Birthday of Daniel Berrigan | Naming the Days

Daniel Berrigan’s life was punctuated with daring acts of nonviolent social motion. Born in 1921, he grew up in an Irish Catholic household in Minnesota and joined a Jesuit seminary proper out of highschool. After he was ordained a priest, he traveled in France the place he was influenced by the worker-priest motion. He returned to the US and commenced instructing in schools, together with Le Moyne School in Syracuse, Cornell, and Yale. He additionally wrote poetry which grew to become a solution to categorical his rising issues about American war-making.

Through the Vietnam Battle, Berrigan was one in all 9 activists who burned draft registration information in Catonsville, Maryland, for which he was tried and sentenced to a few years in jail. He refused to give up himself and went underground for a number of months residing with supporters and surfacing periodically at anti-war rallies. He finally was apprehended and spent eighteen months in jail earlier than his launch in 1972.

Daniel and his brother Philip then organized the Plowshares Motion to protest the manufacturing of nuclear and different weapons. Their first motion was at a Common Electrical plant in Pennsylvania, a nonviolent protest wherein they hammered on nostril cones and supplied prayers for peace. Through the years Berrigan participated in lots of extra demonstrations, together with protesting the Gulf Battle, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the Iraq struggle.

Daniel continued to conduct retreats, to talk publicly, and to jot down till his loss of life in 2016 simply wanting his ninety fifth birthday. He authored greater than 50 books of prose and poetry.

Quotes

Put these quotations in your coronary heart on Berrigan’s birthday.

• “We would like peace, however we stay content material with poverty and injustice and racism, with the homicide of prisoners and college students, the despair of the poor to whom justice is endlessly denied. We lengthy for peace, however we want additionally to maintain undisturbed a social material of privilege and energy that controls the financial distress of two thirds of the world’s folks.”
  — from Lights on within the Home of the Lifeless by Daniel Berrigan

• “We spoke out, dedicated civil disobedience, and went to jail as a result of the peace hangs senselessly and precariously upon weapons costing billions to construct and billions to enhance — weapons which change into extra ineffective as we add to their damaging power. With this cash we might have fed the world’s folks.”
  — from America Is Onerous to Discover by Daniel Berrigan

• “The ‘simply struggle idea’ is in a truth a merciless oxymoron. Battle, irrespective of its provocation or justification, is of its essence and nature, supremely unjust. The injustice of struggle implies a blasphemous inflation of human authority, that people are allowed to decree who shall stay and who shall die, to eliminate human variations by disposing of people. We’re completed with that idea without end.”
  — from Daniel Berrigan: Important Writings, edited by John Pricey

• ” ‘Love’ after which ‘enemies.’ The 2 can not coexist, they’re like hearth and ice within the hand. The hearth melts the ice, or the ice extinguishes the hearth. The hearth wins out (at the least within the Gospel textual content)! The verb ‘love’ transforms the noun ‘enemies.’ The enemy is reborn by the facility of affection. Astonishing. Now the enemy is a former enemy, and a gift pal, brother, sister, lover even. Speak about rebirth!” Love, you, the enemy, and lo, the enemy vanishes the place he stood.”
  — from Daniel Berrigan: Important Writings, edited by John Pricey

Books

• Learn Apostle of Peace, edited by John Pricey which incorporates 40 essays in honor of this Jesuit peace-maker and social activist. Right here this apostle of peace says: “If you wish to comply with Jesus, you higher look good on wooden.”

Lecturers

Try his Dwelling Religious Lecturers’ web page for critiques and excerpts from 13 books by Daniel Berrigan.

Religious Apply

Maybe one of the troublesome religious practices socially aware activists need to undertake is to “love your enemies.” On this passage from Daniel Berrigan: Important Writings, the peacemaker explores what this implies. As you mirror upon his phrases, establish the place you possibly can apply them in your personal life.

“Love your enemies? The Phrase of God in our midst? However we had been at struggle. The second the struggle was launched, all of us grew to become realists. The Phrase of God may apply elsewhere (or elsewhen) or to less complicated occasions to one-to-one battle or to pacifists and non secular (whoever these latter is perhaps; however for probably the most half they had been mum because the others).

“Love your enemies — an odd command, once you consider it. It’s just like the textual content of a drama, written with a mysterious ink. When the play is staged, the textual content disappears. It’s in a way self-canceling. You possibly can say it aloud, act it out and are struck by the great, curt implication. The enemy disappears!

” ‘Love’ after which ‘enemies.’ The 2 can not coexist. They’re like hearth and ice within the hand. The hearth melts the ice, or the ice extinguishes the hearth. The hearth wins out (at the least within the gospel textual content)! The verb ‘love’ transforms the noun ‘enemies.’ The enemy is reborn by the facility of affection. Astonishing. Now the enemy is a former enemy, and a gift pal, brother, sister, lover even. Speak about rebirth!

“Love, you, the enemy, and lo, the enemy vanishes the place he stood.

“Additionally it’s not solely the opponent who undergoes a stunning transformation, however myself as effectively, who towards all expectation has realized love instead of hatred, who had as soon as been caught in the identical plight as my enemy. Collectively we made a frozen mirror picture, terrible, redundant, implacable. I used to be the enemy of my enemy. A sound definition of hell.”