celebrate the burden

One’s humanity is not primarily an inheritance or a gift from on high. Living humanly has a price attached. Let us pay up, and gladly. Knowing as well that the opposite, living inhumanly, pays huge dividends in a crooked world.

Celebrate then, the burden.

Daniel Berrigan

Contemplation & Resistance (3) - Accepting things

NHAT HANH: ... If you cut yourself off from something -- a tradition, a community -- the hope of things will be lost. Right at that moment. So it is not a problem of a word or a term -- it is the problem of life. And that problem of being simultaneously inside and outside yourself is a very wonderful idea. Not an idea but a way of life, a way that retain one's self and the link between one's self and the other part of one's self.

DAN: This was very much a part of the style of Merton -- the inside/outside. And it had very rich consequences, I think. For him and for others. He used to say that he would never become a monk again, but now that he was a monk, he would be a monk. Absolutely. Yes.

JIM FOREST:  A man playing hide and seek with tradition.

NHAT HANH: Anyway, being a monk or not being a monk, that is not the problem. The problem is the way you are a monk or the way you are a non-monk. I think if we greet events in that way, we can master the situation.

In China, they tell the story of a man who lost his horse. He was sad and he wept about it. But a few days later the horse returned with another horse. So the man was now very happy. His loss turns out to be lucky. But the next day his son tried the new horse and fell and broke one leg. So now it is not good luck any more, but bad luck. So he deserts the other horse and takes his son to the hospital and is content with what he has. So they say, if you greet these event with a calm mind, then you can make the most of these events for the sake of your happiness. That's not me, but the Chinese! (Laughter.)

-from a slightly edited transcript of a conversation recorded in Paris in 1973 by Jim Forest between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan. 

Contemplation & Resistance (2) - meditation

DAN: So in a time when machine is claiming its victories over men and women, it seems to me that contemplation becomes a form of resistance -- and should lead to resistance in the world. And this to the point where one cannot claim he is in touch with God, and still is neutral toward the machine, toward the death of people. I mention this because this also is not clear, and in the derangement in our culture we see that people move toward contemplation in despair -- even though unrecognized. They meditate as a way of becoming neutral --  to put a guard between themselves and the horror around them, instead of allowing them to give themselves to people and to hope, instead of presenting something different, something new, to suffering people. We have a terrible kind of drug called "contemplation". The practitioners may call themselves Jesus freaks or followers of Krishna or Buddha; they may wear robes of some kind, be in the street, and beg, and pray, and live in communes, but they care nothing about the war. Nothing about the war. And they talk somewhat like Billy Graham, "Jesus saves". That is to say, it's not necessary to do anything. So they become another resource of the culture instead of a resource against the culture.

NHAT HANH: Also on the subject of meditation, I think most of us have been touched profoundly by our situation, the reality in which we live, and many of us need a kind of healing. A number of people, including myself and many of my friends -- we need a little bit of time, of space, of privacy, of meditation, in order to heal the wound that is very deep in ourselves. That does not mean that if sometimes I am absorbed in looking at a cloud and not thinking about Vietnam, that does not mean that I don't care. But I need the cloud to heal me and my deep wounds. Many of us are wounded, and we understand and support each other in our need for healing. 

-from a slightly edited transcript of a conversation recorded in Paris in 1973 by Jim Forest between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan,

Contemplation & Resistance (1) - Time, "we ARE eternity"

 

[What follows are excerpts from a slightly edited transcript of a conversation recorded in Paris in 1973 by Jim Forest between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan, the one a Buddhist monk and Zen master, the other a Catholic priest well known for animosity to draft  records and for failure to report for imprisonment on schedule. Published in WIN magazine in June 1973]

Dan Berrigan: ... When we were in prison I believe we had a very different sense of time, too. It was closer maybe to the truth.

Nhat Hanh: We tend to imagine that the lifetime of a person is something like using your pen in order to draw a line across a sheet of paper. A person appears on this earth and lives and dies. And we may think of the life of a person just like a line we trace across a sheet of paper. But I think that is not true. The life of a person is not confined to anything like a line you draw, because being alive you do not go in one direction - direction of the right side of a piece of paper, but you also go in other directions. So the image of that line crossing the sheet of paper is not correct. It goes in all directions. Not only four, or eight, or sixteen, but many, many. So if we can see through to that reality, our notion of time will change. That is why in meditation you can feel that you are not traveling in time but we are, we are eternity. We are not caught by death, by change. A few moments of being alive in that state of mind is a very good opportunity for self purification. Not only will it affect our being, but of course it affects our action -- our non-action.

Dan Berrigan's letter to Ernesto Cardenal

Pope John Paul II wagged his finger at Father Cardenal after arriving in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital, in 1983.Credit...Mario Tapia/Barricada, via Associated Press

Jim Forest really does connect all the dots. Cardenal, an admired Latin American poet and priest, served in the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. He actively supported revolution (and violence). During the 1980s, the Vatican publicly demanded that he resign from his government position.

The following is from Jim Forest's biography of Dan Berrigan, "At Play in the Lion's Den". I quote it in its entirety because it is all so important:

 In 1966, after returning from his first trip to Latin America, Dan had briefly questioned whether nonviolent approaches could provide an effective means of overcoming the military dictatorships that ruled so many countries in that continent. In the years that followed Dan became increasingly convinced that there was no alternative to nonviolent methods and attitudes for those who sought to model their actions on the example and teaching of Jesus. On this issue he entered into a public debate with his friend and fellow poet and priest, Ernesto Cardenal, who took part in Nicaragua’s Sandanista revolution and, after its victory, became Minister of Culture. 

In November 1977, in an interview published in the Costa Rican journal Tiempo, Cardenal recalled how he had initially favored nonviolent methods of struggle. However, after the destruction of his community, Solentiname, by troops of the Somosa dictatorship, he had been forced to realize that, in the Nicaraguan context, “a nonviolent struggle is not practical, and that Gandhi himself would be in agreement with us.” 

“Above all,” Cardenal argued, “the Gospel teaches us that the Word of God is not simply to be heard, but should be practiced.” In the Nicaraguan situation, in which so many peasants were suffering persecution and terror, imprisonment, torture and murder, “the only practical witness that could be given was to take up arms with the [revolutionary movement] Frente Sandinista.” Those who did this “did it for one reason only: for their love of the Kingdom of God, for their ardent desire to build a just society, a Kingdom of God, concrete and real, here on earth. When the hour arrived, our young men and women fought valiantly, and as Christians.” The young people, said Cardenal, “fought without hatred, in spite of everything, without hating the police, poor peasants like themselves, exploited.” 

Cardenal saw the choice of violence as tragic but necessary. “We would prefer that there not be fighting in Nicaragua, but this is not the fault of the people, the oppressed, who only defend themselves. One day there will be no more fighting in Nicaragua, no more peasant police killing other peasants. Rather, there will be an abundance of schools, of child care centers, hospitals and clinics for everyone, food and adequate housing for all the people, art and diversions for everyone, and most importantly, love between them all. And it is for this that we struggle.” 

Dan wrote an open letter in response, addressing Cardenal as “dear brother”: 

“Let me say that the questions you raise are among the most crucial that Christians can spell out today. Indeed, in your own country, your life raises them…. They are far more than a matter of domestic importance…. 

“You discuss quite freely and approvingly the violence of a violated people, yourselves. You align yourself with that violence, regretfully but firmly, irrevocably. I am sobered and saddened by this. I think of the consequences of your choice, within Nicaragua and far beyond. I sense how the web of violence spins another thread, draws you in, and so many others for whom your example is primary, who do not think for themselves, judging that a priest and poet will lead them in the true way. 

“I think how fatally easy it is, in a world demented and enchanted with the myth of short cuts and definitive solutions, when nonviolence appears increasingly naïve, old hat, freakish — how easy it is to cross over, to seize the gun. 

“It may be true, as you say, that ‘Gandhi would agree with us.’ Or it may not be true…. It may be true that Christ would agree with you. I do not believe He would, but I am willing to concede your argument, for the sake of argument. 

“You may be correct in reporting that ‘those young Christians fought without hate … and especially without hate for the guards’ they shortly killed (though this must be cold comfort to the dead). Your vision may one day be verified of a Nicaragua free of ‘campesino guards killing other campesinos…’ The utopia you ache for may one day be realized in Nicaragua: ‘an abundance of schools, child-care centers, hospitals, and clinics for everyone … and most importantly, love between everyone.’ This may all be true: the guns may bring on the kingdom. But I do not believe it. 

“So the young men of Solentiname resolved to take up arms. They did it for one reason: ‘on account of their love for the kingdom of God.’ Now here we certainly speak within a tradition! In every crusade that ever marched across Christendom, murder — the most secular of undertakings, the most worldly, the one that enlists and rewards us along with the other enlistees of Caesar — this undertaking is invariably baptized in religious ideology: the kingdom of God. 

“Of course we have choices, of course we must decide. When all is said, we find that the Gospel makes sense, that it strikes against our motives and actions or it does not. Can that word make sense at all today? 

“‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ ‘If your enemy strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other as well.’ Practically everyone in the world, citizens and believers alike, consign such words to the images on church walls or the embroideries on front parlors. 

“We really are stuck. Christians are stuck with this Christ, the impossible, unteachable, unreformable loser. Revolutionaries must correct him, set him aright. That absurd form, shivering under the cross winds of power, must be made acceptable, relevant. So a gun is painted into his empty hands. Now he is human! Now he is like us. 

“Correction! Correction! we cry to those ignorant Gospel scribes, Matthew and the rest. He was not like that, he was not helpless, he was not gentle, he was under no one's heel, no one pushed him around! He would have taken up a gun if one had been at hand, he would have taken up arms, ‘solely for one reason; on account of his love for the kingdom of God.’ Did he not have fantasies like ours, in hours out of the public glare, when he too itched for the quick solution, his eyes narrowed like gun sights? 

“Dear brother Ernesto, when I was underground in 1970 … I had long hours to think of these things. At that time I wrote: ‘The death of a single human is too heavy a price to pay for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.’ I should add that at the time, many among the anti-war Left were playing around with bombings, in disarray and despair. 

“I am grateful that I wrote those words. I find no reason eight years later to amend or deny them. Indeed, in this bloody century, religion has little to offer, little that is not contaminated or broken or in bad faith. But one thing we have: our refusal to take up bombs or guns, aimed at the flesh of brothers and sisters, whom we persist in defining as such, refusing the enmities pushed at us by war-making state or war-blessing church. 

“This is a long loneliness, and a thankless one. One says ‘no’ when every ache of the heart would say ‘yes.’ We, too, long for a community on the land, heartening liturgies, our own turf, the arts, a place where sane ecology can heal us. And the big boot comes down. It destroys everything we have built. And we recoil. Perhaps in shock, perhaps in a change of heart, we begin to savor on our tongues a language that is current all around us: phrases like ‘legitimate violence,’ ‘limited retaliation,’ ‘killing for the love of the kingdom.’ And the phrases make sense — we have crossed over. We are now [like] any army…. We have disappeared into this world, into bloody, secular history. We cannot adroitly handle both gospel and gun; so we drop the gospel, an impediment in any case.
“And our weapons? They are contaminated in what they do and condemned in what they cannot do. There is blood on them, as on our hands. And like our hands, they cannot heal injustice or succor the homeless. 

“How can they signal the advent of the kingdom of God? How can we, who hold them? We announce only another bloody victory for the emperor of necessity, whose name in the Bible is Death. 

“Shall [Death] have dominion? 

“Brother, I think of you so often. And pray with you. And hope against hope.” 

In May and June 1984, seven years after his exchange with Cardenal, Dan and fellow Jesuit Dennis Leder spent a month in Central America visiting both El Salvador, governed by a U.S.-backed military junta, and Nicaragua, in its sixth year of U.S.-opposed Sandanista rule. 

In Nicaragua, Dan took part in a dialogue with leaders of the revolutionary government, including Cardenal, now Minister of Culture. The exchange was, for Dan, deeply disappointing. Asking what provisions were made for conscientious objectors, he was told hat military service was obligatory for all without exception. Dan listened with “a sinking spirit.” Was not respect of conscience essential for a revolution that defined itself as “a revolution of conscience”? A question was raised about concerns Amnesty International had published regarding the treatment of minorities and dissidents, the use of “preventive detention” and forced removals from the land. While everyone present knew that the Sandanista leadership had made a number of serious mistakes, neither Cardenal nor others in the government admitted any of their policies had gone off track. Dan was saddened that Cardenal presented a wrinkle-free portrait of “the revolution as a kind of absolute platonic form, beyond question or critique — essentially a romantic view.” (A decade later, in 1994, Cardenal left the Sandanista party, protesting its authoritarianism, and joined an opposition group. Cardenal stated, “I think an authentic capitalism would be more desirable than a false revolution.”) 

While in El Salvador Dan and Leder listened to testimonies of torture, murder and war, but also of peacemaking and community building. While in the capital city of San Salvador, they visited staff and faculty of the Universidad Centroamericana, including theologian and rector Ignacio Ellacuria and the five other Jesuits who, five years later, would be assassinated by government soldiers. There were also discussions with Jon Sobrino, one of the leading voices of liberation theology. “These learned Christians, theorists, weavers of the volatile biblical words and themes,” Dan noted, were “first of all listeners, and not merely to one another, to [fellow] academics … but listeners to the unlikely poor.”  

Off the train, get off!

Blessed Franz Jagerstaater

Below is an excerpt from Daniel Berrigan's meditation -- Meditation on a Martyr, in Tribute to Franz Jagerstatter -- on the occasion of Jagerstaater's Beatification in 2007. 

Read the whole thing HERE. http://nightslantern.ca/meditation.htm

When asked how he could resist Hitler when his own bishops were telling him not to, Jagerstaater said that "they had not been give the grace to see ... "

Was he right in refusing to board the train, and others, who consented and climbed aboard, desperately wrong ? 

Maybe. But this is cold comfort, this proving something, 

he the winner, they the losers. 

Let us say rather, some of the passengers, since his death have undergone a change of heart, stepped down from this train. 

They have come on an insight, not a comforting one, but salutary. The quality of his Christianity; and their own. 

The difference; but also, through him, the possibility.  

The possibility of - faith. Bedrock. Faith in the living God. 

And of necessity; no more faith placed in the idolatrous state, the hideous 'fatherland', the 'volk'.   

That ragged solitary figure trudging alongside the train -he beckons them. 

Off the train, get off !   

To speak of today; it is no longer Hitler's death train we ride, the train of the living dead. Or is it ? 

It is. The same train. Only, if possible (it is possible), longer, faster, cheaper. On schedule, every hour on the hour, speedy and cheap and - unimaginally lethal. An image of life in the world. A ghost train still bound, mad as march weather, for hell. On earth.

See also:

Franz Jägerstätter: Letters and Writings from Prison

Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, enemy of the state

an enemy of the state

embracing beauty 

Dan owned nothing

At Play in the Lions’ Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan 

by Jim Forest

Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 2017

Reviewed by Sabina Clarke

In his compelling portrait of Daniel Berrigan, Jim Forest has given us a wonderful gift. He captures the amazing grace of Berrigan’s remarkable life as priest, poet, humanitarian, educator, anti-war activist and modern-day prophet. I could not put this book down.

Forest spent time with Berrigan as a young man and kept in touch with him over the years after he moved to the Netherlands where Dan visited him and his family. Theirs was a close bond. Consequently, his knowledge is firsthand. He succeeds in capturing the essence of Berrigan—his intellect, his humor, his compassion, his love for his community of Jesuits and his profound sense of humanity.

Unknown to most is that Berrigan was also the silent doer of daily works of mercy such as caring for the homeless, the dying and those suffering from AIDS when the epidemic first surfaced in 1984 — and when AIDS victims were shunned by society and blamed for their illness. Berrigan embraced them all and did not talk about it.

We find that Berrigan did not progress easily from acts of civil disobedience to acts of violence against military or government property. He was torn between his brother Philip who argued that petitionary nonviolence and civil acts of disobedience in protesting the Vietnam War were not working and that militant nonviolence was necessary and his close friend the Trappist monk Thomas Merton who argued against it. Gradually, he came to agree with Philip and together they began burning draft files and pouring their own blood on the files and drawing sometimes lengthy prison sentences.

Dorothy Day was also a strong influence and mentor. In the March 1965 issue of The Catholic Worker, she published Dan Berrigan’s first anti-war speech on the front page. Berrigan paid a high price for his militant acts of civil disobedience. He was often scorned and ostracized by his own community and on one occasion locked out of his residence, his belongings tossed outside on the steps. After giving a talk in support of Roger LaPorte, a former seminarian who immolated himself in front of the United Nations building protesting the Vietnam War, Berrigan was exiled by the Jesuits to South America — and returned only because of the huge public outcry and only on his stipulation that he be allowed to continue his peace work.

In all his university teaching positions he encouraged student activism and posed provocative questions to the University such as, “How did Cornell treat the migrant workers the University employed in its orchards?” and “What about its investment portfolios — segments of which connected Cornell to the military-industrial complex and the war in Vietnam.”

With a hundred of his Cornell University students he was arrested for the first time in 1967 at midnight on the steps of the Pentagon for protesting the Vietnam War. Reflecting on this he said, “For the first time, I put on the prison blue jeans and denim shirt, clerical attire I highly recommend for the new church.”

In 1975 he led a retreat on peace and reconciliation in Ireland and met with some members of the Irish Republican Army and was later criticized for being sympathetic to them. Even though he did not believe in taking even one life, he developed a rapport with their leader. When Hunger Striker Bobby Sands was on his deathbed, he was asked if he had one last wish before dying. He answered, “I would like to meet Father Berrigan.” With former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Berrigan flew to Belfast only to learn that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ruled that neither Dan nor Ramsey were allowed entrance. They stood vigil outside the prison as Bobby Sands slowly died.

Arrested more than 250 times,  he was noce on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. For four months led the FBI on a wild goose chase evading them until he was captured at a friend’s house on Block Island. In a particular daring escape after giving a talk at Cornell University and with agents from the FBI in attendance—after the lights dimmed he slipped into a costume of burlap sacking with a papier-maché head and aided by the Bread and Puppet Theater was whisked out into a waiting van and sped away. In an Oval Office conversation former President Nixon’s Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman wonders out loud where the Berrigans get their money for legal defense, Nixon responds, “They’ve got millions.”

Dan Berrigan died on April 30, 2016 — nine days before his 95th birthday. At his concelebrated Mass of the Resurrection, more than one thousand people attended. The homily was given by his friend and fellow Jesuit Stephen Kelly who opened with a greeting to the FBI, “We may let members of the FBI assigned here today know that it is Daniel Berrigan’s Funeral Mass of the Resurrection, so they can complete and perhaps close their files.”

In an interview with this writer in his apartment in New York in 2008, Daniel Berrigan said he entered the Jesuits at the age of eighteen because of its Spartan no-frills appeal when other orders were sending him literature featuring tennis courts and swimming pools and a more luxurious life. He stayed this way all his life. He gave away all his earnings from books and speaking engagements to the poor and others in need.

As his niece Frida Berrigan told a New York Times reporter on his death, “Dan owned nothing. He carried nothing. Whenever I traveled with him, he’d bring the little backpack of nothing. I’d pick him up and ask, ‘Is that all you have?’ He’d say, ‘Yes, that’s it. Let’s go.’” The final incantation of Father Kelly’s homily on Daniel Berrigan concluded with this…. that in his opinion… “Dan belonged among the Doctors of the Church.”

* * *

a meditation on Jesus Christ by Daniel Berrigan

1. The gospel of Jesus is spoken in a world
intoxicated with death
mesmerized by death
convinced of the necessary rule of death
technologizing death
acceding to the omnipresence of death
2. And Jesus says No
to this omnivorous power.
So his word makes the slight
all but imperceptible difference
(which is finally the only difference).
A good man, himself powerless,
stands at the side of powerless men
and says to death No
for them for himself.
3. Can any of you
place before you a single child, smiling
squirming in your arms; and say
The death of this child is a fact of modern war; I accede
to that death. I regret it of course
but what can one do? We have to destroy
in order to save; villages, women, children,
The system traps us all...
4. The system; horrible word! Can the system
trap the conscience of a free man?
Traps are for animals; freedom is for men.
I cannot speak for you
but I will not wait upon Caesar
to instruct me in God's word.
I am a man. I can read:
If a man will save his life, let him lose it.
I say to you love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.
Whatever you do to the least of these my brothers, you do to me.
Blessed are you who suffer persecution for justice's sake.
5. Jesus had nothing to say to "systems",
except to deny their power over him.
He said in effect, violence stops here (pointing to his body)
He said in effect, it is better to die for others
than to live (live?) in a trap.
6. Be concrete, be immediate!
Imagine the world!
If you embrace a child, can you consent
to the death of a child? each human face
leads you (follow!) to every human face.
7. I can only tell you what I believe.
I believe I cannot be saved by foreign policies.
I cannot be saved by sexual revolutions.
I cannot be saved by the gross national product.
I cannot be save by nuclear deterrents.
I cannot be saved by aldermen, priests, artists,
plumbers, city planners, social engineers,
nor by the Vatican,
nor by the World Buddhist Association
nor by Hitler nor by Joan of Arc
nor by angels and archangels,
nor by powers and dominations
8. I can be saved only by Jesus Christ.
9. Take this book with you, please
into the midst of children old men and women
the poor, the defeated, the innocent.
Carry it about with you, let it speak
wherever men struggle, suffer, abandon hope,
Let the book happen to you.
It has no other reason for being,
A man
very like yourself
first spoke the words of these pages,
"a man
acquainted with grief,
like us in everything, save sin alone."
He is as near to you/ as your next drawn breath.
10. I do not know
where my life leads.
Do you know where your life leads?
The next note is not struck.
The hands (foul, cleansed) hover
over the instrument.
My friends ask me: After jail, what?
You too (my friends) start awake at midnight,
question the silent lover beside,
the dream-wrapped child;
where? what next?
11. Lover, child, in the immense dignity
of birth or death refuse an answer.
There is no answer.
The genius of the gospel is in the name of man
to refuse an answer.
We had best go forward/ as those in love go
Exulting
in the breadth of the swath love opens
the sound of a scythe at harvest
the soundlessness of children sleeping
a universe
of unanswerable grandeur!
12. If we have awakened to the world
it is probable that our salvation is near.
If we abide in love
we shall be greatly loved.
13. I believe that twelve just men, believing
against all evidence,
may stir the soil or sea
with toilers' hands, bring up intact
something flowerlike, something -
Jesus,
that direct and life-giving man
waits on you.
The world waits on you.
The two statements
are quite simply verified.
Close then open your eyes.

- first published as the foreword to Quotations from Chairman Jesus, compiled by David Kik and published by Templegate for $1.95 in 1969. The book was subsequently reissued by Bantam.

An Advent Credo by Dan Berrigan

“It is not true that creation and the human family are doomed to destruction and loss—

This is true: For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.

It is not true that we must accept inhumanity and discrimination, hunger and poverty, death and destruction—

This is true: I have come that they may have life, and that abundantly.

It is not true that violence and hatred should have the last word, and that war and destruction rule forever—

This is true: Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, his name shall be called wonderful councilor, mighty God, the Everlasting, the Prince of peace.

It is not true that we are simply victims of the powers of evil who seek to rule the world—

This is true: To me is given authority in heaven and on earth, and lo I am with you, even until the end of the world.

It is not true that we have to wait for those who are specially gifted, who are the prophets of the Church before we can be peacemakers—

This is true: I will pour out my spirit on all flesh and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions and your old men shall have dreams.

It is not true that our hopes for liberation of humankind, of justice, of human dignity of peace are not meant for this earth and for this history—

This is true: The hour comes, and it is now, that the true worshipers shall worship God in spirit and in truth.

So let us enter Advent in hope, even hope against hope. Let us see visions of love and peace and justice. Let us affirm with humility, with joy, with faith, with courage: Jesus Christ—the life of the world.”

– Daniel Berrigan, Testimony: The Word Made Flesh (Orbis Books, 2004).

At Play In the Lions' Den

The cover photo alone is enough for me to buy the book. I know Jim did a good job. This book is a must have for me. I'm getting a copy for all of my friends for Xmas too. Thank you Jim Forest for being there and for sharing the story with all of us.

More information about the book is HERE.

Shadow on the Rock

SHADOW ON THE ROCK
by Daniel Berrigan, S.J.

At Hiroshima there’s a museum
and outside that museum there’s a rock,
and on that rock there’s a shadow.
That shadow is all that remains
of the human being who stood there on August 6, 1945
when the nuclear age began.
In the most real sense of the word,
that is the choice before us.
We shall either end war and the nuclear arms race now in this generation,
or we will become Shadows On the Rock.

(Image: "Human Shadow Etched in Stone," relocated and preserved at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum)

The good is to be done because it is good

“The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere. I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go. We have not lost everything because we lost today.” -- Dan Berrigan

The photo -- Dan's last arrest -- was taken Good Friday, 2 April 2011, at the USS intrepid, the floating war museum moored on the Hudson River.

HT: Jim Forest

Remembering Uncle Dan

Daniel Berrigan Memorial
September 30, 2016
St. Thomas More Parish, Kalamazoo
Jerry Berrigan

https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2016/10/18/remembering-his-uncle/

"Uncle Dan was a priest.  He left home at the age of 13 to join the Jesuits, was ordained with his class, and is now buried in a Jesuit cemetery in Auriesville, NY.  He told someone once that in walking the streets of New York the faces of passersby were as the beads of the Rosary to him, a prayer for each one, a moment to ponder the mysteries each person bore, sorrowful and joyful and glorious mysteries.

"All life is sacred, he believed, because life is created by God.  Humanity, this marvelous, fascinating tapestry of similarity and difference.  If life is threatened or taken by human design, if people are robbed of their dignity, this becomes a major problem for Uncle Dan.  His basic theology was that all Christians will try to protect the weak and work for justice and oppose war. ...

"He remained a priest.  I have felt the presence of God, on occasion.  He lived and breathed with God and reported back to the rest of us.  His words, and the congruence between his words and his deeds, rang true to many of us, and there was great beauty in what he said, and so we were brought along, headlong into traffic and other dangerous situations.

"He believed it, he lived it, God was real to him, the stories in the Book were real to him.  The Bible was a work of drama to him in that it was a script for actors.  We are to practice incarnation, which means to make the word flesh.  We are to live it.  If we do, it is alive and real.  If we don’t, it dies among so many hollow words and empty rituals."

Do not be discouraged. The Holy Spirit is not asleep.

"Do not be discouraged. The Holy Spirit is not asleep."
-- Thomas Merton (in a letter to Dan Berrigan dated February 23, 1964

(photo taken by Jim Forest at the Spiritual Roots of Protest retreat in November 1964)

more on Dan ...

somehow, I think that Merton would be pleased with this expose of his friend, Dan, in the Paris review ...

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/08/29/father-daniel-berrigan-poet-priest-prophet/#.V8TQWKtQ0y8.twitter

Evil in the US is riding in high stirrups

This is a repost of a louie post that first appeared in July 2007. Dan is a few years older now than quoted.

"It is sometimes discouraging to see how small the Christian peace movement is, and especially here in America where it is most necessary. But we have to remember that this is the usual pattern, and the Bible has led us to expect it. Spiritual work is done with disproportionately small and feeble instruments. And now above all when everything is so utterly complex, and when people collapse under the burden of confusions and cease to think at all, it is natural that few may want to take on the burden of trying to effect something in the moral and spiritual way, in political action. Yet this is precisely what has to be done.

[T]he great danger is that under the pressure of anxiety and fear, the alternation of crisis and relaxation and new crisis, the people of the world will come to accept gradually the idea of war, the idea of submission to total power, and the abdication of reason, spirit and individual conscience. The great peril of the cold war is the progressive deadening of conscience.

[I] rely very much on your help and friendship. Send me anything you think will be of service to the cause of peace, and pray that in all things I may act wisely."

Thomas Merton. "Letter to Jean and Hildegard Goss-Mayer." The Hidden Ground of Love. Letters, Volume 1. William H. Shannon. editor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985: 325-326

The only Catholic Peace group in the US that I know of is Pax Christi. I have been a member of that organization for several years, and am often bemused that it is not better known amongst the Catholic mainstream.

Obviously, Merton was very much in support of organized Peace Movements to active and visibly resist war, the expansion of weaponry, and social injustices. But he had to weigh just how much, as a monk and hermit, he could be involved without sacrificing the contemplative insight that he could bring to the movement.

In times of confusion he felt that the monk, in isolating himself in prayer was a tempting but wrong proposition:

“Sometimes I wish it were possible to simply be the kind of hermit who is so cut off that he knows nothing that goes on, but that is not right either …” (November 11, 1965, Dancing in the Water of Life)

Other times he wondered if the monastery were not an escape from engaging and responding to the “mystery of our times”:

"I am continually coming face to face with the fact that I have lost perspective here, including religious perspective, and that to some extent we monks are out of touch with the real (religious) mystery of our times." (Witness to Freedom)

Merton continued to balance this tension by faithfully following his vocation to solitude ("My place is in these woods!"), while writing powerfully prophetic essays that have become the foundation of the American peace movement.

More than any of Merton’s friends, Dan Berrigan gave expression to the active side of contemplativeness. Merton trusted and admired and supported everything that Dan did – his spiritual commitment, his prison terms, his exiles. Dan Berrigan is now 86 years old. I recently came across something that his brother, Jerry, said more than 10 years ago about Dan. It seems to capture much of the sentiment of the American peace movement these days:

"Dan Berrigan. Who is this post-modern man, this priest-poet? As our mother would put it, “Dan’s not easy to describe, not easy to pin down!” It can be said though, that four decades or so ago, he glanced askance at the new superpower, the American empire. He was becoming skeptical of its official treatment of people elsewhere in the world. What he learned of the U.S. government and its policies led him to reject its PR, its blandishments. Eventually, he became and was to remain a resister of the White House, the Congress, and the Pentagon, places he considered world forces of lawlessness and disorder.

During these years Dan has, little by little, grown quietly subdued. In contrast to his earlier vocal and vociferous denouncings, he’s become gradually aware of the
deadly scope and tenacity of the forces he opposes. As one Catholic Worker put it, “Evil in the U.S. is riding high in the stirrups”! Dan’s recognition of this has come to him through prayer, prison, and exile and has led him to develop a posture of firm but gentle wariness mixed with detachment. Teaching and lecturing he’s come by a style of understatement. He’s learned. “I, we, concerned and caring though we are, can’t do it overnight. Even together we’ll not be able to reverse the duplicity and violence endemic to U.S. government and society today. If indeed the turnabout we work and pray for is ever to begin, it won’t happen quickly, it won’t happen even during our lifetime. All we can do is try to be faithful; all we can do is to keep on doing.”
(from Apostle of Peace, Essay in honor of Daniel Berrigan)

Prayer: Psalm 121 - Dan Berrigan

I lift my eyes to you
my help, my hope


the heavens (who could imagine)
the earth (only our Lord)
the infinite starry spaces
the world's teeming breath


All this. I lift my eyes
- upstart, delighted -
and I praise

the cry in the wilderness

Some years ago, walking down a crowded and fast moving street in Munich, Germany, a lone monk walked among us. Perhaps Buddhist, perhaps some other denomination or no denomination at all. But it was clear that he was a monk, someone a bit removed from the hustle bustle that enveloped the rest of us. He walked very slowly, one step at a time, and rang a little bell every now and then.

No one really noticed him, we all hurried around him. But I never forgot him.

Just this week I read about The Prophets of Oak Ridge. An 82 year old nun, a drifter, a painter. In the dead of night, these three people penetrated the exterior of Y-12 in Tennessee, supposedly one of the most secure nuclear-weapons facilities in the United States. By exposing what they believe to be the fallacy of national security, by smuggling their anti-war message into the judicial system through the back door, they believe they are putting the country on trial.

Definitely odd people. Outside the norm.

This is what Father Delp says about the man crying in the wilderness, one of his 3 figures who carry the Advent message:

“We live in an age that has every right to consider itself no wilderness. But woe to any age in which the voice crying in the wilderness can no longer be heard because the noises of everyday life drown it - or restrictions forbid it -- or it is lost in the hurry and turmoil of ‘progress” - simply stifled by authority, misled by fear and cowardice ...”

“... There should never be any lack of prophets like John the Baptist in the kaleidoscope of life at any period; brave men [sic] inspired by the dynamic compulsion of the mission to whch they are dedicated, true witnesses following the lead of their hearts and endowed with clear vision and unerring judgement. Such men [sic] do not cry out for the sake of making a noise or the pleasure of hearing their own voices, or because they envy other men the good things which have not come their way on account of their singular attitude towards life. They are above envy and have a solace known only to those who have crossed both the inner and outer border of existence.

“Such men [sic] proclaim the message of healing and salvation. They warn man of his chance, because they can already feel the ground heaving beneath their feet, feel the beams cracking and the great mountains shuddering inwardly and the stars swinging in space ...

“May the Advent figure of St. John the Baptist, the incorruptible herald and teacher in God’s name, be no longer a stranger in our own wilderness. Much depends on such symbolic figures in our lives. For how shall we hear if there are none to cry out, none whose voice can rise above the tumult of violence and destruction, the false clamour that deafens us to reality?"

- Fr. Alfred Delp SJ, “The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp”, p.22. 1963 Herder and Herder New York

Indeed. The false clamor.

There used to be the Berrigans, powerful stories of those faith-driven people who went to jail for actions that were meant to wake us up.

The writings of Father Delp are also part of this cry in the wilderness.

See also: The Prison Meditations of Father Delp.

The Berrigans and the Catholic Left

A trip back in time: In 1971 Phil Berrigan and six others were tried in Harrisburg, PA, for conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger and to cause explosions in heating tunnels in Washington DC. After a mistrial, with only two jurors supporting conviction, the charges were dropped. From J.Edgar Hoover announcing the charges to the conclusion of the trial two years later, the story was headline news.

In 1973 Jim Forest wrote a detailed account of the events that led up to the trial -- "The Harrisburg Case: The Berrigans and the Catholic Left." The piece was published in March 1973 by WIN magazine, journal of the War Resisters League. Recently a friend in Ililnois found the article, photocopied it and e-mailed it to Jim. Using OCR software, the text has now been been added to the "Jim's Essays" section of the Jim & Nancy web site:

http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2012/11/16/berrigans-caholic-left/

Can you imagine if they had managed to kidnap Kissinger??!! (I'm very glad to have that Time magazine cover added to the eclectic lore of louie. )

Ten Commandments for the Long Haul

Dan Berrigan, Photo by Jim Forest on October 28, 2011

- from Ten Commandments for the Long Haul by Daniel Berrigan

1. Call on Jesus when all else fails. Call on Him when all else succeeds (except that never happens).
2. Don't be afraid to be afraid or appalled to be appalled. How do you think the trees feel these days, or the whales, or, for that matter, most humans?
3. Keep your soul to yourself. Soul is a possession worth paying for, they're growing rarer. Learn from monks, they have secrets worth knowing.
4. About practically everything in the world, there's nothing you can do. This is Socratic wisdom. However, about of few things you can do something. Do it, with a good heart.
5. On a long drive, there's bound to be a dull stretch or two. Don't go anywhere with someone who expects you to be interesting all the time. And don't be hard on your fellow travelers. Try to smile after a coffee stop.
6. Practically no one has the stomach to love you, if you don't love yourself. They just endure. So do you.
7. About healing: The gospels tell us that this was Jesus' specialty and he was heard to say: "Take up your couch and walk!"
8. When traveling on an airplane, watch the movie, but don't use the earphones. Then you'll be able to see what's going on, but not understand what's happening, and so you'll feel right at home, little different then you do on the ground.
9. Know that sometimes the only writing material you have is your own blood.
10. Start with the impossible. Proceed calmly towards the improbable. No worry, there are at least five exits.

HT: Jim Forest