Reverend Daniel Berrigan has died. His life makes cowards of us all. When he came to prominence, burning draft cards with his brother, Philip in Cantonville Ohio, it barely made a blip on my teenage radar. I was 13. But having just read about him in conjunction with Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton in An American Pilgrimage, I can't say there is renewed interest but there is interest.
He spent his life in writing books, poetry and activism. He said during his trial in Philadelphia for destroying government property after he and six others took hammers to the (unarmed) nosecones of nuclear missiles: "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...It’s terrible for me to live in a
time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, “Stop killing.”
There are other beautiful things that I would love to be saying to
people. There are other projects I could be very helpful at. And I can’t
do them. I cannot. Because everything is endangered. Everything is up
for grabs. Ours is a kind of primitive situation, even though we would
call ourselves sophisticated. Our plight is very primitive from a
Christian point of view. We are back where we started. Thou shalt not
kill; we are not allowed to kill. Everything today comes down to that —
everything." Italics mine.
Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it - or words to that effect. Maybe humans just haven't been human long enough to evolve past their reptilian hindbrain. But that statement is a sham for we have free will, we can and do learn from our mistakes, we are capable of creating the most sublime beauty, of deliberate selflessness. We can laugh at ourselves, we have a sense of humour, we experience gratitude.. We experience awe. I'm certain other creatures have a sense of humour, can love, can even create despite their lack of opposable thumbs, but is any creature capable of awe? Rather than repeating our doleful violent murderous history, why do we not replicate situations where we are likely to feel awe or, as Jung described, that 'oceanic feeling'?
Finished reading Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. She was a Russian half-Jew whose family escaped nearly penniless from the socialist revolution in Russia and resettled in France. She was a writer and Suite Francaise is the first 2 of 3 books she had planned to write describing the French experience through the eyes of several families under Nazi occupation. Unfortunately she was gassed at Auschwitz before she could complete them, She was a well known writer. Her husband, her publisher and others tried in vain to rescue her, even just to contact her, to send her some food and blankets not knowing even as they tried she was already dead. She had a brief respite at Auschwitz (while she was part of a slave labour force?) before she died. Her husband was picked up, transported to Auschwitz and gassed straight away.
When her voice came through S. F. so clearly it was difficult to read the appendices at the end. In fact, I couldn't finish them. When I watch the evening news and hear 27 people were killed in a bomb attack in Afghanistan I feel a frisson of regret but then wonder how I'm going to prepare that eggplant we're having for dinner. Rev. Daniel Berrigan never let go that regret over innocent deaths. I, a woman sitting safely at a desk where I sign petitions and write politicians, well fed in my middle class WASP-ish existence, salute him.
Wow! I got involved in trying to protect the land and water against horizontal hydraulic fracturing (aka: fracking)a few years ago. I spent close to a year involved in the fight. The passion to save the water purity gave me an energy rush I have seldom experienced. It was great, but after nearly a year, I was so burned out and exhausted that I gave up and turned my back on the fight. I haven't returned. I will talk to people here-and-there, I will share posts via social media, but I am not willing to go out in the trenches again. When I hear of those people who have lived their lives fighting injustice and being activists whether radical or tame, I applaud them. I lack the energy to sustain the kind of fervor needed to devote oneself so completely to a cause, but I admire tremendously those who can and do.
ReplyDeleteThe atrocities committed by my fellow human beings sicken me. The greed, corruption and ignorance that lead far too many humans breaks my heart. I find that to maintain my balance I have to avoid hearing about the details. Those are so abhorrent that I can't get them out of my mind easily, they haunt me, they are under, behind and beside everything I do and they keep me from sleeping and then my health goes downhill. The Holocaust haunts me still, the photos have still not left my mind's eye and I haven'st seen any in over a dozen years. My desire to even remain alive goes by the wayside when the level of depravity that feeds on other lives grows too great.
Then I look to nature, and see all the magnificence and beauty I am struck at what an amazing place we are lucky enough to live in. This planet is so amazing, so beautiful, so full of wonderousness- that I wonder how anyone cannot look at that and know that we are all a part of it, and that what we do to another, we do to ourselves. It is what re-grounds me and keeps me going. To live another day to see another sunrise, sunset, flower bloom, leaf change color, land grow dormant with snowfall, wave crash against the shore, thunderstorm...the magnificence of what we humans have not yet destroyed. I am ashamed our my species more often than not, but within that, there are blissful oasis, you, my grandchildren, my children, horses, elephants, dragonflies, hummingbirds, vultures and the list goes on forever. I can only hope that quantum physics holds the key and that our energy of higher vibration can raise the vibration of all those on the planet and that we can stop the rampant destruction before it is too late.
So...I struggle to stay away from all the horrors, to send positive vibrational energy into the world hoping it makes a positive difference. I ask source to heal the damage my species does and to heal my species so that we may all live in love and light. It is all I can do anymore.
Namaste