Dan Berrigan will be eighty years old next May. When that birthday comes around, he may possibly celebrate it in jail. That’s where his brother Philip is spending his late seventies as he serves his latest sentence – thirty months for damaging two Warthog warplanes of the Air National Guard. The two brothers give no sign of granting themselves a dispensation from this kind of radical anti-war activity on the grounds of age.
In Cambridge to receive an award from PEN New England, the writers’ group, Daniel Berrigan looked like the austere prophet that he is. Gaunt, with dark shadows un-der his eyes, and thinning gray hair, this Jesuit priest-poet came to read some of his work and answer questions from fellow writers and others. Dressed in a nondescript dark shirt with a design of muted colors, along with dark pants and red socks, he showed himself at one and the same time both somber and wry.
I had not seen this former colleague for many years and was at first shocked at his emaciated appearance. When I greeted him, he explained that he had come through diffi-cult spinal surgery in April. Now, however, he was free of the pain that had plagued him for a long time.
The first poem Dan read bore the title, “My Brother’s Battered Bible, Carried in-to Prison Repeatedly.” Its first stanza goes like this:
That book
livid with thumb prints,
underscorings, lashes –
I see you carry it
into the cave of storms, past the storms.
I see you underscore
like the score of music
all that travail
that furious unexplained joy.
The other poems are short, and Dan read them with the same kind of prophetic in-tensity that characterizes his spoken discourse.
Predictably enough, the question period began with the rationale for radical anti-war activity in the current era. What is the role, a fellow poet wanted to know, of non-violence and pacifism during this time of ethnic cleansing like the Kosovo event?
In response, Dan Berrigan invoked the wisdom of Dorothy Day. “Every latest war is the good one, the unavoidable one,” he quotes her as saying. In his view, “The bombs are the horrid quick fix. As we relay on bombs, we lose other aspects of our humanity.”
He went on to question our basic values asking “If we still believe in God, which I think is moot, since we have disastrously given the state the right to kill.”
Someone else asked what would have happened if we had not gone to war against Hitler. Dan held his ground and characterized the air war waged by Roosevelt and Chur-chill as “horrible.” He challenged the questioner: “Did we end up in a better position be-fore God?”
Still another person wanted to know whether it’s still important to go to jail when doing so does not get much attention any more. In responding Dan said “We hear this question all the time. It could not be known at the time when Mandela and others did it what effects it would have.”
Pressing more deeply, my friend Jim Carroll asked, “What does your faith in God mean to you?” Surprisingly, Dan Berrigan said in reply only “The closer the reality is to life, the more difficult it is to speak about.”
My question “How has your aging affected your view of yourself and the world” also evoked only a clipped, gnomic reply. “All the changes I’ve experienced are for the worse,” Dan said, in an ironic, jocular vein.
Thinking afterward about my latest encounter with this now famous Catholic priest radical, I felt a familiar conflict. Should Dan Berrigan’s analysis of American so-ciety be regarded as accurate? Or are his views simplistic and naïve? Should all of us concerned citizens be rising up against the weapons policies of our federal government or rather should we accept them as part of military preparedness against present and future enemies of world peace?
My current approach is to recognize that Daniel Berrigan is a true prophet. He is right to call attention in poetry, prose, and non-violent action to the disordered priorities of our nation. Like the great people of every era, he sees what the rest of us prefer not to acknowledge and he has the courage to suffer for his convictions.
At the same time, however, he oversimplifies the workings of the world. Prophets must do so, I suppose; otherwise they cannot communicate a hard-hitting message to people at large. But, no more than the rest of us do they enjoy an exemption from human fallibility; they can be wrong about details and even basic principles.
In my dour moments, I wonder if we do people like Dan Berrigan a service by asking them to pronounce on all sorts of questions. Yes, I admire and venerate him for his great qualities of heart. But he, too, has limitations that deserve respect.
Richard Griffin