By Bill Wylie-Kellermann, “Giving Voice”: a tribute for his mentor Daniel Berrigan who crossed over at 94 yesterday
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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!”
By Joyce Hollyday
Ho, everyone who thirsts,
Come to the waters;
And you that have no money,
Come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
Without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
And your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Isaiah 55:1-2
I was in Detroit welcoming my new honorary grandson, Cedar, when a coalition of justice organizations convened a Water Crimes Tribunal. The tribunal brought charges against Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, and their accomplices. Their crimes include the infamous switch of the Flint water system to a river that poisoned city residents with bacteria and lead. Continue reading “Thirsting for Justice”
By Tommy Airey
The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
On a Wednesday morning last Spring, just a week shy of his 66th birthday, despite aching knees from decades pounding the basketball court, Bill powered up the three flights of stairs to my office in the old Episcopalian Church overlooking downtown Detroit. I knew something was stirring since he usually whips out his flip phone and sends me a text message if he needs anything while working in his makeshift cubicle downstairs—that, and his eye-of-the-tiger stare down he gave me when he arrived breathless. Obviously, it was game day.
Continue reading “Arrested Development”
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
Come spring and then through summer and fall, we used to take our daughters for regular walks in Elmwood Cemetery on the near east side of Detroit. A favorite photo has them looking up in sun, caught in delight. This European burial ground is the last surviving bit of pre-Columbian terrain in the city. All the remaining earth has been cleared and graded and leveled first as farmland, then paved as urban built environment. This is not to say it’s old growth forest (that wood is long hauled off and the transplants tended into a canopy of stately beauties) but the land has rocky outcrops, ridges, rills, and a stream that emerges from underground to pool before slipping back beneath the street toward the river.
Continue reading “A Covenant of Land & Waters”
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
Hope – a feathered thing?
Less perched than lifting off with raptor wings
spanning a community of roots
in their woven reach for earth
This poem was written by Daniel Berrigan during his imprisonment after the Catonsville Nine action, published by Fellowship Magazine & The Merton Center. It was, later, memorized by Rev. Bill Wylie-Kellermann during his participation in a protest of “tiger cages” used for torture by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War in the summer of 1973 (right). Wylie-Kellermann recited it from memory yesterday at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Detroit, to honor the Catonsville Nine activists.
Part 1.
Dear friends, your faces are a constriction of grief in the throat
your words weigh us like chains, your tears and blood
fall on our faces. Prison; Vietnam, prison; U.S.
prison is our fate, mothers bears in prison,
our tongues taste its gall, bars spring up
from dragons’ teeth, a paling, impaling us. Continue reading “A Letter to Vietnamese Prisoners”
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
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We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the power-less, the oppressed, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christmas letter to friends and co-conspirators (1942)
Seventy years ago today, just weeks before the fall of Berlin in 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was marched naked into the yard of Flossenberg Concentration Camp and hanged with piano wire for being an enemy of the Nazi state. He was 39.
Continue reading “The Feast of Bonhoeffer”
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
The Detroit Public Schools are being dismantled by design and effectively looted. Though Detroiters and the elected school board are consistently blamed for their demise, for twelve of the last fifteen years DPS has been under state control.
Mother Helen Moore, an attorney who heads the Education Task Force has become notorious for her fight on behalf of the schools, and tells the story over and over in community meetings. It’s well documented. Continue reading “Fifty Years Later. In Detroit the End of Brown: Separate and Unequal”
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
empire,
crouched to devour,
breathes, like a dragon, winter darkness upon us:
decrees go out, are believed and obeyed, indictments
are suppressed, privilege covers the blunt ends of supremacy;
widescreen redundancies brutalize, dull, the mind; the most basic human
By Bill Wylie-Kellermann
Fritz Eichenberg, the artist so long associated with the Catholic Worker, published a wonderful and disturbing depiction of the Nativity. In the center foreground lies the babe on hay and in swaddling clothes. Nestled round are an adoring donkey and a cow. Through the crossbeams above, a star points down from the heavens. Hallmark, you would think, would snatch up the print for a comforting and conventional Christmas card. Continue reading “O Holy Nightmare: Incarnation and Apocalypse”
Radical Discipleship 