I want you to tell you the
strange story of my uncle, George Meston, who died in October
1998, aged 91.
George was a highly respected member of his community, in Melrose,
Roxburghshire, Scotland, where he had spent most of his life.
Professionally
he had been the Head Geography teacher in Hawick Academy for many years,
and was known as a charismatic teacher who enthused his pupils with a
pioneering spirit of adventure. Probably his most illustrious pupil was
Chay Blythe, who later embarked on his own adventure of sailing solo
round the world. For many other, less famous, pupils, Mr Meston
was a kind of Indiana Jones character, who seemed to have boundless
energy for travel, and a magpie
obsession for amassing information about world affairs. He took many
pupils
on their first trips abroad, and made sure that they were prepared in
every
possible way to take advantage of the experience - geographically,
historically and socio-politically.
He was also an authority on various other subjects, including the remote
Scottish Island of St Kilda, about which he had lectured, and to which
he had traveled several times, on one occasion being the only person
camping on the islands. In his early years he had embarked on a journey
through the Scottish islands, which involved him swimming between
several islands, including Mull and Iona, where more recently four men
were drowned crossing the same stretch of water in a boat.
Certainly I and my brother, who were his closest relatives, regarded him
as an adventurer, and in our childhood he always seemed to be coming
back from
some exotic place with fascinating stories. Ironically enough when I
went into his house for the first time after he died, spread out on the
sitting room floor were countless newspaper articles ( which was his
habit ) including one about the lost ark, with a picture of Indiana
Jones. The irony would have been totally lost on him, as I'm sure he
had never heard of Indiana Jones, and certainly never knew that that was
how he appeared to me.
Another interest of his was statistics, and he had an elephant's memory
for facts concerning political and governmental issues, particularly in
the area of international relations, trade and defense. All in all, he
had a remarkable brain, and one felt more or less totally unable to
have, let alone ever win, an argument with him. I use the word argument
deliberately, as it was rare that a conversation with him was ever a discussion. This,
of course, could alienate many people, but given that those same people also
recognised that he had a formidable battery of information at this fingertips, and that he was fiercely
principaled, he was regarded as
a pillar of uprightness, if, at the same time a formidable opponent.
In reality he was an isolated man who found himself at odds with most of
the
world around him. His political views veered to the extreme right; at
one and the same time he was an ally of Thatcherism, and a critic of
material aggrandisement, a promoter of brotherly love across racial divides, yet
a critic of inherent weaknesses (as he saw them) in certain races.
Above all he was a fierce critic of moral degeneration, and laxity in our society,
seeing the vast majority of people as without any moral fibre.
To superficial friends and neighbours, however, he was a hearty chap with a
willingness to help where possible.
All of this however concealed a private obsession, the full extent of
which only emerged after his death. In our small family ( he was my
mother's brother), my uncle was a problematic character. He had, from his early
years, dabbled in different causes and beliefs. Having been
brought up in a rather severely Presbyterian family background, he soon began to espouse
other causes, including Jehovah's Witnesses, Vegetarianism, and
a Fitness League which treated even that as some kind of religion. He
then moved on to Moral Re-Armament, with which he was involved for many
years, and rekindled his allegiance to the Scottish Presbyterian church. He
threw himself into these causes with total commitment, but these changes
of affection caused many problems initially in his own family, whom he
tried to encourage to follow him, and later made it extremely difficult for
him to find a partner who could follow his vacillations.
Then in the early seventies he seemed to have transferred his interest
again
to something that he kept rather quiet from the family. He was never available on Saturdays for any social engagements, would never answer
the phone on Friday evenings or Saturdays, and started making it known that
he would not celebrate Christmas, and wanted neither Christmas cards nor
presents. Any such would be sent back. My parents didnıt involve
themselves in questioning too much about this, but to some extent our social
contact dropped off as a result of his secrecy. All the while however, until
well into his sixties, when he was still a bachelor, my mother dealt with
his laundry every week, and used to undertake other tasks for him, such as
providing food, or helping with home decorating, spring cleaning,
and soon.
All this would have been of no import but for the fact that he took it
on himself to be a kind of moral guardian of our family, never holding back
on giving his advice as to how my parents should be bringing us up, and how
they should be directing our general and spiritual education. Relations
were sometimes very strained, particularly between my father and George, and
it was only after he died that I found some letters in which many years
before he had offered some devastating advice to me mother - vis - As your
husband-to-be has not committed himself to God, your marriage will
be sinful. As I also discovered, this threw my mother into confusion, as
she respected her older brother for his brilliance, but was totally confused
by his moral principals into thinking she was sinful.
Over the years my parents tried to forget this painful period in their lives, but I was aware that it had in some way affected our family quite
badly. there was an enormous tussle in my motherıs conscience between
family loyalty and the hurt which George had caused her. At the same time,
because of his rather solitary life, George was very grateful for the
interaction he had as our Uncle within our family.
In the seventies George suddenly announced that he was marrying - he was
in
his late sixties and his wife-to-be in her fifties. They were married in
a civil ceremony undertaken by their "church," which, it transpired, was
the Worldwide Church of
God. The marriage ceremony included a rather
severe lecture (by a lay-preacher) to both participants about their roles
within the union, but the thing that particularly struck me was the way in
which the poor wife was subjected to a list of do's and don'ts which left
her in no doubt that her role was a subservient one to her husband, leaving her
little room for manoeuvre. And he was told that he should not give in to
her whims, if they included requests for things that might be thought of as
frippery or superfluous, such as a hat or make-up.
I took a dim view of the proceedings, though kept my feelings private,
as I was glad that somehow these two lonely people (she was a childless
widow) had found each other, and that remarkably they were both of the same
persuasion. The obvious didnıt dawn on me until much later; that
they had been put together by the church.
Time passed, and relations between my parents and George and his wife improved. Though Jenifer,
George's wife, did indeed seem to have little
scope for her own personality ( whatever that was), she did seem to have
a generally civilising influence on him, and from a practical point of
view, she was the best maid and servant that he could ever have hoped to have
had. As a painfully shy person, she didnt seem to question her role, as she
obviously admired him and let him have total control over all that they
did, including, for example, letting her have a monthly sum of money for
food, and challenging her to work within that budget, with the promise that
she could save for herself whatever she managed to have left over.
We maintained a diplomatic silence over the religious activities - in
any case it was a private matter, and entirely their business. It only
caused problems when for one reason or another they would excuse themselves
from events, in which my mother had hoped they might take part. Some time
around 1990 we understood that, in the church department, there was another
change of allegiance, but to what we were never informed. What had
become more obvious, however was that that the Sabbath period - Friday
sunset to Saturday sunset - had become ever more sacrosanct. No social contact was
maintained between those times.
Some time in the early nineties my mother cautiously told me that a
great
misfortune had befallen my uncle George. Apparently he had lost a great
deal
of money in a South African gold mine investment. He didn't really want
the
family to know (according to my mother), partly because, having always prided himself on his acumen in field of investment, and never
reticent in telling other people where they should be investing their money,
his pride had been dealt a severe blow. There was. however, never any visible sign
of him being impoverished, nor did the loss seem to have any effect
on his lifestyle, which was reasonably comfortable.
But at the time of my own mother's death in 1996, she felt concerned
enough
about her brother to leave him £10000, without actually knowing
specific
details of his loss.
Not long after that, George's own wife Jenifer died. The circumstances
of her death led me to believe that either George was seriously unhinged,
or some completely alien manner of thinking had taken him over. But he was,
to all intents and purposes, in sound mind and not affected by dementia.
To summarize the story:
Jenifer collapsed unexpectedly while shopping one Friday in November
1996.
When I spoke to George on the phone on the Saturday evening, he told me that, although she was obviously not well, he would delay telling the
doctor until the following Tuesday, when he himself had a doctorıs
appointment. I urged him to call the doctor immediately. By the Tuesday he had still
not contacted the doctor. In the afternoon, as planned, he left the
house to go to his appointment. He had left Jenifer lying on the sitting room floor
wrapped up in a duvet close to a coal fire for warmth (as the house was
not centrally heated), and as he himself said he could not understand why
her arms and legs were so cold. Having had his check-up he told the
doctor who, from the description given, said he would come round the next morning. By
the time the doctor did come, Jenifer was dead, having had a series of heart
attacks, the first of which had been on the previous Friday.
As I had been in contact several times over the weekend, the seriousness
of
her condition was apparent to me even over the phone, but his manner of
dealing with it left me speechless. I was rendered even more speechless
when
I saw him the day after her death, and he said to me with tears running
down
his face, How I am going to miss Jenifer's ..........cakes. And she
was planning to make a cake next week. No comment. The
irony of the epitaph that he later had engraved on her gravestone would, I think, also have
escaped him - in few words it summed up Jenifer, faithful servant of
God and me, George.
Following this sad event I endeavoured to help my uncle as much as
possible
from my home in London, and as I was already making frequent trips to
Scotland to visit my own widowed 92 year old father, I used to tie in
visits to my uncle at the same time. In time he asked me to assume the role of
Attorney (and at the same time appointed me an executor of his will) for
him, in case of an emergency. It had transpired that, although the
doctor had said that he was in incredibly good health for a man of his age - 90
at the time - this was either a soothing reassurance, or actually a
mistake, because he had had symptoms of dizziness for quite some time which
were signs of a major problem with his aorta. This was likely to kill him or,
at least, cause him a major stroke at any time. He was open about this with
me, hence his need for me to have POA for him.
By September 1998 he had been hospitalised several times, and surprised
me
by announcing that he had been planning a trip to the Holy Land, which he
was
very anxious to undertake in spite of his health. The doctors had been non-commital about the possibility of him going, since the seriousness
of his condition was known to everyone by this time. Knowing that this was
very
important to him, I did everything possible to encourage him to
go, helping
him in various ways with his bookings, currency, passport etc. He was
discharged - at his behest - from hospital only a matter of days before
the
trip was due to begin.
At the same time I was concerned because, although it was by now about a
year since he had asked me to be his Attorney, I had never signed any
documents, without which I knew I could not excercise the power. To my
entreaties he replied, Don't worry, it probably wont be necessary,
and it
will all be sorted out when I die, somehow conveniently forgetting the
reasons for which he had asked me to be his Attorney in the first place.
I, however, painted the worse-case scenario of him having a stroke in
Israel, which would mean I would have to go to collect him (or his body). Finally
he released the name of his solicitor, whom I rang to express my concerns
about not having signed the document before my uncle went on this long
journey. He had some years before visited various holy sites in Israel, and was
extremely keen to visit them again.
What the solicitor told me surprised me. It transpired that my uncle had
asked him to prepare the document, but not to present it to the court. Effectively that meant that I had no access to his financial affairs.
The solicitor parried by saying that if an emergency did happen it wouldnıt
take too long to process the papers - not my experience of legal processes! (and
certainly not much help if I had had to drop everything to go at a
moment's notice to Israel or to deal with private hospitalisation abroad
etc.)
All of this fell into place after my uncle died, which happened barely a
week after he returned. He had survived the trip, but, seriously
weakened, he was transferred to hospital immediately his plane got back to
Edinburgh.
His death, though sad, was not a shock. I had felt that, though he had
never said so, he would have liked to die in Israel. The place had such a
pull on him because of his beliefs, that the trip was being undertaken as
some kind of atonement.
The surprise, however, when he died, was that he had given over his
entire
estate (including of course the money my mother had left him) to
The Philadelphia Church of God, the organisation run by
Gerald Flurry, of
which he had been a member for several years. In addition to that,
in the year before his death he had given something in the region of £40000
to the cult, had been tithing money to the group for years, and had given
his wife's estate to them after her death. This I saw with my own eyes,
from documents which he had obviously not wanted me to see while he was still
alive - hence the farago over the POA.
Effectively I was barred from removing anything other than papers for
the
solicitor from the house, as the house and contents were also left to
the cult, with £25000 to be paid immediately from his estate, and the
remainder on completion of his estate, sale of the house, realisation of
investments etc. When I entered the house it was therefore a strange feeling to see
a large picture of myself, and another of my parents, taking pride of
place on the mantelpiece, yet knowing that my task was to hand over everything
which was connected with our family to the cult.
The other two Executors were a couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Brown, who were literally
my uncle's only real friends (and who were also members of the PCG),
and Billie Brown informed me that his task - given by George -was to remove
any religious documents from the house and send them back to the PCG as
soon as possible. I had access to the house first and was able to take a look
at the material in the house. What I found was to my mind, quite
astonishing. There were about three tea chests-full of religious tracts which my
uncle had written, some of them fifty or sixty pages long. Many of these
tracts were concerned with dating systems of the old Testament, cataloguing old
Testament kings, dates of events, prophesies etc. Many of them made analogies between old Testament prophesies or disasters and
catastrophies in modern times, such as Chernobyl, claiming that the exact dates of these
modern day times were prophesied in various old testament references. This was a
cult which predicts that Armageddon is coming very soon. Apart from various
end-of-time prophesies, in a slip of paper in my uncle's writing I
also found an exact day and month prophesied for Christ's return in
2002.
In addition to these documents, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of
tapes
from Gerald Flurry, sermons for each week, in Mr. Flurry's inimitable style, drumming into his listeners the fear of God, unless sins are
atoned for, reparations made for past indiscretions, etc. My uncle's study was
packed with learned tomes on biblical studies, pages and pages of calculations connected with all manner of ancient dating systems, and
all the evidence of his financial dealings with the PCG. There were also
copies of letters asking for advice in how decisions should be made in relation
to the orders of the church. One in particular caught my eye. I am a professional cellist, and had an important solo engagement with the
Scottish National Orchestra which took place on a Friday evening. My Uncle had
written a letter to the PCG asking if he would be condemned if he broke the Sabbath to attend this concert. He did not come.
I gradually built up a picture of the way in which the PCG had
controlled
everything in his life, from the people he should associate with, to his
expectation of salvation depending on the amount of money he was
prepared to
give them. But while I was uncovering all this evidence, I felt a
sense of confusion as to whether I was putting an interpretation on the
material I was looking at. (I also had some loyalty to the side of my uncle that I
knew and loved).
But as I looked into all the piles of documents my instinct and
conviction about what I was seeing gradually deepened. I found evidence
(in the form
of letters) from people who had been dis-fellowshipped, trying to warn
my uncle that something was very wrong about this group. But I suspect they
had come too late for him to accept that they might be right, and in any
case he wasnıt supposed to communicate with these people, as they were regarded
as in league with the devil. There was one sad letter from a lady who
told him that she had been kicked out because she had sought therapy.
All in all, this was quite a chilling picture, to unfold the way in
which this intelligent man had become subservient to the belligerence of this
totalitarian regime, handing out instructions to its members as to
how they could or could not behave, in such a way as to deny their own
volition. If guilt had eventually impinged on his conscience in
his handling of his wife's last days, it was therefore obvious that to
atone he had to hand over her estate to the PCG. (Technically he could not
ring the doctor on a Friday or Saturday, which should have absolved him of some
guilt, but he could hardly blame the church for his continuing oversight
after that.) A matter of weeks before he died, he told me that he had
made many mistakes in his life, which I later understood had to be paid for,
or eternal damnation was the reward.
I sent one or two of the religious tracts my uncle had written to a Professor of Divinity at Glasgow University, as I was really curious to
know whether or not all the years of work that he had put into this own
research was of any intrinsic value. The sad reply was that in spite of his
painstaking research, the whole thing was based on completely unsound reading of the texts, using misleading information disseminated by
Gerald Flurry and the PCG (though originally this had come from the Worldwide
Church's prophet, Herbert Armstrong). Basically, followers
are kept busy trying to unravel unfathomable religious tenets, based on spurious
knowledge and interpretation of the old testament prophets. These
are then used to disseminate fear concerning past sinful actions, and to create
suspicion of any views held outside the church's teaching.
I would not bother to tell you all this, but for the fact that I know
that my uncle was of more than average intelligence, and to understand
the fact that he was so duped, is quite hard for me. It is also chilling to
realise that if he was so easily led then, for sure, other people are too.
The squeaky clean image of normality, family life and piety which the
church presents, is a front to a corrupt money-making organisation
which has,
in reality, no true spiritual basis.
It is interesting to me that since I have become aware of the existence
of the PCG, it has come to my notice that there are several sites on the
Internet devoted to exposing the corrupt practices of the church [PCG].
Many of the stories on the Internet sites confirm my own experience.
The point of my uncle's Israel trip was to join a group of the PCG who
were
visiting sites of religious importance. I realise now that the Israel
trip was a death-wish for my uncle, visiting several
"places of
safety" including Petra. He didn't quite succeed. The followers were daily hooked up by
satellite link to Gerald Flurry in the States. One of the rather
pathetic last entries in my uncle's diary recorded "No new revelation from
Gerald Flurry." One of the last things that he was reading was Herbert
Armstrong's 1975 in Prophecy1,
prediction of terrible ravages that
were to overcome those who were not saved. This was illustrated with ghoulish
cartoon
illustrations. My uncle recorded the exact date and time of his last
reading of this document - he had read it several times before, and as early as
1968, according to his annotations.
There are many more things I could tell you in this, for me, strange
tale. As my uncle used to be at pains to tell me how much he loved me, it was
all very hurtful, especially the element of deception in which he involved
me. Some people might say that my involvement in all of this is only because
I feel aggrieved that he did not leave money to myself and my brother (as
he had done in a previous will. The last will - to the PCG - was made only
five months before his death), but that is not of such import to me. I would
much rather that he had left his estate to a bona-fide charity which would
actually have done some good.
I arranged the funeral, but was not prepared to attend the
ceremony which was conducted by the British leader of the group,
John Durrad ( the
British arm of the church is registered as a charity, with Mr. Durrad and
Mr. Flurry having been two of its three Trustees). I made my own peace with my
uncle, regretting that he had fallen into the hands of such a manipulative
organisation.
I do wonder just how many other people have found themselves trapped
into
paying for their salvation through the teachings of the Philadelphia
Church.
By Roger
May 24, 2001
Also read:
"Transfer All Your Assets to Gerald Flurry
After You Die!"
Note: A
judge in Canada finally awarded an estate to a family whose father
willed his estate to PCG. The
12-6-02
court case
(2002 BCSC 1703 Flurry v Fuller et al) has since been removed from the
web, but we have posted a mirror of the original.
(Interestingly enough, Flurry was executor of the 1997 will, and the
judge in this case said he should have stepped down because he is the
same as the PCG, and not a disinterested party.) A link to the 4-20-04
case
(2004
BCCA 218) is
here. If it is later removed, we
have posted a mirror of the original.
Footnote by ESN:
1
Basil Wolverton (a
comic artist and WCG elder) was
behind the grotesque and horrifying pictures in 1975 in Prophecy
and other WCG literature.
Read on our site more
about Wolverton.
"Transfer All Your Assets to
Gerald Flurry
After You Die!" (Members are
instructed how to easily transfer their assets to PCG after their death)
Warning
to All Elderly People Who Are Considering Joining Philadelphia Church of
God!
Beware
'Ambassadors' Bearing Gifts! (A tragic story
of what happened to one man a number of years ago, but is very applicable to what
has happened to many in PCG)
Articles
For Those Who Were Emotionally and Spiritually Abused
Back to Stories
& Testimonies by Those Impacted by PCG
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