An Unbound Spirit

WHEN DANIEL and Philip Berrigan, A.J. Muste, John Howard Yoder, and a handful of Catholic radicals gathered in 1964 with Thomas Merton at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky for a retreat concerning the spiritual roots of protest, the intercessions of that meeting, I am convinced, not only seeded a movement but summoned my vocation.

Four years later when Daniel and Phil Berrigan and seven others entered the draft board in Catonsville, Md., removed 1A files and burned them with homemade napalm, those ashes too would eventually anoint my pastoral calling. October marks the 50th anniversary of the trial of the Catonsville Nine. Released in February 1973 after 18 months in the federal penitentiary at Danbury, Conn., Daniel Berrigan came to New York and taught the Apocalypse of John when I was a student at Union Seminary. Full disclosure: He became to me not merely teacher, but mentor and friend.

In the year following Dan’s death (April 30, 2016), Jim Forest undertook the heroic literary effort of writing At Play in the Lions’ Den. Perhaps he had a running start. Three things of note up front. One is that Forest’s own life is inextricably tangled with Berrigan’s. He was, for example, editor of The Catholic Worker when Dan first appeared there, was part of the 1964 retreat with Merton, and responded to Catonsville by joining others in a draft board raid in Milwaukee within the year. So, like the Acts of the Apostles, there are whole sections of this book written in the first-person voice. Or betimes, Forest just peeks from behind the elegantly researched narrative to lend a knowing detail. This is a risky wire act. Don’t fall into self-aggrandizement (his genuine modesty saves him that) or the net of hagiography. And best to name this from the start, in the subtitle: “biography” and “memoir,” a difficult art Forest has mastered.

Another note: Forest solicited a working circle of collaborators to share testimonies, answer questions, and comment. So the book is a veritable act of community. Okay, fuller disclosure: I was among those solicited, contributing ever so slightly to the story.

A third concerns photographs. Forest once published a pictorial life of Thomas Merton. When he republished his biography of Dorothy Day, he filled it with photos. This volume shares with those a common publisher, Robert Ellsberg of Orbis Books, and a similar commitment to the visual. Posters, banner holds, caricatured birthday invites, the Time magazine cover of Dan and Phil dragging the church into nonviolence by the collar, towering puppets for an underground escape, whole walls of art and loved ones, courtroom sketches, and the inevitable book covers from lauded poetry, to the resistance shelf, and finally the biblical commentaries mining Jesus and the prophets. But above all is Daniel Berrigan himself, in Frida’s arms or beneath Dado’s scowl, side by side with Phil, pious and well-scrubbed, pensive, mugshot, chastened or chagrined, exuberant, mid-utterance, the mic or camera in his face, free in the cuffs, the dock, the cell, laughing aloud or just about to. Always it seems there is love in his eye, and free delight.

Forest glimpses Berrigan’s conversion to the gospel of nonviolence episodically. Berrigan was raised in a home where The Catholic Worker was present, but he didn’t seem to be reading it during WWII where, in the isolation of seminary, he blessed our soldiers, Philip among them, in their cause for Christ. God certainly loves a moving target. Between the seminary and Dan’s participation in another liturgical direct action, hammering swords/nuclear warheads into “plowshares” at a General Electric nuclear weapons plant near Philadelphia in 1980, were refining fires not just of movement discernment but personal transformation.

Crises were perpetual: Dan’s underground sojourn; prison and the ragtag study communities; suffering the heat storm from Israel for his biting critique on behalf of Palestinians; pressing nonviolence with the Weather Underground domestically and with Ernesto Cardenal in Central America; the endless Pentagon actions—blood and ashes—with Jonah House folk.

My own conversion came at Daniel’s hand and word. It provoked in me a genuine crisis. He served just then as spiritual director, offering cold comfort: “You’re getting born and it’s bloody. It’s always bloody.” Wonder how he knew that? He’s often named prophet or poet or priest, and rightly, but too rarely “evangelist” of nonviolence. I venture to say that his life, even again in this telling, will call more of us to radical discipleship. Deo gratias.