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41 Like many, I initially encountered Daniel Berrigan through his written words; first, in an introduction to a 1969 book edited by David Kirk of the Emmaus Community in Harlem under the title Quotations from Chairman Jesus; then, in The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, a classic of the Catholic left published a year later; then, in other books that came my way during those years, including The Dark Night of Resistance.1 As a young, restless, unschooled reader of things radical and religious, I caught the title’s allusion to the daunting vision (or antivision) offered by John of the Cross in The Dark Night. But I did not grasp its—dare I say it—theological and philosophical significance. The allusion suggests that if you practice the methodical—the relentlessly methodical—program of sensual and spiritual purgation set forth by John of the Cross, you will find yourself living a life that is anything but “American Catholic” in the conventional sense of that unfortunate phrase. That is to say, you will not be living the life of a typical, well assimilated, upwardly mobile, college-educated, late-twentieth or early-twenty-first century Catholic in the United States: going on to business, law, or medical school, getting a The State of Resistance: On the Relevance of Daniel Berrigan’s Work to Catholic Social Thought Michael Baxter Marsh-Ch03.indd 41 Marsh-Ch03.indd 41 2/1/2012 4:30:17 PM 2/1/2012 4:30:17 PM 42 Michael Baxter lucrative job, getting married, moving to the suburbs, raising kids, and getting enough in your 401(k) for a long and comfortable retirement, all along the way piously asking God to bless your aspirations; or in the case of religious and clergy, going through formation or the seminary, getting trained for ministry, getting an assignment, getting another assignment, pursuing a career in the Church, and then retiring into a routine of morning prayer, Mass, golf, lunch, nap, evening prayer, supper, and a couple of hours watching television before compline. Whether it be embodied by laity or clergy, liberal or conservative, male or female, this kind of conventional American Catholic life, according to Daniel, must be renounced. Daniel himself has tried to do this in his life. His career—if you can call it that—has been anything but conventional. And he seems not to have grasped the concept of retirement. A clue as to why can be found at the outset of The Dark Night of Resistance, where he proposes “the state of resistance as a state of life itself,” along with the explanation that, “like it or not, this is the shape of things. We will not again know sweet normalcy in our lifetime.”2 Whatever one’s state of life, if lived fully, it will embrace this further state: resistance. By means of the oblique, evocative, prose poetry that has become his hallmark, this is the point Daniel makes in The Dark Night of Resistance. Daniel wrote this book while on the run from the FBI, while “underground ,” to use a word that calls to mind Dostoevsky’s bizarre depiction of a man living beneath the floorboards, writing notes that are reflective of, and created by, the schizophrenia of modern society. Catholic social teaching , it can be said, is the Church’s attempt to propose a cure for modernity’s schizophrenia. The cure lies, in the words of Rerum novarum, in “a return to Christian life and institutions,” a return that will bring us back to the original, comprehensive, multifaceted peace for which we were created: peace of soul, of household, of city, of cosmos.3 But what is Christian life? What are Christian institutions? Leo XIII had the Christian life and institutions of the thirteenth century in mind, but these are unavailable to us. So what forms of Christian life are available to us in this modern, or postmodern , era? What practices and institutions can sustain them? And how is this to be discerned? One way is the method of John of the Cross, renouncing what is not God and not of God and acting accordingly, by resisting, and seeing where that takes us. But how do we know what is not God and not of God? By putting into practice the teaching and example, the grace and peace, the life and death of Jesus. This, I think, is the key to what Daniel has been saying and doing all these years. Jesus. Marsh...

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