In 1996 I interviewed Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit priest and activist,
in New York City (see Heron Dance, issue 9). He was in his late seventies then
and was continuing his work for peace and social justice, his work with AIDS
patients, and continuing to author books. He had written and published almost
forty books. He was still participating in civil disobedience related to anti-war
activities, and still getting arrested regularly.
I became interested in interviewing Dan when I heard an author of a book on the history of the Jesuits describe Dan, his activism, and his volunteer work with AIDS and cancer patients, as exemplifying the Jesuit calling. A mutual friend set up the interview. After being released from prison for protesting the Vietnam War, Daniel spent a few months living with Thich Nhat Hanh in France. Much of the hierarchy of the Jesuit community opposed his work for peace and social justice. He was shipped off to South America for a time by his Jesuit superiors. Dan said to me something like, At one time they pilloried me. Years later those same people, or others just like them, held a parade in my honor. It is all the same.
For the first hour or so of the interview he said very little. His message was that the Truth is simple. We all recognize injustice. We all can tell right from wrong. I am a Christian. I am obligated to confront injustice when I see it. That is what Christ's life teaches us. The difficulty is in living it, not talking about it. There are too many words already. We also talked about Dan's friendship with Thich Nhat Hanh, with whom he spent time in the seventies when they were both prominent peace activists. Thich Nhat Hanh had been exiled from Vietnam for his anti-war activities, and was working for Vietnamese boat people. The lives of these two men, of radically different cultures and, at least on the surface, different religions, had come together over a shared abhorrence of violence and injustice. They wrote a book together: The Raft is Not the Shore.
Excerpts From My Interview of Dan Berrigan: A Vocation for the Suffering.
I started by asking Dan if he would talk about his message. He responded:
Something of chariots and silver. And then the misery and the death that goes with that.
Do you have any thoughts about having a philosophy and paying the price of that philosophy, and what the phrase “courage of conviction” means to you?
I move a lot in academic circles, on campuses a lot. I was teaching for a semester at a school, a very classy college in Colorado Springs. A highly secular place with very bright students who had particular religious interests. They were from elite schools around the country. I was offering a course in non-violence called “faith in non-violence.” And it was sponsored by the religion department. They were the ones that brought me in. They have a unit system, not a semester system. These students were with me three hours a day, five days a week for one month. That is the only course they take for one month. They take eight or nine courses a year. It is very intense, and you get to know them very well. This was very interesting and very good.
There was turmoil on campus because of the official treatment of homeless people. They were being kicked off by the campus cops. Many of the students were very outraged, and they decided to do a camp-out and sleep out of doors. They wouldn’t buy food for five nights. They would get food out of dumpsters. They wouldn’t use the toilets or library, but would come to class. A lot of the idea was to dramatize the plight of the homeless.
Well, most of the students involved were in my class. That was the kind of kid that wanted this course. So I was right in the middle of it. I said lets do this together. Let us gear our class time and our reading to what you are doing out there. Keep a diary and all that. Let’s make that an integrated goings on. My colleagues in the religious department wouldn’t touch this whole thing with a stick. In fact, it came down to the fact that I was the only faculty member who helped them at all. That has happened to me again and again in various circumstances on campuses, where the people teaching the great religions are not with anything that students are trying to do, or are not encouraging them, or not supporting them. Several of the students said that the hardest part of the experience – and it was bitterly cold, it is right in the Rockies – was that they were treated like the homeless. Treated that way by the faculty. They were ignored. No one on the faculty would stop, or look at them, or speak to them.
So I am very grateful that I come and go in these places. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take that kind of life very long. I never stay more than a semester in these places. Then I can teach what I want the way I want. And get out. Okay?
Early in the interview, Dan spoke of his friendship decades earlier with Thich Nhat Hanh,
“I was getting over the Vietnam war, getting over prison. It was providential that I spent time with Nhat Hanh in France. I went into the Zen discipline for about four months. It was very healing. Toward the end, we got this idea that he and I would converse each evening on an agreed topic. We taped it, and adapted it into a book, The Raft Is Not The Shore. . . . . I think I was instrumental in arranging his meeting with Thomas Merton. In the end, I was teaching at Cornell and couldn’t be there. They discussed things like their Gregorian and Buddhist chants. And then they both sang on the tape they sent me. . . .
“Nhat Hanh gave a talk in the City a couple of months ago at St. John the Divine. The organizers sent me two front row tickets. Ten thousand people showed up. . . . I think he is paying a price. That kind of following is not an unmitigated blessing. It is complex to try to figure it all out. The audience was practically all white. It cost quite a bit to get in. So that determines the audience. They were selling his books like hotcakes. I feel kind of badly for him. I would not want to be in those shoes. Not that I ever will be. My message is not that acceptable. It must be very hard. I didn’t get a chance to sit down with him. He is besieged. I would like to talk to him about some of these things.
“The first thing that struck me that night was that these are people getting nothing from the churches of New York. The second thing that struck me was that he only talks inner peace. He doesn’t talk about America or a vocation for the suffering or what that might bring. He doesn’t talk about the war-making state.
“His own life has been so heroic. From being exiled and almost being killed and having so many of his young monks killed in Saigon. And then his work with boat people. But he doesn’t talk about that. He doesn’t challenge people with that. He only talks inner peace. He doesn’t talk about America or a vocation for the suffering or what that might bring. He doesn’t talk about the war-making state. It is almost as if there is a private life, and then a public message. And the message draws thousands of people who want to stop at inner peace. He wouldn’t have that crowd if he started talking about his life and what he’s done. But I would love to hear him talk about the price he has paid. It is almost a delusion that there can be inner peace without confronting injustice.
“It is a very hard question, when you are asking it about a friend, the way I am. And yet I want to because I think there is something lost here. On all sides. The middle class people of New York desperately need some sense of a public vocation and a public connection with the suffering that is everywhere around. And they don’t want that connection. But they need it. We need it. We need it for our humanity.”
I asked Dan about the retreats he leads during which the group studies and discusses chapters of the Bible, in particular Isaiah.
I find them to be a light in the darkness in this crazy world, crazy country and crazy city. I find some light in the darkness through these great images. I have been working on Isaiah for about 12 years now. I find a great likeness in what they underwent and I undergo.
There is a commonality in the themes. They are all facing the same empire. They are all charged with telling the truth and paying up: personal suffering and even death, threat of death, exile. Being put into stocks and thrown into a well. That is very helpful. To see them persevere. And not give up. In circumstances very much like today. Surrounded by the same greed and the same big brothers and the same armies. That is nice, that they are not talking in normal or easy times. They are talking in the face of very contrary winds.
Close to the end of our interview, I asked Dan about the role of inner peace, of spiritual practice in his life, and about how that related to his activism.
You have a nice rhythm going. I have a nice rhythm that I am very blessed by and moved by and attached to. That is symbolized by going to retreats and then coming back and working alone during the week. Or by being arrested again, like I will be on Good Friday. That goes on all the time. I couldn’t just be alone, and I couldn’t just be out there. The one nourishes the other. The one sends me to the other. That is the unity of the human experience — public responsibility and soul. Both.
Several months later, I attended a talk Dan gave in Burlington Vermont. After the talk, he was asked if he had an opinion as to what kind of work was most needed or important now. He said,
“What type of work we do seems less important to me than that we do the work that we are attracted to. If we touch human need, or human sorrow or loss at some point, I think we are touching it at all points. I hesitate very much to indulge myself in some kind of a grocery list of world ills. We are bombarded with that so much anyway. The main thing is to touch human life at some neuralgic point in which we can serve and be served, and heal and be healed. Then a lot of other things become clear, because these things are all connected. I don't think we can connect physically with all of them, at least I can't.” River Flight
Phil Berrigan
Dan helped me set up an interview with his brother, Phil Berrigan. Phil was then 72. He died in 2002, at the age of 79. Dan had spent a total of eleven years in prison for various anti-war actions and at the time of our interview was still regularly arrested for his witness. I spent the night in their community home, Jonah House, located in one of the more impoverished areas of Baltimore. The group lives in voluntary poverty, obtains surplus food from distributors and gives it to the destitute in the inner city neighborhood in which they live. During the interview, I asked Philip if his real opposition wasn't comfort -- the comfort that prevents people from confronting the injustice they know exists. He responded that our culture is centered around the weaker side of human nature. We define success and strength in terms that have little to do with compassion.
I asked Phil how he got into ant-war, anti-nuclear work.
I studied for year in Washington and was ordained there as a Josephite priest. Our work was with African Americans in this country. We had been working among black folks since the Civil War. After a year, in a very impoverished parish in southeast Washington, I was sent by my superiors to New Orleans. I taught down there for seven years in a central black high school. About a thousand young people. During that time, I was introduced to the civil rights movement because things were very much in ferment then. In the deep South. I graduated to the anti-war movement. While I was there, the Cuban missile crisis happened. The showdown with the Soviet Union happened. All of the deep south was endangered by these intermediate range ballistic missiles in Cuba. They were targeted for deep south ports ? Tampa, Houston, New Orleans, Biloxi. Since I am a WWII veteran, I thought it highly incongruous that Khrushchev and Kennedy were debating whether I was to live or die. The panic of people in that area was manifested mostly by those living in Florida. By the thousands, they began to move out during the Cuban missile crisis. We came within a hair's breath of nuclear exchange.
I got deeply interested, through the help of friends, in the struggle in Indo-China. When I moved to Baltimore, I began to look at it very seriously in terms of direct action. I tried all the other measures. I knew a lot of congress people, I did a lot of lobbying, I wrote letters to editors, I did a lot of legal marches. Nothing happened. I was doing a lot of reading. I was very impressed with what Henry David Thoreau said in his essay, The Duty of Civil Disobedience. He said dissent without resistance is consent. You have to take into consideration the unjust law, which legalizes or protects the actions of the government. Those laws are to be broken, as Rosa Parks broke the law when she sat on the front of the bus in Montgomery Alabama. Unjust laws have to be unmasked for what they are.
Of course, that is true today. Our nuclear arsenal is legal. If we ever get into a nuclear exchange, it will be legal. So I began to break the law. I knew that the law protects the terrible injustice. As a result of my protest, I was sentenced to six years in prison. When the appeals process ran out, in 1970, I was ordered to report for prison. It was a six year sentence. With my brother I went underground with two other members with the Catonsville nine .... David Darstead had been killed. He was a Christian brother from St. Louis Missouri. He had been killed in Minnesota trying to visit someone in prison up there. His car had slid off the road. He died in a crash. So there were only eight of us. Four of us went underground, and four reported for prison. The four who reported for prison had their sentences cut in half. Of course, ours were left in tact. DanÕs was three years, mine was six, and the other two had had similar sentence.
I was excommunicated from the priesthood in 1973 when my wife and I were married. The Catholic Church still has a position of mandatory celibacy. We deemed this to be wrong. We continued the same work we did before we were married. Christ did not make an issue of the marital status of his disciples. Peter was a married man. Several of the apostles were. So what? The official church has had this policy since about the 12th century.
I got out of prison in late 1972 after being in about 40 months. My wife and I started a community because we were convinced that we couldn't survive in the resistance without the support that comes from community. You need the resources of ideas and prayer and study that come out of community. There is always a high level of dialogue going on here with our community. We have two people from the community in jeopardy now with the government down in Newport News, and the other five of us here at home not only support them, but if necessary raise money for them and provide a haven for them if they want to come up and discuss legal matters. Unless you have the support of a community, you are not going to last long in the resistance. The government will crush you. They will crush you psychologically and spiritually. You will feel alone and forsaken. Ostracized and separate. So we determined to start community here. We began in 1973 when I got out of prison.
And we try to use the Bible as our handbook. Especially the New Testament. There is one provision in the New Testament that the whole human family ought to be one community. The only way you can symbolize that is to live in community yourself. If you say that human beings are all of one species, and one family, and one race, we all share the same human nature, if you say that you have to reflect it in your life. And you have to build a microcosm of what ought to be under the sovereignty of God everywhere. People ought to live in community. Christ's first public act was to form a community. He approached this rag tag bunch - Peter, Andrew, James, John - and said follow me. He lived with these people up until his execution. They constituted the early church. They not only remembered his life and his teaching, but they lived it under persecution. So we just try to reflect that. We say people are supposed to look upon each other as sisters and brothers. And are supposed to live that and treat one another non-violently. Not exploit one another. Not brutalize one another. Not abuse one another. Not fight one another. As we do in the world. The whole nation-state of course reflects the terrible divisions between people who are essentially sisters and brothers. Racism is based upon the fact that if someone is of a different skin than you are, they are no longer your sister brother, they are you enemy.
I asked Phil if there was a history behind devoting so much of his time to serving the black community.
I am a WWII veteran. I trained in the deep south. In Georgia. Florida and North Carolina. I saw there the discrimination against black folks. Terrible discrimination. And since the armed services were segregated, I experienced first hand the discrimination accorded black Americans in the Armed Services. Blacks were accorded a service role. They weren't allowed in combat, generally speaking. In the navy they were mess boys. They were given the dirtiest jobs. President Truman finally integrated the Armed Services in 1948, after the war ended. But up until that time the social oppression was extended to the armed services. I thought it might be a good way to spend my life - doing what I could to serve black Americans.
We have been distributing food in this community for about twenty years now. Fifteen years ago, when they opened up the mammoth wholesale terminal midway between Washington and Baltimore, we went out and saw the director. We asked if we go through the food that wasn't selling. What the chain stores and supermarkets are not interested in. They bring stuff in by plane, by rail and tractor trailer into this huge terminal. They handle an enormous volume. And because the fishing industry in Chesapeake Bay is very proximate, and because Baltimoreans consume a lot of fish, they have an enormous fish wholesale market. So we developed connections there. And the wholesalers are very good to us. Sometimes one wholesaler will give us $500 worth of fish. Case after case of salmon. All packed in ice. So every Tuesday we go there, first to the market that handles fruits and vegetables, and then to the fish market. We fill our van and share it in the neighborhood. We take about 2% of it for ourselves, and give the rest to our friends in the neighborhood.
These are not homeless people. They are on fixed incomes. Elderly folks. Alcoholics. Some are drug addicts. Some are in desperate straights because of poverty and destitution. And because they are black. We give out the food up at the bus stop. We line up the crates. It is all orchestrated because we have been working with these people for about 20 years. Certain of them have emerged who watch over everything to make sure that everyone gets a fair share. If you come back with two cases of oranges, with a hundred and twenty five people, they can only take about two a piece. Things like that. So they watch over those things. Then they help to clean up the bus stop because there is stuff scattered all over. We have to sweep it up and clean it. Tuesday morning too, that same morning, we go to the food bank and fill up the vestibule with cereal and can soup and things like that. And sometimes we run into freebies. The food markets will be sharing things like fruits and vegetables. We bring that back too.
On Thursday morning people line up at the door. They all bring their little bags. We fill up their little bags. Between Tuesday and Thursday morning we are able to share maybe $40 per capita. That is real mainstay of a lot of people.
People also during the day or night for food. They shouldn't. We have found through experience that since we are a non-violent resistant community, not a food service bureau. Our business is anti-war work. We try to conduct that not only by running around and lecturing, and sharing the latest information about what the Pentagon is doing, but we resist. Our people are in and out of jail all the time. We are not social workers. We don't try to combat drug addiction or alcohol abuse, or provide jobs for people. We can't do both. We had to decide what is most important. So when people come around at odd hours, and we are beating a path back and forth from the kitchen to the door, that distracts us from our primary focus. Sometimes have to be gruff with people. You try to be compassionate. You realize that people are in dire straights. We are kind of pushovers. It doesn't work out too well.
Jesus said whatever you do for the least of my sisters and brothers, you do for me. That is one of the great parables of the New Testament. Christ is talking about our relationship to God. We don't have any relationship to God when we ignore the neighbor. Because the neighbor is made in the image of God. That is why you should be hospitable and kind and just. Compassionate. The neighbor is everything in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I asked Phil if the community belonged to a single church congregation.
We make constant reference to the gospel. On Sunday morning we sit here in the front room. Friends come in, usually about fifteen of us, and somebody gives a presentation on the scripture. Right now we are studying John's book of Revelation. It goes on for a solid two hours. We try to come to grip with that scripture, which is God's word to us. God's speech to us. God is talking to us. It is one of the main ways that God talks to us. He talks to us through the neighbor, through history, through events. But through the scripture too.
What have been the major influences on the values you've chosen to live your life by?
The difference between them and us has been that Grace has made provision for us to take their word seriously. You have all these manifestations of grace from your background. Your family. Your education. Your friendships. Which actually are what form us. We emerge and mature according to all of these powerful influences in our lives. I can study my own life, and I can say I have my brother Dan, and I can say at least three of my brothers are extraordinary people. All of them are non-violent, anti-war people, all are extremely compassionate toward their neighbors, all have their deep friendships. They have all influenced me. All have helped to bring me up when I was young. Dan has been a great influence in my life. He's two and a half years older. He will be 75, I am 72. I have all of these benefits that these people have not. I can't take credit and say I am superior.
We are teachers of one another. We all require teachers. A good teacher is someone who stands for something, who lives something, and then is prepared to speak of what they live. A good teacher is irreplaceable. Otherwise you are not going to amount anything.
Another primary influence on me is the community that has formed me, and has formed my wife. Not necessarily the community that has lived here. But a community down through the ages. A community of great authors. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Victor Hugo - great authors who have changed us. Changed us for the better. The great Americans - the non-violent figures out of our own history - beginning with John Wolman. American has the finest history of non-violent resistance in the world. The abolitionists, the resistance to WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Korea. That is part of our history. Most Americans are ignorant of that. It is a tragedy, but it is true. This precious history is not taught in our schools, not taught to young people. They don't know what it means to be an American. All of this has been formative to me. It is part of the community that produced all of us. Just like you are a result of community.
The thing about it is that you provide for others what has been given to you. And you give out of the community that has formed you. You give it to others. It is as simple as that.
What drags a community like this down? What do you have to guard against?
A variety of things. One would be hubris. Pride. Vain glory. Judgmentalism. Self-righteousness. Comparison. Comparing yourself with another community member. Saying, "I am doing all these things. They are doing shit." Holding them accountable for that. Then a kind of psychological warfare that is carried out of the distinct personal failures on our part. Things I have been guilty of. I have always enjoyed a lot of health and strength. I am good with my hands, and my wife is the same way. We are both hard workers. We can go on seven days a week. Week in and week out. But what about people in the community who can't? I have to place things in a non-violent perspective, and see things in such that they are not liable for my output, my production, my contribution, not my standard. Either I have that perspective or there is going to be conflict. I try to keep our cars in shape. Other people drive the cars and don't take care of them as well as I do.....All these things come up. That is providential and it is part of the mechanism that God provides for us. We are supposed to learn and change under that regimen.
There is one great phrase from Luke, where Jesus says if we have different gifts, they come from God. So why do you pride yourself on that? None of us have done everything that has been commanded of us. None of us are obedient. Even if we were, we would still be unprofitable servants. I really don't amount to much. Everybody has to have a scripture, some reference to what life is all about, so that you compare your own life to it. That is what life all about - comparing yourself to some ideal under God. That is what life all about. You have to have that scripture. You are accountable to that. I seriously consider the way I live. It is all-important.
Phil talked a little about the community's philosophy of voluntary poverty.
The scripture says that God places the world and everything in it at our disposal. We are supposed to use it for the enhancement of human life. Obviously corporate capitalism doesn't fit in very well. There is something wrong about our economic system. Something wrong about a communist economic system. Something wrong about any economic system that doesn't take into consideration things like community, sharing, not amassing property. To the degree that you amass property, sooner or later someone is going to suffer.
We all work with our hands and do a whole variety of jobs. We do rough carpentry. We do a lot of painting. We do masonry work. We do roofing. As sub-contractors. We charge a just rate. Eight or nine dollars an hour. We usually work four days a week.
We keep $200 around here for eggs and milk, and to go to a movie once in a while if it is a good movie. But we are supposed to be accountable for that we spend. We all list our expenditures. If we are spending too much - say on long distance phone calls -- we discuss it and decide it is too much. Or too much water. We don't need a shower every day. There is a water crisis in the world. And the world is full of people who can't get pure water. 150 gallons a day. Per capita. A frightful waste. So we try to be responsible. Sometimes without success. But we are working on it all the time. It is hard in the culture, because we are bombarded all the time. With wants. You don't need this, but you got to want it.
Bank accounts and investments and houses - if you have more than you need, they don't belong to you. God made this Earth, and made this creation. God ordained that we handle our property in consideration of our sisters and brothers. So that is why we practice voluntary poverty. We have more than we need. Some of it we try to share.
The world can supply for our needs, but it can't supply for our greed. That is what is wrong right now. We are only 1/16 of the world's population but we consume about 1/4 of the world's production. We are producing all over the world. We produce anywhere there is cheap labor, or cheap raw materials. So we consume seven or eight times our just share. That is non-negotiable. If anyone wants a war over that, we are ready. That is our attitude.
Capitalism lures the lower person in us. Our addiction to materialism, to our own self-enhancement, to privilege, to superiority over our neighbor. Where your goods define you as a person. People are attracted by that. The expensive car, the foreign vacation. This accent on private property appeals to the lower side of our makeup. And the major culprit is television.
I asked Phil about the role of inner peace in his life.
Inner peace is not something you seek. Inner peace is a by-product of other things you seek. You seek justice and peace with your neighbor and you might get some peace yourself.
Have you achieved peace with yourself?
I can live with myself. I sleep at night. I haven't betrayed anybody. I haven't quit. I haven't stopped trying I don't even worry any longer about how effective I am. Or what kind of results are coming from our work.
Why is that not important?
Results are another one of the insidious and subtle temptations. If you focus on effectiveness and results, and don't achieve them, what are you going to do? Most people quit. Gandhi said that results were the last temptation for the resister. And maybe the most important, most critical temptation.
The over-riding principle is that you do this because it is right. It is just. It is proper. The government has to be held accountable, even though no body listens. Because their crimes shriek to the heavens for resolution. And nobody is going to the Pentagon, except the people of faith, the people who believe something. When we demonstrate, maybe sixty people show up.
Does anger have a role in work for peace?
Anger is ok as long as it doesn't turn into hatred. There would be something radically wrong with us if we weren't angry over the activities of this government. If we took it with a grain of salt, there would be something wrong with us. Something would be wrong with us that would be destructive. But the anger can't be destructive or ... Dan has always been a great help to me. I started out as an angry person. At all of the tortured lives coming out of the war game. And has its own place, but it can be devouring too. You can get furiously angry at good people. So he has been helpful too.
I correspond with a lot of religious people and they sign their letters, the peace of Christ. The peace of Christ rests on non-violence, on good relations with your neighbor, it rests on my peace with the people who take more food than they should on the corner, keeping my cool under these harsh sentences that are accorded me.
But mellowness can be dangerous too. If it gets to the point where I am no longer doing anything, that can be dangerous. You try to keep going with a better level of non-violence every time, because you know everything depends on that. And non-violence is truth. The exercise of truth. Gandhi would say it was an experiment with truth. It fits the way I speak, the way I eat. Do I eat too much? It applies to everything.
Who are you serving?
You are serving God. The human family. This society has to come to terms with its crimes. With Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is an area of national responsibility. Nothing short of that will achieve anything. We have to come to terms with Vietnam and the Gulf War. But Dan and I have been at this for thirty years. And Liz maybe 25. All this time we have been trying to work for peace, and still America keeps going to war, keeps building more and more powerful weapons. In fact, things keep getting worse. But you have to put that in perspective. Maybe it is a great thing if you break the unanimity. I was with a great guy in the federal penn up in Connecticut. Dan knows him well too. He was asked by a reporter once "Why do you keep doing this. It doesn't seem to achieve anything. Why do you keep doing this and busting your ass?
And he responded, 'At least I keep it from being unanimous. Everything depends on that.'
How are you treated by other inmates when you are in prison?
You attempt to achieve relationships. You become a listener rather than a talker. Nobody listens to these poor guys. You try to break down the racism. Prison is like a fishbowl of the overall society. If your overall society is racist, you are going to see that in prison. So you try to break down the racism. And be friendly and helpful to black Americans. Always, when you go to prison, it is known why you are there. That is by in large respected. By in large. Those who don't respect it - for instance in Danbury, Dan and I got friendly with a bunch of bikers from the Devil's Disciples, and Hell's Angels, and they were fascists. Their politics were disastrous. They were America First, flag and country jocks, but they didn't give us any trouble. They watched our behavior and saw that we tried to be helpful and they left us alone. In fact, we became friendly with several of them. So everything depends upon your non-violent conduct. They respond to your good intentions. They know in their hearts that you didn't gain anything for yourself in doing what you did, except maybe spiritual reward. They see that what you did was relatively selfless and that is respected.
