DAN BERRIGAN'S 'TILTINGS'
Neuhaus, Richard John
BOOKS DAN BERRIGAN'S 'TILTINGS' RICHARD J. NEUHAUS The subject is Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J. The subject matter also covers peace and war, imperialism and poverty, jails and illusions of...
...Their hope is to provoke others to join them in bringing down upon the Egypt of American imperialism "a plague of locusts...
...While teasing and testing are key metaphors in the Berrigan style, judgment and wrath are never shortchanged...
...Throughout Berrigan's reflections are intimations of Jesus' strange prayer in which he thanks his Father for hiding the secrets of the Kingdom from the high and mighty and revealing them to children instead (Matthew 11:25...
...Surely his name is Jesus...
...Absurd Convictions is a series of interviews conducted by journalist and friend Lee Lockwood during March, 1972, Berri-gan's first month after release...
...it is better to die by fire than to kill by fire...
...But they think I do, and that's sobering indeed...
...The messenger frequently seems incapable of distinguishing himself from the message, the person from the role...
...7.95...
...And if we get the identities mixed up from time to time, surely that is reason to be grateful...
...Then again, and somewhat later, the fifty-year-old dreamer speaks of the youthfulness of the movement, of the springtime of change, and invites us to laughter and celebration...
...Not in the theater of the absurd but in the theater of the ultimately real "we are dramatizing from different points of view, different points of visibility, the teasing and testing aspects of drama...
...In any event, Absurd Convictions, while useful to students of "Berriganism" (as the cult was recently dubbed by an unfriendly bishop), is not the penetrating search of Berrigan's heart and mind conducted by Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles in The Geography of Faith (Beacon, 1971...
...No, 1 am wrong...
...They sucked in their breath from the sweet sharp air, they piped and squeaked, rusty as awakened bats...
...The subject matter also covers peace and war, imperialism and poverty, jails and illusions of freedom...
...the review is essentially Berrigan's autobiographical reflections America is hard to find, by Daniel Berrigan...
...Worn out blood began to stir, old bones to move...
...Not that I qualify...
...Activist readers looking for a "State of the Movement" message may be surprised by one foundational premise: The "movement" that Berrigan takes seriously is very small and very personal...
...Even friends of Daniel Berrigan, those who have been companions in risk, will frequently comment on his apparent "arrogance," and there is little in these two volumes to contradict the appearance...
...absurd convictions, modest hopes: conversations after prison, by Daniel Berrigan and Lee Lockwood...
...A little fragment of a scenario in America Is Hard to Find, inserted apropos of nothing and everything, indicates what Berrigan and his friends think they are about...
...Talking to Lockwood about why he was reluctant to reach out to enlist others, Berrigan remarks, "I thought it would be much more fruitful if they would come a certain distance in their own lives before approaching me...
...The judgment of what America has become is relentless...
...Those who did not approach, or those who approached but did not follow, are consistently depicted as victims of fear and moral failure...
...Perhaps it is Lockwood's closeness to Berrigan that causes him to suspend his critical probing at too many crucial points in the interview...
...Jerome, another Berrigan brother, writes the embarrassingly adulatory introduction to America Is Hard to Find, informing the reader it is time to move "beyond Buber to Berrigan...
...As poet and priest, Berrigan is liberated from that more conventional arrogance...
...I think people have been going through a starvation diet in heroism...
...In the same book Daniel includes a "review" of a recent biography of Dietrich Bon-hoeffer, the German pastor martyred by the Nazis...
...Their job is to offer "tiltings at the consciousness of America...
...It was the Seventh Seal he had opened...
...on his resistance to the Indochina war...
...There are infrequent moments of analytical detachment...
...he is free from the hubris of presumably scientific futurists who would reduce the contingencies of history to mindlessly computerized projections from an almost infinitely confused present...
...He is in the business of intuitions and not of predictions...
...they jostled and milled around like a ragged Coxey's army, the eternal unemployed, on the move once more, something of value, in a people's park...
...off today, off death...
...191 pp...
...Forever...
...The whole rationale of the original Catonsville draft board raid is unembarrassedly set forth in a simple proposition: "It is better to burn papers than children...
...It would be unkind and probably inaccurate to interpret the "Not that I qualify" as purely pro forma...
...It is perhaps more a measure of Berrigan's own chosen vulnerability than of Lockwood's failure as an interviewer that America Is Hard to Find is the much more revealing document, exposing, usually explicitly, the foundations of the private and public Berrigan...
...America Is Hard to Find is a collection of essays, reflections, poems, letters to family and friends, written during the months Berrigan was underground in 1970 and during the almost year and a half in Danbury prison (a "popsicle prison," says Father Dan...
...5.95...
...John the Evangelist in Brooklyn...
...otherwise I couldn't explain it...
...As they walk through a park, "The dead sat there like statuary, hunched in their coats and scarves, hating one another behind The New York Times, their eyeballs frozen to the perpetual bad news of this world...
...There is a caution or two against equating our situation with that of the Third Reich, but for rhetorical and strategic purposes the parallel is assumed...
...In whose company we can hope with some reason to be found...
...They all went off singing...
...Random House...
...To be grateful for the witness of Father Daniel Berrigan, S.J., among others...
...Doubleday...
...But mainly the subject is Daniel Berrigan...
...Mr...
...Berrigan is not intimidated by the "realists" who challenge the effectiveness of his action in terms of quantifiable change produced...
...Such logic is enough, as Berrigan might say, to drive a mad world sane...
...In some sense, he is personally the moment of truth...
...their voices warmed, they found a human scale again, they shouted, they exulted...
...He [surely his name is Daniel] went by, whistling in the graveyard...
...Neuhaus is pastor of the Lutheran Church of St...
...The thrust of new life and hope for change often seems confined to Dan, his brother Phil, and a handful of others who have been awakened by their radical vibrations...
...The future is bleak: "Everything from Vietnam to Lewisburg [where Philip was imprisoned] suggests to me that those who hope at this point for other directions than further repression, further wars, more jailings of resisters, are whistling into the prevailing winds . . . For we are going, downhill and pell-mell, into a dark age, a progress led by Neanderthals armed to the teeth...
...He and Philip have no desire to run the government...
...With Dan and Phil already in, further recruitment must be selective indeed...
...They RAN after him, he beckoning them on...
...The parallel with Bonhoeffer might strike some as presumptuous, when it is made by others, and as unspeakable gall when made by Berrigan himself, but it must be noted to Berrigan's credit that he is quite willing to defend such an implicit judgment of his role in history...
...227 pp...
...In a moving letter to his family Dan writes, "And am at peace as I pray you are too: knowing that God who weighs the world and finds himself shortchanged, often by believers, still settles for one or two just men...
...Berrigan is committed to a complicated simple-mindedness that scandalizes worldly wisdom...
...He is the author of "In Defense of People," published earlier this year by Macmillan, and, with Peter L. Berger, of "Movement and Revolution...
...The months underground were consciously theatrical...
...Berrigan was amazed, he tells Lockwood, at the celebrity he had become...
...For others no doubt it is precisely this refusal to distinguish between "external" politics and personal self-realization that makes Berrigan such a compelling figure...
Vol. 36 • December 1972 • No. 12
