At first blush, Daniel Berrigan can seem a strange figure to bring to the task of spiritual formation. In the popular configuration of spirituality as somehow usually to the side of the questions we sequester away with words like “political,” “business,” “public,” “private,” “ecological,” or “economic,” it can be difficult to reckon with a poet priest who burned draft files on camera while reciting the Lord’s Prayer at the height of the Vietnam war. Even if they’re undertaken in the name of life and love and wholeness, such actions often feel unseemly and disruptive, and Berrigan’s career was full of them. To even allude to him can have a polarizing effect on what might have been a calm and straightforward conversation in which we all had a sense of what we were talking about. To really remember Daniel Berrigan is to invite a disruption, to recall the sometimes-unwelcome realization that everything has to do with everything else. Do y’all think everything has to do with everything else? I do.
But perhaps disruption is essential to right vision and right practice. Spirit, after all, knows no division, and, when it’s pursued with any depth at all, the question of formation naturally overflows whatever boundaries we have erected to somehow assert that one section of the human barnyard can be made definitively separate from the other. This, the saying goes, doesn’t have anything to do with that, but spiritual formation, same as it ever was, insists otherwise as it invites us, yet again, to refuse the dualistic thinking that renders us sad and confused and very often angry. Perhaps there are others who have been here before, people who might help us out. Enter the saints.
The people we come to call saints are those who seem to have generally succeeded in overcoming dualism and who somehow manage to stand—as perhaps everyone is called to stand—in what Neil Young calls the great divide. We praise them and cite them on solemn occasions, and we expect ostensibly respectable people like David Brooks to nod approvingly when they’re mentioned. But could it be that we cut their voice off a little and render their insight less immediately available when we confer sainthood upon them? Is there a further dualism or even a disavowal involved, a hiding away of something from ourselves, when we erect pedestals and place our fellow human beings out of reach with the attribution of saintliness? Are we trying to contain the disruption they bring to consciousness lest it spread to areas we would prefer to keep obscured? Do we want them to shut up?
Berrigan’s mentor, Dorothy Day, seems to have had these questions in mind when she famously declined to be praised with a bestowal of saintliness: “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” She did not like the suggestion that her own attempt at hospitality for and among the poor or her lifelong resistance to state-sponsored violence was something more than what the plain teaching of Jesus and the prophets and communities of sanity here, there, and yon demand of right thinking people everywhere. We are not really honoring or even taking seriously anyone’s lived witness when we pretend to sanctify them in this way. And similarly, I suspect we lose the hard-won gifts of insight Berrigan offers us if we are quick to speak of him as a radical, as a man somehow beyond the pale of normal health and wholeness, standard spiritual formation.
He didn’t make it easy for us. “If you want to follow Jesus, you better look good on wood,” he once observed. Such lines are typical of the dark humor and prophetic seriousness I associate with Berrigan and his brother, Philip, but they are of a piece with a long life of steadfast joy. It is like something Mark Twain might say about the righteousness of Joan of Arc. Beware when all people speak well of you, Jesus warns, for this is a sign of a false prophet. If your alleged devotion to God is not met with some kind of resistance, perhaps even violent resistance, you are doubtless doing it wrong. Keep religion out of politics? Every news cycle—and even a cursory reading of the prophets and the gospels—reminds us that life does not work this way, that Jesus might have died an elderly man if he had managed (as if any human being ever could) to stay out of politics. Whether marching in Selma, pouring blood on nuclear war-heads, or doing time as a prisoner of conscience, Berrigan never stopped dramatizing, for anyone with an ear to hear and an eye to see, the moral disgrace we sustain with our tax dollars, our votes, and our presumed consent. He charted a Christianity worthy of thinking adults and was cheered—sometimes from the sidelines—by many who were otherwise long inured against thinking such a thing possible. “For me Father Berrigan is Jesus as a poet. If this be heresy, make the most of it,” Kurt Vonnegut once remarked. In an age of white supremacist terror, Christian supremacy, and taxpayer-funded misogyny pushed and perpetuated by so many a Industry Christians, Berrigan is rightly remembered as a pioneer of human seriousness, one who really meant it and believed it and took on the cost of doing so again and again come what may.
But no one becomes Jesus as a poet overnight. While the question of spiritual formation was ever before him as a child taught by nuns in Syracuse on into his training as a Jesuit in Baltimore, a more conventionally accommodating view of culture might have been his fate. Even though copies of the Catholic Worker were shared and read aloud among his family growing up, the path to a genuinely prophetic imagination was by no means inevitable. His brother Philip was an active serviceman in the Air Force during World War II—which he readily approved of and even praised as a form of Christ-like faithfulness—and, in early adulthood, neither brother viewed a militarized culture as, in any deep sense, problematic.
As a teacher of fifteen-year-olds at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City in the late forties, he began to sense a tension in the pursuit of his vocation. From a long line of thoughtful people who had inspired and taught him, he had picked up the habit of mulling aloud over what he himself was discovering in his own reading, and the class discussion one particular day brought to mind Ronald Knox’s book God and the Atom. Among the speculations entertained in Knox’s text was one path not taken in World War II. Among a remaining few Americans, conventional wisdom concerning President Truman’s faith-based approach to defeating Japan, we might say, had yet to completely concretize, and Berrigan voiced aloud Knox’s observation that the United States could have easily opted to drop the bomb on an uninhabited Pacific island as a show of force instead of incinerating thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While he doubtless understood that it was even then a controversial idea, Berrigan was surprised by the knee-jerk hostility he found he had provoked among these not-so-righteously-catechized young people. “We did good! . . . It was them or us!” they exclaimed. In just a few formative years, they had come to believe—and even insist—that the escalation of violence and the needful human sacrifice that fate sometimes decreed must never be questioned. What’s done is done. No reflection, confession, or repentance aloud. And in a profound sense, they had been formed to believe and know, with accompanying heat, that entertaining alternatives to the path of preemptive annihilation, in this instance, was tantamount to treason.
Among these young thought police, he saw that a very different spiritual formation than the one he hoped to build upon had been long ago ingrained. Their hearts and minds had been enlisted in the direction of unreasoning aggression for some time, and the learning space was the entirety of American culture and its self-understanding on the world stage. As a young educator, Berrigan was himself receiving an education. Throughout his life, these clarifying moments in conversations with students, parishioners, superiors, and professional politicians would continue, and a picture would emerge: The deep formation of mistaken identity—we have to humiliate others in order to survive—has been deeply entrenched in many a human psyche. Berrigan’s task as a minister of word and sacrament was emerging. He described the realization thusly:
We . . . knew who we were . . . in the act of war. Ancestors were, first of all, warriors; in that degree only, they merited honor . . . Ancestor to child; it was presumed that violence needed no teaching, it took care of itself. It was nonviolence, civility, that required discipline and instruction, and was under perennial assault.
Rooting out the idols and ideologies to which we sacrifice our own lives and the lives of others was at the core of that longer, slower, deeper work to which Berrigan would devote his life as a prophet of the wide-angle lens among us. In that classroom, this perfectly respectable poet-priest was still a couple of decades away from undertaking any word or action that could easily brand him “political” or “radical.” But there remained the question of how to be a witness to—how to somehow even embody in word, deed, and idea—a life-giving alternative culture amid the reigning catechesis of a taxpayer-funded dream of “an eye for an eye” and then some. How might one begin to counter the powers of proselytization—the never-ending calls to worship—of the military-industrial-incarceration-entertainment complex?
“The whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.” These are the words of the poet, monk, and correspondent supreme, Thomas Merton who would become a mentor to both Berrigans. When they met him, Philip had been imprisoned periodically for his participation in sit-ins protesting segregation and demanding the right to vote for people of color while Daniel had grown increasingly disenchanted with many an American-enforced, Cold War status quo as he lived and worked within Jesuit communities in France, South Africa, and Czechoslovakia. One insight I imagine Merton brought to both of them was this sense of deeper rhythms at work in everyday reality, deeper than the mind of any engineer—whatever the alleged specialization or expertise might be—can successfully ascertain. As witnesses to these ordering rhythms, the Brothers Berrigan were alive to (and would eventually bring their own bodies to bear upon) all manner of disorder sustained and defended by the alleged upholders of right order, but Merton’s example as a contemplative who resolutely viewed himself as a learner of the sacred rhythms of true order, as opposed to a master, an authority, or a copyright owner, served the Berrigans powerfully in proceeding with care, specificity, and profound humility of mind in a rebelliously idolatrous world . . . or what we mistakenly think of as the world.
For the prophets, specificity is everything. There are no generalized, contextless visions, because ideas can only live in people and places and things. The prophets enact, demand, and invite us to join them—as they always do—in a more subtle perception of what is; a deeper read, in Marvin Gaye’s phrase, of what’s going on. Here is Berrigan on the school of prophetic thought to which Jeremiah sought to be true:
In the prophets, we note that “the world” is never generic; it is one’s own world. It is the slow cohering over long time of a culture; friends and family and land and language and dance and song; a world of coherence and beauty, each element infinitely precious, irreplaceable. Thus “the world,” a cohesion of beauty and truth and joy, makes sense, wins the heart, becomes one’s own—as a dance does, a poem, a work of art. (Especially for children, that “world” in all its fragility is to be cherished and guarded, a nest in which coherence, truth, and tenderness are honored).
There is so much—an entire vision of culture, really—here: the world as inescapable, infinitely precious, a long work of care and affection across generations whether in song or dance or some other form of realization. The world as relentlessly communal. The world as a labor of coherence that has to be looked to and remembered again and again lest coherence, the world itself, be lost. Are we formed to experience our own common life this way or are our imaginations deformed to discern no such thing? These are the stakes in the work of spiritual formation. Until we begin to experience the world as the world, our energies know no rest and we have yet to make our home, our neighborhood, our own lives together with others. No one gets to have their meaning alone.
In this spirit, the Berrigans marched together from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr. shortly after meeting Merton in person. It was a unique occasion in the sense that they were at long last engaged in a demonstration together. Though he was an outspoken public figure throughout the sixties, Daniel, at this point in time, had yet to experience incarceration, and this was a move toward deeper embodiment. Philip would describe it this way: “We stepped out of rhetoric, into the realm of action, and the realm of consequence.”
In time, King himself would be the primary public figure to highlight the connections between racism, economic inequality, and our nation’s commitment war. And what better way to show the biological fact of our inescapable network of mutuality than to put the matter biblically? The function performed by the Vietnam War in our human household, King asserted, is that of “a demonic destruction suction tube.” And millions of Americans believed what sacred tradition never forgot. Both brothers watched in dismay as their own church communities were silent or often even complicit in the escalation of war. They were confronted again by a spiritual formation crisis in the very communities commissioned by generations of Catholic social teaching to sponsor and serve as a living sign to an ethic of love and liveliness.
The Berrigans’ task, as they understood it, was to be a witness to the deeper rhythms of God’s righteous expectations anyway and thus, in some small way, chart a path of congruence with the beloved community of King, Heschel, Dorothy Day, Jesus, and the prophets in spite of the reigning unfaithfulness among so many a supposed faith leader. If no one else would, they would seek to redeem their tradition in a public way. The verifiability of the kingdom, the biblical reign of God, in the American scene was, in no small way, at stake. Daniel described the righteous work to be undertaken thusly: “Constantly exploring and enlarging the known frontiers of the Kingdom, the visible geography of spirit, so that the Kingdom is not a limbo of the restless disembodied, but a community of incarnate consciences.”
How does one go about learning to be an incarnate conscience (and somehow keep at it) in the shadow of American empire? Together with others and one day at a time with an aliveness to opportunities, a determined commitment to nuance in speech and action, and a sense of prophetic expectation. An incarnate conscience is alive and aware to what conscience might yet remain to be guarded and cherished in every human exchange however seemingly hostile. In the late sixties, every news cycle was full of urgent and despairing information with little or no indication as to what anyone could do about it. Sound familiar? And all of this without the Internet. But real knowledge and meaningful action is ever available as the knowing beneficiary and active participant of beloved community. The nests of meaning in which truth and joy and beauty cohere are available wherever two or more are gathered and animated by a steady commitment to say what we mean and mean what we say. Incarnate conscience can break out at any time. Daniel’s vision of what remains possible despite the surrounding chaos and despair is inspiringly straightforward: “Notional knowledge is the assimilation of facts leading nowhere; whereas real knowledge is some mysterious alchemy whereby the truth of existence, including the facts, leads one to moral development or simple action on behalf of people, on behalf of actual needs.” Even while the death-dealing generalizations of us and them, enemy and ally, were everywhere, simple opportunities undertaken for the good of others would arise.
For Daniel, one such opportunity arose in the form of a phone call from Tom Hayden in January of 1968. It was an invitation from Hanoi. The North Vietnamese government wanted to release three American prisoners of war in celebration of the Buddhist Tet holiday to two representatives of America’s peace movement as a joint goodwill gesture. Agreeing to the mission, he was joined by the historian Howard Zinn. As welcomed guests in Hanoi, they hid in bomb shelters, held infants, and took in the scenery. For his part, Berrigan experienced the facts on the ground as a live-action lesson in all the ways “American power” serves as “the active, virulent enemy of human hope.” A foreign policy of murderous despair, the listlessness of the American electorate, and the suffering of the many on the wrong side of one nation’s perceived self-interest were rendered undeniable. A conviction concerning the psychic toll of endless war he had come to share with his brother and others within the beloved community was only intensifying. He would carry his vision of the dysfunction, this mess wrought by all manner of misconceived human self, on into the twenty-first century: “Immortal urges do not come cheap, whether in lives or resources.”
Meanwhile, Philip (now a Josephite father) had begun to take courage from younger men refusing induction into their own military and suffering imprisonment for it. Wanting to engage the crisis himself in a way that involved risk, he walked into Baltimore’s Selective Service Board at the Custom House with the artist Tom Lewis, the poet David Eberhardt, and the minister Jim Mengel who handed out copies of the New Testament while the other three opened draft files and poured blood over them.[11] Lest anyone misunderstand the meaning of their action, they also passed out leaflets containing the following statement: “This sacrificial and constructive act is meant to protest the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood in Indochina.”
Philip would eventually receive a six-year sentence for this action making him the first Roman Catholic priest to be tried and imprisoned for having committed a political crime. But in the meantime, he was free to confer with Daniel and propose an escalation of dramatic tensions. Before his case went to trial, he felt compelled by God to perform another liturgical raid on the sacrosanct, the paperwork of American war-making. Daniel was unsure but was also committed to praying the matter through.
He would famously characterize his spiritual formation crisis in this way: “I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence.” Anybody know the feeling? I imagine these words name the danger we’re all in—whatever the context—in a wonderfully specific way. It is a confession of the felt risk we sense when we are at the point of decision between a conscience that is on the threshold of eroding or becoming incarnate. I believe this was his point of decision (not that there are not a multitude in any one life) when it came to going deeper toward embodying a community of witnessing discernment when it counted for a nation on the brink. What appeared before him was one solid and perhaps costly opportunity to speak justly to power and to gesture toward what human wholeness looks like in the shadow of our reigning geopolitical liturgies of domination and degradation.
If not them, who? If not now, when? The Christian tradition to which they had vowed to be true and the very Body of Christ they were called to be in the world was, by many indications, completely sidelined in popular discourse. Could they make a vanished inventory of sacrament credible again? Maybe authority was up for grabs. Berrigan later articulated the state of play:
Who owned the tradition, anyway; and who was worthy to speak on its behalf? . . . Indeed, the issue was not simply that a tradition was traduced daily by those responsible for its purity and truth. The issue was a far more serious one . . . The tradition was a precious voice, a presence, a Person. The war had silenced the voice, outlawed the Person. Church and state had agreed, as they inevitably did in time of war, that the Person was out of fashion, “for the duration.” He had nothing to offer in the face of guns . . . He was a prisoner of war this Jesus. He was in a species of protective custody.
And yet, the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it: files, designated areas, the whole of it. Could they keep their vows to be ambassadors of God’s righteous order without publicly protesting—in some demonstrative way—the idolatrous ordering of the nation-state? They would bring the liturgical forms with which they had been entrusted by their tradition to the war-making liturgies, the paper-work, for instance, of the United States government, whose enlisting of young men to commit acts of indiscriminate violence and devastation upon the people and the land of Vietnam constituted, biblically speaking, a demonic stronghold. On May 17, 1968, they joined seven other activists and walked into a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, removed papers with the names of young men scheduled to be conscripted, and conducted the prayerful burning of draft files with homemade napalm. Apologizing for their fracture of what they could no longer abide as “good order,” and noting that they were no longer able to say “Peace, peace” when there is no peace, they observed that they thought it fitting to burn paper instead of children: “We could not so help us God do otherwise.” As the fire burned, they punctuated this purposeful ritual by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
In the name of the deeper, truer rhythms of God’s greater economy and what it might yet mean to be formed by it, their action was a redemptive raid on the sacrosanct. A moment’s reflection on that almost excruciatingly helpful adjective—sacrosanct—is a reminder that it is indeed ever in play: flags, borders, weapons facilities, private property, bodies, pledges of allegiance, wildlife preserves, water. Choose your own liturgy? We do. All the time. And the Catonsville Nine did one fine day: “Those draft files! They were, of course, more than they purported to be. They had an aura, they were secular-sacred documents of the highest import.” The Berrigans chose to be militantly transparent when it counted. And in this way, their transparent liturgy would serve to disrupt and destabilize, even if only in one neighborly instance, the unacknowledged liturgy of the draft. Were they wrong to do so? Our answer will largely depend on our sense of the sacrosanct. What’s yours? This is one essential question in the work of spiritual formation.
What was accomplished? They went to jail. The Berrigan brothers were placed on the cover of Time magazine. It was a palpable hit in the sense that it made the news for a time. Similar actions were undertaken and continue into our day, most recently by the late Sister Megan Rice and her companions. These endeavors are often staged under the moniker of the Plowshares Movement and pose, as the prophetic always does, the question of authority. To whom and what are we rightly subject? What shall we credit? How shall we adhere? To what are we devoted?
There is no escaping these questions. And spiritual formation is to reach into the whole of reality, they can’t be put off as a concern for a disembodied, netherworld existence. Berrigan posits that the biblical vision of restoration is one in which “The actual world is our only world,” and whatever we think of God’s reign must be understood as operative in the this-worldly, reality-based realm.[18] For Berrigan, now is the new then. In his long career of living witness, it’s what the God who is love, the love that is and was and is to come, is for:
Humankind, it seems, has always been overdue to see God’s Word as subversive of a human dis-order largely disobedient, rebellious, and perverted—one close to self-destruction from toxic fouling of our nest, or from weapons designed to protect our mammon, the money of exploitation. The word of God revolutionizes this social chaos nonviolently, replacing the politics of greed, blood lust, and violence with politics designed for children.
And with this appeal to A. J. Muste’s famous demand—still largely unmet—for a foreign policy dedicated to the healthy thriving of children, we move toward the broader witness articulated by Philip Berrigan’s wife, Sister Elizabeth McCalister, and the Plowshares movement. They charged that the United States’ military budget, especially when it comes to nuclear weapons proliferation, reflects a spiritual malformation that goes unmeasured and unchecked until we begin to see it candidly and clearly as a form of compulsory religion enacted upon our population.
As McAlister argues, the United States government’s commitment to nuclear weapons proliferation constitutes the establishment of a national religion which violates the non-establishment clause in the First Amendment. “Its existence, its pre-eminence, its rituals, gods, priests, and high priests make serious encroachments on all of us . . . violating our freedom of religion.” This “state religion compels a quality of loyalty focused on our acceptance” of nuclear weapons “as a necessity. Weapons we are expected to pay for, adulate . . . become sacred objects of worship.”
We may be decades away from anything like this argument being taken up by the Supreme Court of these United States, but a community of incarnate conscience lives according to an alertness to what was evident to Daniel Berrigan as he sought to engage fifteen-year-olds in the forties: our American culture suffers under a systemic case of mistaken identity. Many of us seem to believe we have to hold the power of death over others in order to have life. On the national, state, and local level, policy is liturgy writ large. We become what we normalize. We become what we fund.
What is to be done? It is doubtless the prophetic work of generations, the slow undoing of what fear hath wrought. But spiritual formation begins with carefully securing space—there are so many ways of doing this—for coherent moral witness, a vision of self and others that makes joy and generosity and solidarity a living possibility. How do we overcome the bad religion we’ve learned to abide? One human exchange at a time. Small, meaningful actions add up.
Stand where you must stand. Be human there.
I love this essay so much—challenged and freed by it! I will be sharing, oh yes. Anything to induce more exorcisms from our robots. Love to you and the fam! 👋🏼
Great essay, David. Honestly that quote - "Who owned the tradition, anyway; and who was worthy to speak on its behalf?" - is everything.