Daniel Berrigan: Notes on Courage
On May 3, 2002, Meghan Johnston ’04 and labor activist Peter Kellman of North Berwick, Maine received the 2002 Stringfellow Awards for Justice and Peace. The awards were instituted in 2000-2001 by the Chaplain’s Office at Bates in honor of peace activist, theologian, and lawyer William Stringfellow Bates Class of 1949. Poet and peace activist Daniel Berrigan, S. J., a close friend of Stringfellow, visited Bates to present the awards and to read his poetry. Father Berrigan also led a morning retreat on the writings of the prophet Isaiah and their relevance to the current American and global situation. Below are an excerpt from Meghan Johnston’s acceptance address and an excerpt of an essay on courage written by Father Berrigan that summarizes much of what he imparted during his two days at Bates. In that essay, Father Berrigan highlights the prophetic work of the “Plowshare Activists,” people who, following his own example in 1980, have been “hammering swords into plowshares” in prophetic obedience to the prophets Isaiah and Micah, symbolically damaging weapons of war with instruments of peace. Father Berrigan’s essay first appeared in the book Courage, edited by Barbara Darling-Smith (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002) and was reprinted in Portland magazine. We reprint it here with the permission of the editor.
On Love and Death, Plowshares and Swords:
The 2002 Stringfellow Awards
Plowshares and Swords: Some Notes on Courage
by Daniel Berrigan, S.J.
“…They shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
Neither shall they learn war any more.” – Isaiah 2:4b
As a little child, I stumbled along after the plow each spring as my father turned the earth up, black and huge, one furrow upon another. A new, mild odor arose in the suave air, after the killing north-country winter. I imagined that the giants of the earth were turning over in sleep, just short of awakening. Or I thought of the furrows as great coils of woven roe, a vast weaving of the tegument of the world enacted before my eyes.
The child, it must be admitted, was not notably useful to the work: he went along, free and feckless, a contemplative of the new season, wandering, humming to himself, falling behind, catching up. Sometimes he had a sense of walking on black waters. The furrows dipped and rose, the boy’s unsteady feet treading a heavy earthen surf.
Was the earth breathing? He remembers breathing the earth, that overpowering odor, the released soul of the soil. That child thought the whole world was like his world; that plowing the earth was the normal function of humans; that odor of the earth was of soil, not blood or brimstone. He had much to learn.
Only later, when he saw his four brothers enlisted for war, the truth-the reversal of the oracle of Isaiah-struck. The war was, in the cruelest of phrases, world war, total war. “For the duration,” as they said, the able-bodied laid down the plow and took up the sword.
Even that awful fact did not exhaust the event. Swords had become the symbols of the human being itself; the swordless, the unarmed (and the more stigmatized, the disarmed) were simply less than human. They were shirkers, deserters, draft evaders, fit to be ostracized or jailed or both. And if, here and there, a plow turned up the earth in those years, it turned up corpses and land mines and the discarded rusted tools of peace.
During the war, the nation was conferring a new name on my four brothers. They were no longer farmers, steelworkers, students. They were warriors; that was their honor, the new vocation conferred on them by holy mother state. Their lives took on an unlikely static beat. Their lives, like their clothing, went from multiform to uniform. So did their minds, their obedience, their civil baptisms. They were pledged to kill, or to support those who killed.
The boy learned something else then, a cruel new climate in which he must live. It was not yet a nuclear winter, and yet the air was like a sword at the throat. No more springtime; no climate of peace; always war, hot or cold. Hot war – Korea,Vietnam – and cold war in between. Never a season for plowing; always the season of the sword.
He had much to learn, and he so slow a learner! It came to this; as long as the sword was in hand, the human vocation was violated; God lent neither presence nor blessing. In wartime, other gods, Mars or Vulcan or Jupiter, were in horrid charge, worldwide.
This is the way it went, our lifetime. For decades, the gods plowed the earth with a sword blade; then they sowed the earth with dragons’ teeth: nuclear mines, bunkers, laboratories. And there sprang up a new and unheard-of race-nuclear warriors.
Thus was a new history forged, an utterly spurious normalcy, a new sin. The new sin was the original sin in a new form, newly made original. And most appalling of all, conceived in the sin of war, a new species of human was born; call it the “normalized inhuman.” All other forms of the human, those that long centuries of travail and glory had created, were thus placed in question. The believing human, the compassionate human, the just human, and above all, the peacemaking humans – these became peripheral to the main chance; they were severally tolerated or suspected or indicted or jailed. They were, in a sense, in the human race, but not of it.
And what of the nations, more specifically, the nuclear nations? Under such assault, the assembly of humans became, in concert, a suicide club, a mutuality of perfectly balanced hostility, teetering, bickering, lying, invading, cozening, controlling, The nations fulfilled, to the letter, the dark description of the inhuman in Paul’s letter to the Christians of Rome. The ecology of the world, too, was monstrously altered; it became a forest of drawn swords, laid to the throats of the living.
And still, that oracle of Isaiah. Heartening, despite all; the oracle was issued in a time analogous to our own. Isaiah’s world was as dangerous, as petrifying to the spirit, mindless, captive to illusion, appallingly belligerent. Indeed, nuclear developments have merely underscored once again the ancient stereotype and impasse faced by the prophet. A world at war, a world prepared for another war, a world grown inept in the sweet uses and skills of peace. An unlikely time to issue a word of hope!
Yet the worst time, Isaiah dares imply, is the apt time! The kairos of God, the epiphany of God’s hope, enters the human scene at the moment when hands drop in helplessness, when all resources fail. The time when nothing can be done, when the new gods own the world-this is exactly the time of the toppling of the unsteady thrones. If only we believed.
I summon to our side the suffering servants of the oracle, those who have taken the hammer in hand and beaten the nuclear sword into a plowshare. I summon them to our side, to our worship and intercession, sisters and brothers, Christians and Jews, prisoners and ex-prisoners of the oracle, parents and grandparents, nuns and priests, Catholic Workers, missioners, chaplains, teachers, my brothers Jerome and Philip. Summon them to our side where they belong. Ignored as they are by the media, derided by prosecutors, scorned by judges, their fate of no great concern to churches and synagogues.
These women and men have made a beginning in the sorry and thankless task of fidelity to the oracle. No great claim, and yet through the courage of a few, the claim is repeatedly verified. They have made a human future less unlikely for all. They laid their hammer to the sword, and the beginning of a new creation has dawned in our terrifying world. The sword is turned aside; the plow renews the earth.
The Power of Love and the Power of Death
by Meghan Johnston ’04
As William Stringfellow committed himself to the struggle against the “power of death,” the death that seeks to demoralize, impoverish, strip a person of his or her own dignity, we must also commit ourselves to this struggle. We must live each day advocating for those who are the most forgotten, most marginalized, those beaten down by the power of death, destruction and hate. By rejecting the temptation to give in to hate and the tactics of the oppressors, we are moving with the grain of life, the grain of love. We must cultivate within each other and ourselves a love that is free of anger, free of violence, a love that gives of itself without judgment. And in doing this we are creating a movement that is bigger than ourselves individually; it is a movement that relies on a deep commitment to community.…
I have found the most understanding and strength in the community of people for and with whom I’m advocating. Feeling the physical link between their suffering and my own body has given me a sense of solidarity with the poor. I am able to look at myself and create a spiritual identity on a parallel level with my brothers and sisters. This has led me to comprehend the necessity of both service and social justice. Community service without an understanding of justice is only seeing what you can do for another and not seeing what they can do for themselves. Likewise, activism without service is far too removed from the people one seeks to empower and can be used as an outlet for misdirected anger. Finding the balance between the work for social justice and community service can be difficult. Fortunately this fall, in my work with the Bates Anti-Sweatshop Coalition, I had the opportunity to visit with two Bangledeshi sweatshop laborers and listen to their wishes for me as a student and a person, and they helped me understand more about that balance.
These two women were extremely articulate about the hardships they had endured-like miserable wages, no benefits, twenty-hour work days, and no bathroom breaks. And even with all of these horrible conditions, do you know what their number one wish was? It was that they would not be yelled at and told they were stupid by their bosses. These women wanted respect and dignity more than anything else.
This really opened my eyes to the complexity of the peace movement. It’s not just a matter of rallying for issues, organizing protests, and holding teach-ins (although these are very important and crucial). A large part of the movement’s purpose and success is the kind of people we choose to be every day–whether or not we will decide when we wake up every morning to be committed to understanding those around us, committed to easing their burden and securing their dignity. Each of us has the power to do this–to reclaim the force of goodness and wonder that exists in each of our hearts, to live the peace that we seek to see in the world. We must go into that world with open arms, ears, and hearts and surrender ourselves to the movements of peace and beauty. We are one body of peace-bearers, each with our own strengths and weaknesses. And we can choose to move with the grain of love and peace. We have the ability to build a world where love prevails and our common resources are used with moderation and understanding. I wish to all of you in this room the power of love and the endurance of strength in this mission for peace and justice.