The trouble with our state
Print Friendly Version| On the Road to Peace by John Dear S.J. | Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2007 |
| Vol. 1, No. 9 |
This week, my troublemaking friends and I might, after several postponements, be standing trial for our attempt in Santa Fe Sept. 26 to pay a visit to Sen. Pete Domenici and urge him to sign the "Declaration of Peace," a pledge to help end the U.S. war on Iraq. To aid our case we boldly subpoenaed the good senator, who is up to his ears in problems for his role in the firing of prosecutors. His lawyers are wrangling to keep him out of the courtroom, so our trial may well be postponed again.
But resistance to the war grows and with it our hope. A few weeks again, the Philadelphia Fourteen, another Declaration-of-Peace group, were acquitted for a similar case. Trapped in an elevator too, for going to see their senator, the police milled about monitoring their moves. Their verdict gives us hope -- if we keep at it, others will be acquitted, and others and others, and the props holding up the lies will come down in a crash. And the war, one day, will end.
I draw hope from another quarter -- the tenacious witness of my Jesuit brother, Daniel Berrigan, who turned 86 last week. This summer, a series of his 10 best books, including his autobiography, will be republished by Wipf and Stock.
To celebrate his birthday, and his keeping at it all these years, friends have produced an astonishing CD of Dan reciting and reflecting on 25 of his best poems. I wrote the liner notes, Martin Sheen and Howard Zinn wrote the text for the back of the CD. Just before he died, novelist Kurt Vonnergut sent his endorsement, "If Jesus were a poet, this is what he would sound like."
In honor of Dan's birthday, our Philadelphia friends' victory, and this great new CD, I thought I'd offer the title poem, Dan's insightful summation of these 50 states. May it inspire us to speak out against this unjust, immoral, illegal war, through our own nonviolent action.
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The Trouble With Our State
By Daniel Berrigan
The trouble with our state
was not civil disobedience
which in any case was hesitant and rare.Civil disobedience was rare as kidney stone
No, rarer; it was disappearing like immigrant's disease.You've heard of a war on cancer?
There is no war like the plague of media
There is no war like routine
There is no war like 3 square meals
There is no war like a prevailing wind.It flows softly; whispers
don't rock the boat!
The sails obey, the ship of state rolls on.The trouble with our state
-- we learned only afterward
when the dead resembled the living who resembled the dead
and civil virtue shone like paint on tin
and tin citizens and tin soldiers marched to the common whip-- our trouble
the trouble with our state
with our state of soul
our state of siege
--
was
Civil
Obedience.
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John Dear's new book, Transfiguration, (Doubleday, with a foreword by Archbishop Tutu) is available from www.amazon.com or your local bookstore. To order a copy of the new DVD, "The Narrow Path: Walking the Way of Peace and Nonviolence with John Dear," go to www.sandamianofoundation.org. To order the new CD of poetry read by Daniel Berrigan, go to www.yellowbikepress.com. For more information, see: www.johndear.org.
A most interesting comment
A most interesting comment from William Horan and quote by Jim Forest.
Here is a quote from goodnews@americancatholic.org:
"There is a certain dynamism in all the saints that prompts them to find ever more selfless ways of responding to God's grace. As time went on, Theophilus [St. Theophilus of Corte 1676-1740] gave more and more singlehearted service to God and to God's sons and daughters. Honoring the saints will make no sense unless we are thus drawn to live as generously as they did. Their holiness can never substitute for our own."
And a quote from St. Francis: "Let us begin, brothers, to serve the Lord God, for up to now we have made little or no progress" (1 Celano, #193).
Best Wishes to Daniel
Best Wishes to Daniel Berrigan in his 86th Year!!!
We have truly been blessed, to say the least, by his rocking the boat, speaking the truth, writing poetry, cracking open unarmed nuclear warheads, resisting and disobeying the forces of evil with non-violence.
The image that comes to mind when I think of Dan Berrigan cracking open an unarmed nuclear warhead in a production plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania is of Jesus turning the tables and cracking with his whip of cords at the money changers and merchants at the Temple that defiled His Father's House.
God Bless Dan, John Dear, and all who are working for peace and for the truth and for justice. I can't say enough good things about you. You bring a great hope into the world, that has been all too much and oh so civilly obedient to hopelessness.
Here is what Jim Forest
Here is what Jim Forest had to say about such protests at the Catholic Peace Fellowship conference in South Bend, Indiana, on 24 March 2007
"Both Dorothy and Merton were firm believers in patient efforts simply to communicate to others what the Gospel is all about, what the Church teaches, and the value of paying attention to saints who in various ways set a timely example. This is not so much carrying out what are sometimes called “prophetic actions” as engaging in ordinary acts of communication. While being patient and even supportive of me and others who engaged in such dramatic acts of civil disobedience as breaking into draft offices and burning draft files, neither Dorothy nor Merton recommended such tactics as a method of protest."