Posted by Passing By on March 18, 2005 at 15:44:04
In Reply to: M.A. thesis interview needed posted by Monika Kosz on March 13, 2005 at 15:05:15:
I understand our need for rigor but as other say these are difficult questions because nothing was ever static. Some context is required and your thesis director should be able to help you on that. Here is one way of breaking things up.
Q8. How did you celebrate name days, birthdays, weddings, funerals and other festivals?
Family life used to be centered around "serving the Lord", which translated into doing whatever was necessary to advance the cause. For some people was to give out the message, and through other means selling it out. First it was word of mouth and lots of PR. This would sometimes translate fundraising. But this takes time and, most of all, a little nack for handling people.
As a result, a guy by the name of Stephen (now a pastor of a church in Houston, Texas) is credited as coming up with the idea of selling literature. Litnessing was born. The notion of shiners and shamers is born as well. Some homes and some people start making money. This activity, as fundraising, developed and integreted well into other proselitizing activities such as escort services and FFing.
This is the context in which your questions exist. Because there were basicaly two types of homes, those which did fundraising and those which used the funds. Likewise, there were people who did the fundraising and people who used the funds.
The field homes were the ones heavily involved in fundraising. Those are the ones with the best teams to do litnessing, FFing, postering, etc. Obviously, some activities required some special characteristics to make each person suitable for one or another "ministry".
The non-field homes are the ones where the leaders live, or teams that produce proselitizing materials, or the famous letters, etc. They for the government and its bureaucratic structure. There have always been formal and informal titles and positions and the field operative was never sure of how high one of those members in non-field homes was, unless it was well published. You may be familiar with the term "selah", well this is the general case when talking about non-field homes. Even the leaders in the field are not even mentioned many times.
That is a superficial coverage of the hierachy and now to your questions. The answer is actually shorter.
It all depends on who the center of the festivity is. If it is an important person, or somebody who is high in the hierarchy, it may be a big deal. If it is somebody in the field, there will probably be nothing - unless the closest leader(s) deem it important for whatever reason.
Take the Coronation (you read about it in Deborah's book) was huge deal. There were many reasons "of state" for that. A marriage would be sort of important but in many cases all it happened was a prayer in their weekly churchy meeting. Earlier on, it was sort of important but mainly to give the con-man himself the opportunity to brainwash us on something.
Birthdays were totally unimportant, unless it was Berg's or Maria's. I only remember a couple of funeral celebrations, and that's what they were. A party to celebrate their "graduation". In those days there were many suicides but I remember hearing about 2 members who got killed in 1970-71 somewhere in Brussels or Antwerp.
I wish I had been there for David Berg's funeral but I was already out. I wonder when we will be celebrating Maria's, Peter's and some of the other sidekicks' deaths. But all in all, those will be hollow celebrations due to the amount of damage they have already done and all the grief they have already caused.