Dan Berrigan: Mentor
and Inspiration by Steve Clemens, May 3, 2016
I don’t think I heard about the draft file burning at
Catonsville, MD until a year or two later. After all, our high school baseball
team was hoping to win its second straight Ivy Prep League title (we fell one
game short with me in the on-deck circle with bases-loaded and two outs) and I
was caught up in Senior Weekend and my up-coming graduation. Even Dr. King’s
assassination the month before didn’t register in my sheltered life at an
all-boys college prep school on Long Island. My life of privilege allowed me to
virtually ignore the increasing carnage of the Vietnam War because it was
assumed all 41 of our graduating class of 1968 would be attending college and
receive “student deferments” as long as we maintained a decent grade-point
average.
I do remember thinking that the destruction of property,
coupled with the fact that most of the actors of the Catonsville 9 were Roman
Catholic, was not an appropriate act of dissent when I became aware of it about
a year after the May 17, 1968 occurrence. At the time of their trial, I was
wrestling with the momentous decision of registering for the military draft. A
month earlier I was issued a rifle and a uniform as part of my registration at
Wheaton College; all male students were required to enroll in U.S. Army ROTC
unless they had an honorable discharge from military service or a 4-F
(physically or morally unfit for service) or 1-O (conscientious objector)
status from their draft board. I was scheduled to register for Selective
Service on October 16 when I turned 18 years old.
It was not an easy decision; my father had left his
Mennonite heritage and entered the U.S. Army when drafted in World War II. He
never talked to me (or to my brothers, I assumed) about his experience in
France and Germany as a radioman in the infantry as his unit followed General
George Patton’s soldiers. Only after his 80th birthday did he share
any details with us about this period of his life and then mostly to say he
wasn’t proud of the things he had done but he had “promised the Lord that if he
got home safely”, he’d return to the church and “follow the Lord.” Even though
the Mennonite Church my Dad helped found in 1950 never affiliated with any of
the Mennonite conferences and did not stress the traditional “peace witness”
expected of Mennonites, I was aware that some of my relatives were pacifist or
conscientious objectors even if my parents weren’t.
After prayer, reading scripture, and talking with a Resident
Assistant on my college dorm wing, I decided that I must register as a conscientious
objector – to all wars, not just the current one in Vietnam. But it was a
personal decision – a moral stand as an individual – rather than a social or
political decision at that point. I couldn’t in good conscience take up a gun
to kill the Vietnamese but I also wasn’t sitting in judgment on those who did
go or my government’s “foreign policy”. I knew little about what was happening
in “the far East” other than what my parent’s copies of US News and World
Report stressed: those “godless Communists” were killing our “Christian
missionaries” and wanted to force their atheism on all of southeast Asia.
So Father Daniel Berrigan, his brother Phil Berrigan and the
other actors of the drama at the Draft Board office in Catonsville, Maryland
didn’t register. A year after becoming a conscientious objector, I started
participating in anti-war marches on the Wheaton, Illinois Draft Board, led by
“Father Tom”, a Maryknoll order priest from nearby Glen Ellyn. Sometime that
fall or early winter I came across Dan’s book about their trial, The Trial
of The Catonsville Nine. I was struck by Dan’s poetic description of the
draft files – they were cast as “hunting licenses for human beings.” That made
me re-think what was really going on. As I spent more time with Father Tom and
other “radical Catholics” at anti-war marches or taking courses at the
Maryknoll Seminary where he taught, I was struck by their vibrant Christian
faith and was jolted from my anti-Catholic upbringing.
That was a good thing as the books of Dan Berrigan fed my
soul and spirit in a way that few others did. No Bars to Manhood, The
Dark Night of Resistance, Night Flight to Hanoi, They Call Us
Dead Men, The Raft is Not the Shore, America is Hard To Find,
To Dwell In Peace, We Die Before We Live, …. The list could go on and on, especially his
commentaries on the Psalms (Uncommon Prayer), the Prophets,
Lamentations, Exodus, … Again, insight, challenge, humor, conviction. I didn’t
understand probably half of his poetry – but what I did understand, wow!
Especially “No and Yes and the Whole Damned Thing” that was published in
Sojourners Magazine in 1976.
I only met Dan Berrigan a few times – the first being at my
first arrest for civil disobedience a month before the Vietnam War ended. He
was one of the 62 of us who refused to leave the grounds of the White House in
March 1975, demanding that we meet with President Ford to reject the continued
funding of the South Vietnamese military and in rejecting what we called his
“punitive clemency” program for Vietnam War draft resisters. I was much closer
to his brother Phil and his partner in resistance, Liz McAlister, having joined
their Bible study group the year before. In 1980 I heard Dan speak at a
national Fellowship of Reconciliation gathering at Berea College and then in
the mid-1980s Dan came to our Georgia communities gathering at Koinonia Farm to
lead a weekend Bible study on the book of Revelations. I saw him again briefly
at larger gatherings or demonstrations but his inspiration and challenge to me was
much greater than my personal contact with him.
What stands out most vividly was his claim that our
[Christian] baptism is an embracing of the life and crucifixion of Jesus, and,
when we are raised out of the water, our resurrection to new life means that
there is nothing the state can do to threaten us if we’ve already chosen to
“die with Christ”. The state has no power over us since it’s most harsh
sanction, death, has already been embraced in our choosing to follow Jesus. The
state can jail us – but we’ve already “died to Christ.” They Call Us Dead
Men – if we can excuse the pre-feminist exclusionary language – was Dan’s
call to me to act out of my faith rather than my fears. Dan didn’t just write
about faith and resistance, he embodied it. He incarnated his faith by standing
in the street, hammering warheads, ministering to other fellow prisoners, and
sharing the Eucharist with all who gathered.
Dan, I love you, I thank you, I miss you. But I know your
spirit is still with us every time we gather to say “No” and “Yes” – not too
soon, not too quickly, not too easily, not too cheaply. Until our “No” is
swallowed up in [Christ’s] “Yes”. We are called to continue on the path you
trod for the past 50+ years.
No and yes and the whole damn thing … A poem by Daniel Berrigan. 1976
What is the point in saying no,
What is the point in not
saying no?
The questions make sense as long as there is
a point toward which the questions are moving.
If I say no, and there is a point at
distance, at which someone is saying yes, then it makes sense to say no; for my
no is transfigured, hastening into that yes.
If I do not say no, and there is a point at
distance at which someone is saying yes, then my not saying no also makes
sense, as long as I am attentive to that yes, and want my not naysaying to echo
and be included in that yes.
I may however say no in a void, just as I
may refuse to say no, in a void. In which case my no saying and my non no saying
are lost in a void.
We look for land marks, we look for sea
marks.
“When
we are seated in a moving vessel and our eyes are fixed upon an object on the
same vessel, we do not notice that we are moving. But if we look further, upon
something that is not moving along with us, for instance upon the coast, we
notice immediately that we are moving. It is the same with life. When the whole
world lives wrongly we fail to notice it, but should only one person awake
spiritually, the life of all others becomes immediately apparent. And the
others always persecute those who do not live like them.”
(Pascal)
We must come from somewhere if we are to go
somewhere.
We must go somewhere if we are to remember
that we come from somewhere.
There is only one word in all creation.
‘Jesus is the YES of God.’ (Paul)
We however dwell on the other side of that
yes; the grave side, the dark side, the death side, the underside.
So it is important not to say yes too soon,
too easily, too often, too cheaply. This would be to debase the currency of
life itself which is not a money, but the blood of our brothers and sisters,
the blood of Christ.
Just as it is important not to say no in a
void. This would be to join our voices to the despairing wail of the damned.
It is important to say no in view of, in the
direction of, a yes which is forever distant, forever nearing.
Because we are hungry for fullness, for non
death, for life, for non suffering.
Because we cannot merely stand by or bystand or spectate or grandstand or
freeload or grimace.
Because a because joins us, life to
lifeline, to the cause of goodness, of love, of truth in deed.
Because the distance between the no we
insist on and the yes that insists on us, is constantly narrowing, reaching,
almost touching.
Therefore our word to all systems of this
world, right, left, center, imperial, colonial, fascist, racist, capitalist,
Marxist, maoist, castroist, reformist, is
Not yet, not enough, not quite, not at all,
not by a half, not by a long shot.
Ours being an ethic of the promise, implying
that we keep our promise; to say no until the day when our no is swallowed in
His yes; until then we await and press forward and trust to His keeping of the
promise which is to say a payment no power or form or arrangement of this world
can estimate or hand over to mint or hoard or bribe us with
a war payment but more
a blood sacrifice and more
a livid stigma and more
His payment coming due on His day; nothing
less than the substance of his promise which is our rising from the ‘body of
this death’
Life unimaginable
to the degree that our
misery, our moral stagnation, our spiritual and corporal and social plague, is
beyond healing
any healing but one;
maranatha, come Lord Jesus.
