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Empathy, Science Fiction, and the Jehovah's Witnesses (a Reminiscence) [1]
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Date: 2025-04-29
Thinking about empathy led me to remember an encounter. Jehova’s Witnesses coming to the door are often the butt of jokes—one of a few small groups people feel safe ridiculing. Yet in my experience, the few self-identified Jehova’s Witnesses I’ve spent any time talking with have been very kind people. Admittedly, I have a very small sample size, but I just don’t feel comfortable casting aspersions. We all have our own journeys of faith and belief. I can’t say mine are any better or worse. They believe in a particular interpretation of the Bible while I read science fiction. We share a common membership in humanity. Might as well be kind.
So while others refuse to answer the door when they come knocking or devise self-congratulatorily clever ways to shoo them away, I… well:
About two decades ago, I was telecommuting from Albuquerque. There was an older couple of Jehovah's Witnesses who would come by from time to time. They'd ring the doorbell, and I'd invite them in for ice tea if it was hot out or coffee if it was cold. They were very nice and we'd chat for a bit.
I read a lot of science fiction. One of the times they came by, I had just reread the classic Ray Bradbury story, "The Man" in which a rocket ship of explorers lands on a planet just after Jesus had visited that planet. I hit them with that story and we got into a long discussion about religion in science fiction.
A few visits later, I was rereading R. A. Lafferty's novel Fourth Mansions, which is a reinterpretation of Teresa of Avila's book on meditative prayer, Interior Castle. Lafferty’s novel posits that mankind is on a journey towards the next steps of intellectual, cultural, and spiritual evolution. A young cub reporter stumbles upon four sets of preternatural conspiracies that have been working since the dawn of time to hold humanity back from the next steps in our evolution.
This is my favorite novel in any genre by any author. I especially love what I see as an ultimately hopeful message—that any one of us, not just some unknown chosen one or heir of great power, but every single one of us everymen, everylouts, each and every “malodorous worm in the middle” has the potential to understand the forces that beset us and lead us all to the next levels of development.
I thrust a copy of the book into their hands and bubbled with enthusiasm about the writing and the metaphors and what it has to say about our potential for evolution.
They never came back.
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