Daniel Berrigan – Priest, Poet, Prophet, & Peacemaker

Slide 1

“One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the U.S. around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”

—Daniel Berrigan

Slide 2

“One cannot level one’s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.”

--Daniel Berrigan

Slide 3

“Our apologies, good friends for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise."

–Daniel Berrigan

Slide 4

“The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere. I believe if it is done in that spirit, it will go somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t think the Bible grants us to know where it goes, in what direction. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go.

—Daniel Berrigan

Slide 5

“All you have to do is make your story fit into Jesus’ story. All you have to do is close your eyes to the culture of violence and open them to your friends.”

–Daniel Berrigan to John Dear, 1984

Slide 6

“The death of a single human being is too heavy a price to pay for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.”

– Daniel Berrigan

Slide 7

“The only message I have to the world is: We are not allowed to kill innocent people. We are not allowed to be complicit in murder. We are not allowed to be silent while preparations for mass murder proceed in our name, with our money, secretly.”

—Daniel Berrigan

Slide 7

“What are we to do with our lives? A question which seems to me is a peerless source of freedom to the one who dares pose it with seriousness. Anything short of confronting this question ends up sooner or later in a suffocating dead end. We have taken up one after another almost every question except the one which would liberate us: the question of our humanity. How is a human being to live today? How is he or she to live? Is it possible for a person to do something other than kill his brother or sister—the practically universal demand laid upon us by the state, approved by the silent church? Is there another way to live here and now, which will also allow future generations to live their lives in a different way from the one way sanctioned today?”

—Daniel Berrigan

Slide 7

"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. 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

Slide 7

“Nonviolence sees itself as its best, as indivisible, and at its least, as potentially universal; that is, as a way of life that is simply human. In the nuclear age, it is the only alternative to the escalation of genocide and universal incineration. So you always note among responsible people both a profound spiritual root and a profound political responsibility.”

---Daniel Berrigan

Slide 7

“The disarmed God in Christ is the great scandal of history. We are not yet a disarmed church because we are not yet worshipers of a disarmed God. Today we are being asked to live out the drama of the disarmed Christ in a world armed to the teeth. To confess Jesus these days is to be working for peace.”

—Daniel Berrigan

Exaltavit Humiles

By Daniel Berrigan

All things despised, capricious,

Evanescent, have an hour of morning. Sumac jostled

By shouldering oaks to the forest edge—how it burns

Clearer than they. And cobweb, no more than afterthought,

Trembles at dawn like new-hammered silver.

Someone has overlaid the crouching rocks

With purest lace: they almost stumble to feet

For very pride.

The wild brown grasses stand

Singing a canticle at the furnace door:

Bless the Lord, rhyme at morning, frost and cold air!

Even the roots, bound hand and foot, hear and heave mightily,

Like cruciform, and wait the breaking spell.

For a moment, nothing is wasted, nothing of no moment;

To the banquet grace calls, grace clothes the unwanted poor.

–from Time Without Number

For more Poems, click HERE

“A Wedding Sermon on Peace”

By Daniel Berrigan (unpublished)

(This sermon was preached at the wedding of Kristin and Radoslaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York in 2003, as the U.S. war on Iraq had begun. It has never been published.)

Our gospel [Matthew 5:1-11] surely has a poignant meaning for Kristin and Radoslaw. And for all of us here present to honor their vows – and to honor once more, the vows of our baptism.

Our country is at war. One of the beatitudes, “Blessed are the makers of peace,” touches closely on our situation, which hovers between predicament and holy opportunity.

What indeed can it mean in such days as we endure, to be ‘peacemakers’? Not ‘just war’ theorists, not ‘pacifists,’ not, surely not war makers. But ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ ‘the makers of peace.’

The term in the original Greek, is disturbingly concrete, physical. One makes peace in somewhat the way one makes a table or a building, a school or a hospital, something useful or beautiful or both. We make peace in somewhat the way two people make a child. Makers of peace. The task is untidy, unfinished, laborious, always to be started anew. The task may involve crossing a line, getting in trouble with a law that protects war and weaponry, law that makes peacemakers liable to legal consequence.

For the full sermon and more, click HERE