The Trouble with Our State

Daniel Berrigan, John Dear

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781666729504
  9781666720945
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666720952
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"The trouble with our state," Daniel Berrigan writes in his great poem, "was not civil disobedience, which in any case was hesitant and rare. . . . The trouble with our state--our state of soul, our state of siege, was civil obedience." This poem, like the many others gathered here together by Daniel Berrigan's friend and editor, Rev. John Dear, continues his famous critique of the American war machine and summons readers to carry on his campaign of nonviolence for the abolition of war, violence, and nuclear weapons. "In this collection, I've brought together some of his most well-known political poems, poems from prison, poems from resistance, and a few never before published," John Dear writes in his foreword. "I hope they will inspire us to take up where Daniel Berrigan left off--following the nonviolent Jesus by resisting the culture of war, racism, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction and pursuing a new culture of justice, disarmament and environmental sustainability." May we heed his call and carry on the gospel journey of civil disobedience, creative nonviolence, and divine obedience to "seed hope," "flower peace," and trace "a liberated zone of paradise." "In looking over the selections, I'm thinking of poetry and nonviolence," Bill Wylie-Kellermann writes in his introduction. "There is certainly the matter of bringing more poetics to action, for which Berrigan enjoys virtually a charism. This is not just in the recounting, plucking an action from the street and telling it in verse (there are any number of such here), but for casting actions in symbol, metaphor, liturgy, even sacrament. Enact the poem; embody it." He continues, "Poetry also has a freedom about it, akin to what Gandhi called non-attachment to results. Like prayer, or sacrament for that matter, one offers a poem into the world, setting it loose and letting it go. It is. A germinating seed. In that sense, this book is a seed packet of nonviolent resistance. The sower has cast it. Upon Earth. Upon us all."

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• The Trouble with Our State
• Prophecy
• Peacemaking Is Hard
• Children in the Shelter
• My Name
• The Death of the Children
• Wings
• Eucharist
• The Verdict
• The Sermon on the Mount, and The War That Will Not End Forever
• Certain Occult Utterances from the Underground and Its Guardian Sphinx
• A Penny Primer in the Art of Forgetfulness
• I Will Sign My Name
• Seminar
• Tulips in the Prison Yard
• Almost Everyone Is Dying Here. Only a Few Actually Make It.
• We Were Permitted to Meet Together in Prison to Prepare for Trial
• No One Knows Whether Death, Which Some in Their Fear Call the Greatest Evil, May Not Be the Greatest Good
• The Cross as Military Decoration
• A Salvation of Sorts
• A Reading (sort of) From Paul’s First Loving Letter to Friends on the Greek Coast (& to us)
• Come, Dear Reader, Stand Breathless Before This Blinding Logic
• Skunk
• A Desert Painting I Saw in Here, Badly Reproduced
• Letter from Prison to the Vietnamese Prisoners
• The Risen Tin Can
• December 2, 1971
• Rehabilitative Report: We Can Still Laugh
• One Tries Hard to Mean These Words
• It Was a Dry Year, Followed Unexpectedly by a Deluge
• In Jail We Had a Glimpse of the Sky
• Zen Shovel
• One Thinks of Friends in Trouble Elsewhere, or; Change the Regime but Keep the Prisoners by All Means
• I Hope and Pray This Doesn’t Happen to Me
• On Being Asked to Debate H. Kissinger
• Wherein Are Explained My Reasons for Going From the University to the Pentagon, and Breaking the Law,Georgetown University Having Accepted Gross Millions From the Tyrant.
• Thank You, Your Point of View Is Certainly Interesting, If Somewhat Bizarre. Are there Any Questions?
• Hiroshima
• Swords into Plowshares
• Prisoners in Transit
• My Brother’s Battered Bible, Carried Into Prison Repeatedly
• For Philip in Prison
• Your Second Sight
• The Verdict
• The Opposite
• The Prisoner, the Cave
• The Gift
• I Want You Free
• A Few Gifts for the Prisoner
• Poverty
• Penalties
• What Marvels the Lord Works for Them (Psalm 126)
• Hymn to a New Humanity
• Pie in the Sky
• Miracles
• Etty Hillesum
• You Finish It: I Can’t
• Prayer for the Morning Headlines
• Harm Not the Trees
• Ambition
• Less Than
• Apartment 11-L
• Equilibrium
• September 27, 1971
• There’s a Deed Floating Somewhere
• Somewhere In the Middle
• Taking Stock
• Block Island Cottage
• Each Day Writes
• If
• Insight
• Chicago, Holy Week
• Chariot
• The gods of the 1980s
• The Economy Is Bullish
• My Brother Prisoner in Transit
• After
• The Catholic Bishops Approve Bush’s War
• Payment
• Days on an Island in January Will Do This to You
• Good Friday
• Facing It
• Resurrection
• The Face of Christ
• Word
• Knowledge
• Zen Poem