“...the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Oh how I would love to believe that's true. I'm not saying I disbelieve it, but the past 50 years has called it into question.

It's hard to say. Maybe justice is just a dream. I will always hope not.

Reading over the life of Daniel Berrigan, who sadly is no longer with us, I can't help but wonder if that's not the way he came to see it.

It's not going to be easy to change things.

Daniel Berrigan

The Berrigan Brothers were a big deal in their time – in my time. As a young teenager in the 60s, I read of them while we all went through the Vietnam War era and the civil rights era simultaneously. Dr. King and the Berrigan Brothers shaped me and changed me in profound ways, and I remain grateful to my core. In a world that lied to me about history, pushed me around and meant to use me as cannon fodder, I looked to Dr. King and the Berrigan Brothers, primarily, for moral grounding. These were the people I could find who had something real to say. These were people putting themselves on the line for what they believed.

You just have to do what you know is right.

Daniel Berrigan

In a couple of days they come and
Take me away
But the press let the story leak
And when the radical priest
Come to get me released
We was all on the cover of Newsweek
And I'm on my way
I don't know where I'm going
I'm on my way I'm taking my time
But I don't know where
Goodbye to Rosie the queen of Corona
See you, me and Julio
Down by the schoolyard
See you, me and Julio
Down by the schoolyard
See you, me and Julio
Down by the schoolyard

Paul Simon, Me & Julio Down By The School Yard

That was a reference to the Berrigan Brothers, the radical priests of their day. They were very prominent in the antiwar movement. Daniel and Phillip. They did shocking things. It made people pay attention. They paid dearly for their heroic activism.

I think of my brother just out of prison again. He will have spent ten years of the last 30 in prison.

Daniel Berrigan

They seized draft records and burned them with homemade napalm. They were sentenced to 3 years in prison for it. They were undeterred in their activism.

From the LA Times

The Berrigan brothers entered a draft board in Catonsville, Md., on May 17, 1968, with eight other activists and removed records of young men about to be shipped out to Vietnam. The group took the files outside and burned them in garbage cans.

The Catonsville Nine, as they came to be known, were convicted on federal charges accusing them of destroying U.S. property and interfering with the Selective Service Act of 1967. All were sentenced on Nov. 9, 1968, to prison terms ranging from two to 3½ years.

When asked in 2009 by "America," a national Catholic magazine, whether he had any regrets, Berrigan replied: "I could have done sooner the things I did, like Catonsville."

Berrigan, a writer and poet, wrote about the courtroom experience in 1970 in a one-act play, "The Trial of the Catonsville Nine," which was later made into a movie.

Berrigan grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., with his parents and five brothers. He joined the Jesuit order after high school and taught preparatory school in New Jersey before being ordained a priest in 1952.

As a seminarian, Berrigan wrote poetry. His work captured the attention of an editor at Macmillan who referred the material to poet Marianne Moore. Her endorsement led to the publication of Berrigan's first book of poetry, "Time Without Number," which won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1957.

From an old diary of mine:

I have long admired the Berrigan Brothers.  At the March 19 [2008] demonstrations in DC, I met Phillip's widow, Liz.  I hugged her and told her how much I had always loved and admired her husband.  She thanked me and shared that Daniel is very frail.  So sad that these brave warriors for peace should die without seeing peace come to us all.  They sacrificed all their lives to make it happen.  Shame on the rest of us for not helping enough.  
Love is what made their sacrifices possible.

I took this pic of Liz McAlister in Washington DC, March 19, 2008.

If you are awed by your own existence, if this universe fills you with wonder, if you feel reverence for life, if your heart feels compassion for the suffering millions, the profoundest response to our existence that any of us are capable of is love, sweet love.

Where is the love?

This is my favorite quote from Daniel Berrigan:

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even. 

Daniel Berrigan

That quote would wring humanity from the hardest heart...or so one might be tempted to believe.

This is my saddest quote from Daniel Berrigan:

The arms race is worse than it ever was, the dumping of creation down a military rat hole is worse than it ever was, the wars across the earth are worse than they ever were.

Daniel Berrigan

Another sad one:

I don't know what more to say. I mean, we're all going to die in a world that is worse than when we entered it.

Daniel Berrigan

The world repaid your goodness with crap, the way it does. But thank you from me, and from all the others to whom you meant so much. May you finally rest in peace.

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