Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community

2. “Let’s Do It Again!”: The Berrigans and Jonah House

2 “let’s Do it again!” The Berrigans and Jonah House A t the end of the Vietnam War, the two now-famous Berrigan brothers didn’t go back to teaching and parish work but remained in the forefront of peacework. While I was unable to interview either of them, we can learn of Dan through his poetry and of Phil through the words of his wife and children. Father Dan Berrigan, SJ Father Dan Berrigan was released in 1972 from Danbury Federal Correctional Institution for his Catonsville Nine prison term. In 1980 he participated in the first Plowshares action. Even today, he continues to pastor the nonviolent peace movement, to write and speak out for peace, and to practice his Jesuit calling. Dan declined to be interviewed for this book but gave me permission to use anything he’s written, so I’ve chosen two poems that hold special meaning for me.1 Today, “The Trouble With Our State” speaks even more loudly than when I first marked it in a book Dan gave me in the late ’90s. It reminds me of Catholic Worker founder Peter Maurin’s pithy “Easy Essays.” At that time, I also marked “Less Than” as being perhaps uncharacteristically autobiographical. The Trouble With Our State The trouble with our state was not civil disobedience which in any case was hesitant and rare Civil disobedience was rare as kidney stone No, rarer; it was disappearing like immigrants’ disease You’ve heard of a war on cancer? There is no war like the plague of media There is no war like routine 49 There is no war like 3 square meals There is no war like a prevailing wind It blows softly; whispers don’t rock the boat! the sails obey, the ship of state rolls on. The trouble with our state —we learned it only afterward when the dead resembled the living who resembled the dead and civil virtue shone like paint on tin and tin citizens and tin soldiers marched to the common whip —our trouble the trouble with our state with our state of soul our state of siege— was Civil obedience Less Than The trouble was not excellence. I carried that secret, a laugh up my sleeve all the public years all the lonely years (one and the same) years that battered like a wind tunnel years like a yawn at an auction (all the same) Courage was not the fault years they carried me shoulder high years they ate me like a sandwich (one and the same) the fault was—dearth of courage the bread only so-so the beer near beer 50 Doing Time for Peace I kept the secret under my shirt like a fox’s lively tooth, called self knowledge. That way the fox eats me before I rot. That way I keep measure— neither Pascal’s emanation naked, appalled ‘under the infinite starry spaces’ nor a stumblebum havocking in Alice’s doll house. Never the less! Summon courage, excellence! The two, I reflect, could snatch us from ruin. Father Dan Berrigan, SJ, at an anti-Iraq war vigil in Manhattan, 2003. (Photo courtesy of Vivian Cherry.) “leT’s Do iT again!” 51 A fairly modest urging— Don’t kill, whatever pretext. Leave the world unbefouled. Don’t hoard. Stand somewhere. And up to this hour (Don’t tell a soul) here I am. Priest, renegade, exile. Prophet and poet still. Dan’s memorable line at the Catonsville trial, “The burning of paper instead of children,” seared my brain in 1969. The scar remains. —————— Phil Berrigan Dan’s younger brother, Phil Berrigan (1923–2002), was the rock on which the movement I chronicle grew. I used to see him at peace protests in DC, but frankly he scared me, so big and craggy and famous in the small circle of peace people. So I never introduced myself and missed being personally influenced by his rapier-sharp mind, his steadfastness, and his uncompromising moral allegiance . Instead, I know him through the people he has formed in their faith, through the continuing work of Jonah House and the Plowshares movement and through his family, his wife, Liz McAlister, and his children, Frida, Jerry, and Kate—all following him, but in their own way, and all living examples of his vision. Awakened by his exposure to violence and racism as a combat soldier in World War II, Phil entered...