Daniel Berrigan visited Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, in April 1976. It was my good fortune to drive him to the University of Oregon in Eugene and then north to Reed College in Portland, where we had also arranged lectures and poetry readings. He would later spend another week at Whitman College in January, 1977, and a few more days in 1983 at the height of the nuclear freeze movement.
I had the privilege of remaining in contact with him until his recent decline and death. It was while we were driving on Interstate 5 from Eugene to Portland in April 1976, that Berrigan first spoke to me about Christianity and peace. The hostilities in Vietnam had ceased the year before, ending what was then the longest war in our nation’s history. Berrigan’s career as a Christian peace activist, however, was just getting started.
The first Christians, he argued, refused to do military service. They believed it was incompatible with the gospel of peace to which they adhered. But over time, the ‘Just War Theory’ won out and Christians have been waging wars ever since. For his part, though, Berrigan never saw any Christian justification for war.
When his parole expired and he was free to leave New York City, he was one of sixty persons arrested at the White House as they knelt and prayed to protest the bombings in Cambodia. As soon as the war ended in 1975, the Berrigans focused on the issue of nuclear weapons.
In the first letter Berrigan mailed to me, dated March 1976, he writes: ‘Why is the nuclear question, when raised at all (infrequently) merely regarded as one question among many, sort of #2485 on the grocery list of public ills? Is it too hot to handle? Too horrifying to imagine?’
It was, perhaps above all, the reality of nuclear weapons that convinced Berrigan that we live in a culture of death: ‘Our real shrines are nuclear installations and the Pentagon and the war research laboratories… If North Dakota seceded from the Union, it would be the third nuclear power. And this is a farming state.’
The nuclear question was the subject of all the talks given by Berrigan that I attended in the Northwest from 1976-1983. He was outraged by the sin of mass destruction, and feared that, four decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our government was preparing for similar atrocities.
These final years were largely given over to corporal works of mercy, such as care for the dying at Saint Rose’s Home in Manhattan and work with AIDS patients at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. An active pacifist whose pacifism was biblically based, Berrigan often declared that no principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human life.
In ‘Zen Poem,’ which he read on January 11, 1983, in the First Congregational Church in Walla Walla, Washington, he unwittingly described the man we all loved:
Blessed is the one
Who walks the earth
5 years, 50 years, 80 years
and deceives no one
and curses no one
and kills no one.
On such a one
the angels whisper in wonder…
He was so vibrant and energetic, so much more alive than most of us, so steady and unyielding in his principles and so full of courage, that it is impossible to think of him dead. All of us thank him for his moral leadership and example. May his memory be a blessing.