my own emerging sexuality. I was seventeen when I first hit the university, and while I was a "late bloomer" regarding puberty, I was still a fully functioning male with hormones. With the advent of the Internet connection to Pitt becoming available to my house, I spent a great deal of time exploring pornographic websites, learning to admire and appreciate the beauty of women from all around the world. While a great deal of pornography is simply exploitative, I felt that certain aspects of this area must be acceptable to God. After all, he made us in his image, didn't He? The first commandment is to fill the earth -ie. have sex.
The third crack, as they multiplied, appeared when I found my calling - theater. I took an Introduction to Performance class as a fun way to fulfill a Humanities requirement, and I promptly became a living testament to the wonders of a liberal arts education. That education exposed me to something I would never have done otherwise, and that thing, theater, has become the mainstay of my current life. Backstage work at first, (where I saw my first real-live naked woman!), and later acting. Now, I'm working on getting my own theater company off the ground. Thanks, Pitt!
The cracks in the walls of my conviction were multiplying too rapidly for me to number them or keep track of the order of their appearance. The program of "spiritual feeding" at the Kingdom Hall simply wasn't up to the task of satisfying my intellectual curiosity, and this resulted in a sense of spiritual emptiness. Instead of being able to recognize the spiritual emptiness for what it was, however, I was convinced that it was somehow my fault, my fault for not studying the Society's publications enough, my fault for missing meetings to work in the theater.
Now an ugly demon raised its head: bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed officially at the age of twenty one, but its symptoms were manifesting themselves long before.
I dropped out of college on an impulse, and spent a year working for a local brother mowing lawns. This is where I began to see the hypocrisy of the Witness' expectations. Suffice to say that this brother's personal conduct was not exactly up to the Watchtower's excruciating standards - and people in the congregation judged him harshly for it. And yet, he was such a loving father and devoted husband! Again, the dissonance between what the religion demanded and what was truly important in life struck me as absurd!
Meanwhile, at the age of nineteen, I was offered the role of Hamlet. I accepted, and began missing many meetings in order to attend rehearsals. During an enjoyable if amateurish run at the Bard's greatest work, I met a young girl who worked backstage. I fell in love. Things happened - and I was publicly reproved. This was my first experience with a Judicial Committee (I would have a total of five JC's in the next two years.)
Under pressure from the committe, I broke off my relationship with this "worldly girl". I promptly began suicidal ideation, slashing my arm. I was writhing in guilt over abandoning what I saw as being true love for the approval of a religion. My mother eventually called the police and had me committed to the psychiatric wing of a local hospital.
Now the story begins to take on Kafka-esque tinges, as my parents went through my room, seeking the source of my spiritual discomfort, and threw out twenty CD's of various genres. I often wonder what would have happened to me if they had thrown out the collection of Watchtower bound volumes? The CD's were not of the type to encourage mental aberration: Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, the Ramones... all of these were tossed into the pitch pile.
A local family in the Carnegie congregation, for whom I still pray regularly, took it upon themselves to help me spiritually. They had me over that summer, every day, and we'd study for the upcoming meetings and then go swimming or camping or just watch movies. This evidence of a balance between a spiritual and material life convinced me that I was still "in the truth" and I needed to work harder to assuage my doubts.
My relationship with my parents was "on the rocks" and therefore we agreed that I would go away to school, to Pitt's campus in Greensburg. I would stay in the dorms, eat in the cafeteria, attend the local Jeanette congregation, and get a degree in English Writing (a major that was a much better choice for my personality than the asocial computer science degree.)
Three out of the four semester went better than even my parents could have hoped for. I studied regularly, for every meeting. I witnessed to my roommates (who in retrospect were amazingly tolerant of this visitor from another world.) I went to every meeting, leaving the college three times a week in my suit and tie in front of a curious crowd of shabbily dressed drunken freshmen. Oddly enough, I wasn't really bothered by anyone about it, although a few did ask where I was going all the time.
Even though my schoolwork was going well, I was headed straight for a confrontation with the expectations that the Society placed on me - and the expectations I placed on the local congregation's elders to help me in my time of trial.
My loneliness and sense of isolation was growing every day, and I was literally surrounded, in our coed dorm buildings, with sympathetic, intelligent, beautiful women from all over the world. I fell in love again, this time with a young woman from next door, and again, things happened. Embarrassment at the results of my first fumbling attempts at intimacy, rather than modesty or prudishness, precludes me from revealing the details of what went on. Suffice to say that I was reproved, reproved again two weeks later, and was up for a third JC when I actually "sinned" again.
I was humping like a rabbit, in other words, and I was also in love. The elders seemed... detached. Although I had been at every meeting for two years, had auxiliary pioneered, had tried to be a model Witness, the elders said that they didn't really know me that well.
That third JC was a nightmare of tangled emotions, as I struggled to defend what was (in my mind at that time) indefensible - I was a sinner. I was desperate to not get disfellowshipped. I arranged to move out of the dorms, back home, and commute the 37 miles each way to school three times a week. I was willing to do anything to avoid "repeating my error."
Two of the elders seemed pretty cold about disfellowshipping me, as though I had deserved such a measure. The third seemed more emotional about it, weeping as he told me. God knows what went on in there between them, but I don't. All I knew was that after 22 years as a Jehovah's Witness, I was suddenly an outcast. The organization that I had built my life around had failed to treat me with the love and concern that I had come to expect as my due for my loyal service.
What was I to do?
I moved back onto campus, back into the same room I had before, and quit going to meetings. I drank, slept with women, and did a couple of shows. I was depressed enough to begin experimenting with nature magic, learning things from the Internet and trying them out in the woods around the campus. The results were... interesting; not quantifiable, but the experience was certainly frightening to someone who had been raised with the idea that demons lurked in every corner.
Upon graduation, I made a concerted effort to be reinstated. I moved back home, studied, went to every meeting. But I began to notice a change in my reaction to the meetings. Whereas before I had been merely bored, now I began to have physical reaction to every statement. It seemed like the speakers had lost some magic quality that made them tolerable. The Watchtower lessons became excruciatingly painful, physically making me ill. Five meetings a week began to seem like an unreasonable requirement (it patently is.)
After a six month effort, I wrote a letter to the original congregation from which I was disfellowshipped. There was no response. Two months later, I wrote again. Again, no response. The Carnegie elders were concerned. After all, I had been almost perfect in meeting attendance, but going to meetings where nobody talked to me was beginning to wear on my endurance. It is a measure of the ludicrousness of a corporate religion that the elders in Jeanette had to reinstate me, when they had no measure of how I was actually doing, spiritually.
My meeting with the elders this time was a humiliating experience that revealed their lack of interest in me. Whereas I left work early to be there on time, had dressed in a suit, and brought my Bible, these elders were in shorts and ragged T-shirts. They treated me with cold indifference, said that praying with me was "a form of spiritual fellowship" that they could not engage with me in, and had to borrow my Bible in order to show me some scriptures, vague texts that I was more familiar with than them. They dismissed me with the comment that I would need to be out for at least a year.
All right. I left, burning with disappointment and humiliation. I had tried my best to be a Witness, but it seemed that life and God had other plans. I bounced back and forth to Oklahoma, living drunkenly and promiscuously, screwing up job opportunities and my life.
Now I decided to build a life for myself. My parents kicked me out. I found an apartment, a job, a girlfriend to live with me and help me with my bipolar disorder. This girlfriend is now my fiancee, and I am more in love than I've ever been. I'm in awe of this "worldly" girl that has shown more true love and endurance than those who were charged by God to do so.
I've found a peace and communication with God, a relationship not based on the Christian mythos but a simple, pure, direct effort to display love in everything I do. Mercy, so hard to obtain in "God's organization," has been present from day one in my house. I've learned to truly forgive, to not judge, to be kind. I'm absolutely determined to be a good man, a good husband, and someday, maybe, a good father. (I'm practicing this with my cats.)
A judgemental attitude is NOT the tenth fruit of the spirit.
Will I ever go back? Hell, no. Kafka is nice to read about, but you wouldn't want to live there.
If you made it this far, God will send you a blessing... HA!
Love,
CZAR