Dick and Mary Try Again
Dick and Mary came back
this morning,
the elderly Jehovah’s
Witnesses who came
to my door last month
and told me they
were going to celebrate
their 60th wedding
anniversary, and I was
sitting in the shade
of the maple tree
reading C. G. Jung and
Herman Hesse, A Record of Two Friendships,
by the Chilean writer
Miguel Serrano (I do
a lot of reading in the
shade of our maple
tree), and I invited
them to join me (they
had of course come back
to proselytize me),
and I greeted them with
the courtesy and
civility that their age
and commitment
deserved, and within a
minute or two I had
informed them that I
had read their two
Watchtower pamphlets but only part
of the
book What Does the Bible Really Teach?
because I could not buy
into such a literal
interpretation of the
Bible that their teaching
espoused, and I give my
reasons why, as
honestly as I could
without offending their
dogmatic sensibilities,
which I did because
reincarnation was the
work of the Devil for
Dick and Mary, but they
were polite with me
and tried to smooth
things over when I backed
them into a corner
with logic and personal
experience, and we
ended up respecting each
other for our beliefs but
they went away sad
that they could not
save me, and I went back
to reading my book on Serrano’s
friendship
with Jung and Hesse, two
iconic writers who
broke the mold of fixed
thought and set an
untold number of souls
free.
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