From the David Wilcox song “Deeper Still” (2000):
In this life, the love you give becomes the only lasting treasure.
And what you lose will be what you win,
A well that echoes down too deep to measure.
Evicted
From Matthew Desmond, Harvard sociology professor and author of the best-selling Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016):
Those of us who don’t live in trailer parks or inner cities might think low-income families typically benefit from public housing or some other kind of government assistance. But the opposite is true. Three-quarters of families who qualify for housing assistance don’t get it because there simply isn’t enough to go around. This arrangement would be unthinkable with other social services that cover basic needs. What if food stamps only covered one in four families? Continue reading “Evicted”
Hearing his Voice
From Democracy Now!
Mourning a Mentor & Friend
By Joyce Hollyday
Daniel Berrigan: May 9, 1921 – April 30, 2016
I was a young associate editor at Sojourners magazine when Dan Berrigan sent a poem for a special issue sometime in the early 1980s. Accompanying it was a note that read “Here’s the poem—my first on a word processor. Seems a bit jumbled. Might have got a food processor by mistake.” He was not yet a friend, so I wasn’t familiar with the mischievous grin that likely spread across his face as he wrote it. Continue reading “Mourning a Mentor & Friend”
For Berrigan
By Ric Hudgens
When pundit choirs
sing for blood
when hatred fills
our morning hymns
when court chaplains
intone murder
when tithing
funds annihilation
the prophet
is the one
the prophet
is the one
the prophet
is the one
who interferes.
Glory to God.
Requiescat in pace.
Daniel Joseph Berrigan, S.J. (May 9, 1921 – April 30, 2016)
*Photo: Rose Marie Berger
Proclaiming an Anti-Imperial “Way of salvation”
By Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Ferguson Johnson, commentary on the lectionary for May 8, 2016
We offer this reflection in memory and honor of Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who proclaimed and embodied Jesus’s “way of salvation” over the long haul.
This week’s reading from Acts cries out, “In your face, Roman Empire!” Sometimes, Luke keeps his anti-imperial message shrouded in “hidden transcripts,” as when he tells tax collectors basically to quit (by taking the profit out of their hated work, Luke 3.12-13). But in today’s passage, it is all out in the open, thanks to the ironic witness of a slave girl possessed by a spirit not “holy.” Continue reading “Proclaiming an Anti-Imperial “Way of salvation””
Just Enough Courage
Dan Berrigan Week continues with this excerpt from Ched Myers’ living eulogy in 2003 (read it in it’s entirety here in this month’s Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries newsletter!):
None of us would be gathered here—neither Catholic Workers nor members of the Immaculate Heart of Mary community, nor any of us assorted feral Christians—were it not for Dan’s showing and telling of the gospel. The political spaces he opened through his public witness, the theological imagination he ignited with his pen, the language he gave us in a time when lies are sovereign—all these have helped us find just enough courage to embrace something of the Way.
Alive in the world and waiting for you
April 30, 2016
Daniel Berrigan, Uncle, Brother, Friend,
PRESENTE
A statement from the Family of Father Dan Berrigan, SJ
This afternoon around 2:30, a great soul left this earth. Close family missed the “time of death” by half an hour, but Dan was not alone, held and prayed out of this plane of existence by his friends. We – Liz McAlister, Kate, Jerry and Frida Berrigan, Carla and Marc Berrigan-Pittarelli—were blessed to be among friends—Patrick Walsh, Joe Cosgrove, Father Joe Towle and Maureen McCafferty—able to surround Daniel Berrigan’s body for the afternoon into the evening. Continue reading “Alive in the world and waiting for you”
We Cry Peace
From Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016) in No Bars to Manhood (1971):
We have assumed the name of peacemakers, but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want the peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues, because the waging of war, by its nature, is total – but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial. So a whole will and a whole heart and a whole national life bent toward war prevail over the velleities of peace. In every war since the founding of the republic we have taken for granted that war shall exact the most rigorous cost, and that the cost shall be paid with a cheerful heart. We take it for granted that in wartime families will be separated for long periods, that men will be imprisoned, wounded, driven insane, killed on foreign shores. In favor of such wars, we declare a moratorium on every normal human hope – for marriage, for community, for friendship, for moral conduct toward strangers and the innocent. We are instructed that deprivation and discipline, private grief and public obedience are going to be our lot. And we obey. And we bear with it – because bear we must – because war is war, and war good or bad, we are stuck with it and its cost.
But what of the price of peace? I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans – that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor the disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs – at all costs – our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost – because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war – at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
Daniel Berrigan: ¡Presente!
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann, “Giving Voice”: a tribute for his mentor Daniel Berrigan who crossed over at 94 yesterday
—————
the heart dares the word dares the page
lest love stick in the throat of this pen,
and go untold
i remember my name
in your voice
echoing down the underground hall
beneath niebuhr place:
come, crack a jar of scotch
come for talk and a minted brew of tea
come to life. wake. arise.
(an ascent follows, sweet and rash) Continue reading “Daniel Berrigan: ¡Presente!”
Radical Discipleship 