Daniel Berrigan, S.J. (1921-2016) — A Personal Remembrance
This article is from SPIRITUALITY, Volume 22, September – October 2016, No. 128
In my office there is a facsimile of a check. It is xeroxed on green paper and paper-clipped to a stole-like strip of green material that hangs on the wall. The real check was deposited nearly thirty years ago, most likely to buy that week’s groceries. It is dated Jan. 18, 1987 and arrived with a celebratory and congratulatory note seven weeks after the birth of my first child and only daughter. Suspecting she was remiss in opening an account in her first months, the sender wisely made the check out to her mom and dad. In lively cursive it says simply “Fifty—“ and is signed Daniel Berrigan.
Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J. died on Saturday, April 30, 2016, less than one-month shy of his 95th birthday. Like his teachers, confidants, and friends Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and Abraham Heschel, it takes many words to begin to capture who Dan Berrigan was: for starters, try Catholic Christian, Jesuit, priest, poet, prophet, merry-maker, war resister, tireless worker for peace, companion of the anawim and the dying, blessed and broken human being, child and partner of God. Just a few short hours after his passing, internationally and nationally there began to appear in print, on the internet, on radio, and TV, a plethora of tributes and recognitions of his life. Mindful of these panoptic eulogies, many by those who knew him long and well, I’d simply like to offer a few modest but personal reflections on Dan Berrigan and then add what I see to be at least part of his lasting bequest.
As my parents dubbed me, so his parents christened him Daniel Joseph insuring that his destiny from birth would include holding the tension implied in these two names, the one meaning “God will increase or add,” the other meaning “God is my judge.” Beginning no later than 1969 when I was a 9th grader at the Jesuit high school in Seattle, I knew of Dan Berrigan. Since then, in the realm of the human and the holy, Dan Berrigan was what Pete Maravich, Jim Brown, and Roberto Clemente were for me in basketball, football, and baseball respectively. If you don’t follow American sports, that is high praise, and I followed and tried to emulate each with great youthful fervor.
When I heard Dan Berrigan died this past weekend, I felt like air had been let out of the universe, let out of me. And yet, even before I read so many of the laudatory tributes and testimonials, it was apparent to me that his Spirit and the Spirit that inspired his words and actions and sustained his long life, lives on in the thousands of persons he has directly and indirectly touched through his friendship, guidance, courage, enduring faith, witness, written and spoken words, common deeds and uncommon love. To give just one characteristic example, Bill Wylie-Kellermann, pastor of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, writes of Berrigan. “I owe him my heart, my life and vocation. In a century, how many souls on this sweet and beset old planet has Berrigan called to life in the Gospel? How many deeds of resurrection? How many hearts so indebted?”[i]
Meeting Dan Berrigan
Dan Berrigan is one of the early and most enduring influences of my life. His visage holds a place of privilege on my personal Mt. Rushmore along with Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Martin Luther King, Jr. With them he stands as a modern mentor who has tangibly impacted my vocation, worldview, faith, and understanding of what it means to accept the sacred invitation to become more fully human. Along with Day, Merton, and King, Berrigan showed me what it means to hitch one’s life to Jesus, to risk identifying oneself as a Christ-one, to dare to be drawn out by the justice and the joy, the responsibilities and the possibilities inherent in the gospel.
Remembering Dan is for me both a joyful and a sorrowful mystery. Joyful because for a brief time in my life I had the pleasure of keeping company with Dan and because his life is a vivid and enduring testament of consciously participating in the experiment of becoming human and being a companion of Jesus.[ii] Sorrowful, not just because Dan has passed, but also because to remember him exposes me to my own compromises over the years and to the too easy evasions of the deepest implications of the gospel and aligning oneself to the way of Jesus. That too is a blessing and a goad as are all “long, loving looks at the real.”
I had the privilege of getting to know Dan Berrigan in the early 1980’s. Having taken a detour off the path of my dream to coach college basketball, I suddenly found myself– a married Catholic lay person– pursuing graduate studies in theology and ministry in Princeton, New Jersey. Five years married but frustrated and confused by feeling called to be priest in a tradition whose male leaders were hell-bent on repudiating even the possibility of a married clergy, still inspired by the spirit of Vatican II but beginning to sense that the fledgling Pope John Paul II was cut from different cloth than John XXIII, exchanging a career in one of the few areas of life in which I felt a smidgeon of expertise for being a reluctant trailblazer with an unknown future, I wrote a rambling and, I suspect now, rather desperate sounding letter to Berrigan seeking understanding and guidance.
I don’t recall what if anything I expected. I’m not sure I even imagined my missive would elicit a response. After all, this was Dan Berrigan, award-winning poet, recognized author, teacher, and retreat leader, co-founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship and the interfaith group Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam whose leaders included the likes of Rabbi Heschel, Martin Luther King, and Robert McAfee Brown. This was Daniel Berrigan who, along with his brother Philip, had donned the cover of TIME Magazine, who for a time was on the Top Ten Most Wanted list of the FBI for refusing to turn himself in for a penitential stint in the penitentiary for having the audacity, along with eight fellow disturbers of the peace, to confiscate and publicly burn the draft files of young American men so they didn’t have to go to the other side of the earth to follow orders to burn the women, men, and children of Vietnam. This was Dan Berrigan, one of the first clergy persons to side with the evangel of Jesus rather than the imperialism of America in the 1960’s, one of the first Catholics publically to decry the separation not of church and state but of church and God, [iii] and one of the first American Christians to clarify that the threefold allegiance of Gospelers is not to God, family, and country but rather “to act justly, love kindly, and to walk humbly with your God.”[iv]
So it is an understatement to say that when the phone rang and my wife answered it and then exaggeratedly mimed “It’s Daniel Berrigan” I was shocked. I remember how fast my heart started beating. I remember him thanking me for my letter. I remember how understated and natural he made it all sound when he invited me to come for lunch and conversation at his New York apartment. I remember it was a pinch me moment.
I also remember well that initial meeting and how it offered me the first impressions of Dan Berrigan that would be fleshed out and endure. Dan had an apartment on 98th Street in the West Side Jesuit Community. I remember after being greeted at the door the alluring waft of homemade soup cooking on the stove. I remember his apartment, as I imagine anyone who has ever spent even just five minutes there surely remembers it. I had never seen anything like it. Never having made it to Burning Man, I have not seen anything like it since. I remember Dan saying, “Have a look around” as he excused himself to tend to the soup and the lunch he was fixing us. And look around I did. Like a baseball lover at Cooperstown. Photos of ancestors and family members and luminaries like Merton and Day and other notable figures, artwork and icons and arresting artifacts, fabrics and colors, the typewriter and table that nourished others, broadsides and posters from what seemed like every poetry reading, protest, sit-in, march, concert, play, and liturgy from the last twenty-five years. I was beside myself, pretending not to be.
Looking back, I’d describe Dan’s apartment as part carnival, part monk’s cell, part writer’s study, part corner pub, part well-lived in home, part safe haven. I remember years later wondering and worrying about what the Jesuits would do with Dan’s apartment after he died. I fantasized that someone would have the sense to contact the Smithsonian to see about preserving it for posterity, and that obliging, the Smithsonian would provide experts to delicately and painstakingly remove and mark every item that donned nearly every inch of the walls and ceilings of Berrigan’s three rooms and bathroom. That apartment captured for me who Dan Berrigan was. Being there was like being inside a six-sided poem, like being a player in a piece of performative art, like being part of the liturgy of life.
But what I remember most about that day is Dan Berrigan, and what I remember about Dan was his lack of pretension and the ease of his years (he was 64 at the time), his attentive listening and genuine presence, his empathy and encouragement. I remember his generosity, kindness, and hospitality—many months later he would insist on setting up an appointment with his doctor and footing the bill for my wife who suffered from a debilitating back injury. The day of our first meeting ended with an invitation to join he and other jesters and justice-seekers for bible study, conversations, and retreats which we did for the next couple years whenever our class schedules allowed us to get up from Princeton to New York City or to Kirkridge Retreat Center for weekend gatherings in the Pocono Mountains.
This was Dan’s way, as I came to learn—a natural desire and propensity to gather in, to include, to make one feel at home and part of– and why I think he was always so popular even in his later years with young people as well as the outcast, the turned away, the desperately seeking Susans and soldiers back from Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq trying to make sense of life or faith or war, inmates and housewives and professors and artists and A.I.D.S. patients and the dying.
After returning home to Seattle in 1988 I would see Dan occasionally when he would come to the Northwest to teach and give talks. I continued to read his books and articles. In 1990, we had our first son, who is named after my father. He tires of hearing that his middle name Daniel is less a nod to me than it is an homage to Daniel Berrigan. Though separated by thousands of miles and many years, Dan Berrigan was never far from my thoughts, my work, my ministry.
10 Giveaways from the Life and Writings of Daniel Berrigan
I rank Dan Berrigan with Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton as one of the greatest, most influential American Catholics and one of the most outstanding and exemplary ambassadors of peace and prophets of justice of the 20th century. The links below cite many aspects of his legacy. I offer here, in no particular order, my own sense of Dan Berrigan’s enduring contributions.
- The most basic thing I want to say is that Dan Berrigan is what a Christian looks like. That is perhaps his most generous and lasting gift to us. In true Berrigan fashion it comes not so much as commemoration as question: If I am one who claims the name of Christ—am I what a Christian looks like?
- Dan was a Jesuit to his core. A Jesuit for 76 years and a priest for 63, he was the embodiment of a contemplative-in-action, one of the earliest guiding principles of Ignatian spirituality. A tireless activist for peace and justice, who he was and what he did was firmly rooted in prayer.
- In 1981 Dan wrote a book as part of the wonderful Journeys in Faith series edited by Dan’s friend Robert Raines and published by Abingdon Press. The authors of the books were important theological and American figures who wrote autobiographical reflections on the joys and struggles of putting faith into action. Berrigan’s book was titled Ten Commandments for the Long Haul. It’s the words long haul that strike me still. Although I’ve read the state of the world saddened Dan greatly in his later years, unlike so many who copped out, burned out, or gave up, Dan’s core convictions never wavered because he never based his life, actions, or ministry on success or end results. That’s a tough, courageous way to live and Dan was still participating in public protests in his 90’s.
Much like the L’Arche communities in which there is so much celebration and joy amidst stored anguish, the peace communities that Dan led and was part of were always a “festival of friends” who, while suffering arrests, imprisonment, ridicule, loss of jobs, friends, and families, were sustained by the sacraments of laughter, music, and holy revelry.
- Dan treasured his family and Jesuit community and counted them among his great earthly blessings. A universal figure, his true greatness was manifested up close and personal as mother’s son, brother, uncle, friend, guide, and companion.
- Once, just released from prison, a newscaster asked him how he felt, “Like I’m free,” he said simply. Assuming personal struggles, contradictions, failures, and disappointments, Dan Berrigan seemed to me a freer man than most.
- Dan was a wordsmith who combined the perceptive and linguistic skills of a poet with the concerns and daring of a prophet. Rehearsed or spontaneous, written or spoken, his words often were poignant and provocative. Here are some of the quotes I have used over the years:
(An excerpt from the statement read aloud in court on behalf of the Catonsville 9 for the burning of draft files of young men conscripted for military service in the Vietnam War):
“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise. For we are sick at heart, our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.”
(Referring to the implications of apprenticing oneself to Jesus):
“If you are going to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood.”
(Challenging the notion that prayer is some cozy, pious, privatized devotion):
“The time will shortly be upon us, if it is not already here, when the pursuit of contemplation becomes a strictly subversive activity.”
(The cost of being a true peacemaker):
“Because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total — but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial . . . ‘Of course, let us have peace,’ we cry, ‘but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties’ . . . There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war – at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison, and death in its wake.”
- Dan was an avowed pacifist. He gave his life to the Prince of Peace. He knew the early church’s stance against soldiering and war. He challenged the notion that to be a Catholic pacifist was an oxymoron. He had the audacity to take seriously the prohibition against the taking of life saying, “No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being.” He believed there are worse things than death. He believed there are few things greater than giving one’s life for the cause of peace as an agent of peace acting peacefully. He believed it was a lie and a blasphemy to suggest one could kill in the name of life and go to war and call it making peace. He knew that violence and war perpetuate more violence and more war and never will bring peace.
- Dan was a lover and serious student of scripture. He favored the books of the prophets. His bible studies looked nothing like those of so many who read the sacred texts out of context and that tend to produce either rigid fundamentalists or me ‘n Jesus Christians with safe, comfortable, privatized faith. Dan connected the social circumstances, crises, and challenges out of which the Jewish-Christian scriptures were composed to the social and ecological circumstances, crises, and challenges facing us today.
- In this year of a U.S. Presidential election, it is worth reflecting on what Dan once said to a largely Catholic audience. He said, in effect, the real issue is whether you are a Catholic who happens to be an American or an American who happens to be a Catholic. For Dan Berrigan, being a Christian trumps being an American or an Iranian or an El Salvadoran or a Tanzanian. No real Christian “happens” to be one. It is a choice, a conscious and intentional way of being in the world. It is a radical, dangerous, and paradoxically liberating way of life that if lived generously will eventually bring one into conflict with the dominant culture whose values favor the powerful and privileged, look nothing like and often violate the values and vision that are integral to the reign or dream of God “on earth as it is in heaven.”
Daniel Berrigan was an unfinished man, no more inherently holy, no less inherently human than you and I. Like the Eucharist which sustained his life, made no one a stranger, and enfleshed the “No” that resisted the idolatry and evil of violence and war, he was broken and blessed. As such he had the courage and trust to make of his life an oblation to God, a gift to the human and earth community, a faithful journeyer and companion, a herald of justice, a maker and disturber of peace, a poet, prophet, prisoner, free man, and partner of God. Dan Berrigan was an inspiration to all who seek “to cease evil, learn to do good, and make justice their home forever.” He was a sacrament of hope for all who yearn for God’s dream to come true. In humility and with confidence I say– Dan Berrigan was the delight of God.
NOTE: Daniel Berrigan’s funeral is this Friday, May 6th. For those who are interested, it will be Live Streamed at 10am EST (7am PST). Find information for the Live Stream at one of these links:
http://americamagazine.org/content/all-things/livestream-daniel-berrigan-sj-funeral-mass
http://sfxavier.org/news/daniel-berrigan-sj-funeral
https://universalonechurchblog.org/2016/05/03/livestream-daniel-berrigan-s-j-funeral-mass-courtesy-universal-one-church-newsfeed/
A SAMPLE OF RESOURCES
Below are a sample of written and video Tributes and Resources about Dan Berrigan. There are numerous materials about Dan on the web and many of his books are still in print.
Recalling the Life and Legacy of Daniel Berrigan:
Articles
http://americamagazine.org/issue/man-peace
http://americamagazine.org/issue/poet-and-prophet
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/02/life-and-death-daniel-berrigan
By Christopher Hedges http://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/06/11/daniel-berrigan-americas-street-priest
By Ched Myers http://www.chedmyers.org/blog/2016/05/01/%E2%80%9Call-words-scroll%E2%80%A6%E2%80%9D-eulogy-daniel-berrigan-ched-myers
Videos from DEMOCRACY NOW
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/5/3/jeremy_scahill_remembers_his_longtime_friend
http://www.democracynow.org/shows/2016/5/2?autostart=true
Interview
Terry Gross interviews Dan on Fresh Air in 1988 regarding Catonsville 9:
Catonsville 9
The statement Dan Berrigan read aloud in court on behalf of the Catonsville 9 who were tried for the burning of 1-A draft files that contained the names of young men to be conscripted intot he military for the war in Vietnam: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/berrigancatonsvillenine.html
ENDNOTES
[i] Quoted from “Poet and Prophet: The Peacemaking Legacy of Daniel Berrigan, S.J.,” by Luke Hansen, S.J. in America Magazine, April 30, 2016.
[ii] In the early years of the Jesuit Order, the first Jesuits often called themselves Compañeros de Jesus– the companions of Jesus.
[iii] Berrigan’s friend Rabbi Abraham Heschel said the real issue was not the separation of church and state but the separation of church and God.
[iv] Micah 6: 8.