Chapter 1
A Life: Reflections on a Biography
When Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip, along with A. J. Muste, John Howard Yoder, and a handful of budding Catholic radicals gathered in 1964 with Thomas Merton at Gethsemani Abbey for a retreat concerning the Spiritual Roots of Protest, the intercessions of that meeting, I am convinced, not only seeded a movement, but fell upon me, summoning my vocation.
Four years later when the Berrigan brothers with seven others entered the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, removed the 1-A files (of those eligible for sending to the Vietnam war front), and burned them with homemade napalm, those ashes too would eventually anoint my life and pastoral calling. Daniel turned that action toward liturgy, toward poetry. He edited the transcript of their conviction in federal court into a play of international repute, refused induction into the prison system, and went notoriously underground for four months, writing and speaking from the âmost wanted listâ before being captured by the FBI at the Block Island home of his friend William Stringfellow. When he was released after two years in the federal system, Berrigan came to New York City and taught a course on the Apocalypse of St. John when I was a student at Union Seminary. Full disclosure: Dan Berrigan became to me not merely teacher, but a mentor and friend.
In the year following Danâs death at nearly ninety-five (+April 30, 2016+), Jim Forest undertook the heroic literary effort of writing At Play in the Lionâs Den: A Biography and Spiritual Memoir of Daniel Berrigan (Orbis, 2017). Perhaps he had a running start. Three things are notable about the book up front. One is that Forestâs own life and callings are inextricably tangled with Berriganâs. (He was, for example, editor of the Catholic Worker when Dan first appeared there, was himself part of the Merton retreat, hatched with Dan and staffed the Catholic Peace Fellowship, and responded to Catonsville with his own participation in a draft board raid joining others in Milwaukee within the year.) So, like the Acts of the Apostles, there are whole sections written in the first-person voice. Other places, he peeks from behind the elegant narrative to lend a knowing detail or simply cites the voices of others with a certainty of having been there too. For a biographer, this is a vested and risky high-wire act. Donât fall into self-aggrandizement (his genuine modesty saves him that) or the net of personal hagiography. And best to confess up front by title: Biography and Spiritual Memoir, a difficult art he has mastered.
Another note is that he solicited a circle of collaborators to tell their own testimonies, answer questions, comment, and correct the occasional misplaced assumption. In that sense the book is a veritable act of community. Not so much collectively written as collectively underwritten. 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 expanded and republished his biography of Dorothy Day, he filled the book with photos. At Play in the Lionâs Den shares with each a common editor and publisher, Robert Ellsberg of Orbis Books, and a similar commitment to the visual. Every chapter of text is illuminated with a host of photos. 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 resistance shelf, and finally the biblical commentaries mining Jesus and the prophets. There are photographs of compatriots and conversation partners: Dorothy Day, Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh, Howard Zinn, Ernesto Cardenal, Stringfellow, Eqbal Ahmad, Elizabeth McAlister, Muste, and King, never mind beginning to endâPhilip, Philip, Philip. But above all himself, in mother Fridaâs arms or beneath Dadoâs scowl, pious and well-scrubbed, pensive, mugshot, chastened or chagrined, exuberant, mid-utterance, the mike 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 somehow free delight.
Like Gandhiâs âexperiments in truth,â Forest tracks moments in Berriganâs conversion to the gospel of nonviolence. To be sure he was raised in a home where the Catholic Worker was present, but he didnât seem to be reading it during World War II where in the isolation of seminary, he blessed our soldiers, Philip among them, in their cause for Christ. Post-war, he did create a small dust-up reading God and the Atom and sharing it with his first high school charges. A year in France (he came to love the place) moved him forward with exposure to both the âworker priestâ movement and the front-page reports of Dien Bien Phuâthe collapse of the French war in Vietnam. Back in the states he met Dorothy Day and began a decisive lifelong relationship to her Catholic Worker movement. Knew it or not, his conversion was met in earnest. Add Philâs early experience with racial justice work and conversation with Christians of Eastern Europe, and by the time of the Merton retreat he was in deep conversion.
Prelude to Catonsville was the anti-war self-immolation of the young Catholic Worker, Roger LaPorte. (See Danâs discussion of that with Thich Nhat Hanh in The Raft is Not the Shore.) Forest reproduces portions of his memorial homily for the community that actually triggered his ecclesial exile to Latin America, yet another station on the way. In 1968, a more immediate prelude was his night flight to Hanoi with Howard Zinn to retrieve American POWs. There, in a shelter, he tasted life beneath US bombing. Between that and the draft board action was the assassination of Martin King. Find the cost of freedom. God loves a moving target and Berriganâs conversion to gospel nonviolence ran effectively lifelong. The big events, like Catonsville or the 1980 General Electric action (hammering swords/nuclear delivery vehicles into plowshares) are the ones where the struggle of discernment within the movement was a refinerâs fire. Was destruction of property nonviolent? At first, though they eventually affirmed, Dorothy and Merton would have held him back. Phil pulled forward.
In between and thereafter the elements of conversion were perpetual: the network of safehouses built in his underground sojourn; the ragtag study communities gathered in prison; suffering the heatstorm 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 actionsâblood and ashesâwith Jonah House folk.
My own conversion to gospel nonviolence came at Danielâs hand. Or at his word. Call it the witness of his life. And it precipitated a genuine crisis in me. He served in that period as something of a spiritual director to me and offered cold comfort: âYouâre getting born and itâs bloody. Itâs always bloody.â Donât have to wonder how he knew that. He is so often called prophet or poet or priest, and rightly, but too rarely âapostle or evangelistâ of nonviolence. I venture to say that his is a life, even again in the telling, which calls so many of us to radical discipleship. Deo Gratias.
Transformative Aside: Conversion (A Letter from Eric Martin)
December 11, 2020
Dear Bill,
Itâs Winter in America, as Gil Scott-Heron put it, and you ask me to say a word about Dan and transformation. It seems a fitting task, given the circumstances of his life and witness, and a hopeful one, given ours.
I met Dan in his late eighties, when I assumed his transformations would be over. Unlike most who knew him, our tales together are pretty tame. No arrests, no protests, no parties with liquor in the bathtub, no liturgies of questionable orthodoxy. We only ventured outdoors once in all our time together. He already lived on Thompson Street, meaning the only time I entered the famed 98th St. Jesuit community where he used to reside was to celebrate its final community dinner before closing. His body too seemed on the verge of closing its doors, a reality which definitively framed my visits to his armchair, then his wheelchair, and, eventually, his bedside.
I wrote him a letter from a pit of confusion, as I later learned so many others had before. Would he be willing to call this stranger to talk? âOf course, and come for tea,â he bade. Forget the phone.
Our long sit continues to transform my life. A vocational path that seemed morally closed became, in his zen hands, reopened, vivified, blessed. More importantly, he gave me an address. A Catholic-become-atheist-become-Catholic-again in my early twenties, I felt lost in the Church, as if it had no space for me or my ultimate concerns. He heard this, held it, consulted a notebook, and copied for me â503 Rock Creek Church Rd NW.â When I later looked quizzically at the âCatholic Workerâ sign outside this DC house as a tall man named Art Laffin opened the door, I remembered Danâs assurance: âYouâll find your people there.â I did, and do.
When I eventually started the PhD in theology that Dan cleared a way for, he moved to the retirement home on the edge of campus, just a two-minute walk from my classes. I landed up writing my dissertation on his own transformation from a Rome-loving celebrant of V-Day to âDan Berrigan,â a project he repeatedly (and accurately) ...