Fr. Daniel Berrigan, S.J., died this past week, on April 30, which was a Saturday this year. He had been living in a Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University.

Berrigan was introduced to me through William Stringfellow, who was a guest speaker when I was a freshman at Atlantic Christian College. The next day, I bought one of Stingfellow’s books (it had, for some reasons, many pages missing or out of order – as a naive young person, I thought that it was somehow Stingfellow’s style to put out a book like that. It was the early ’70’s, you see!) and picked up Dan Berrigan’s Love, Love at the End, a book that still moves me deeply after all these years.

Berrigan and his brother, Phil, were both Roman Catholic priests. Phil was the radical one, in the beginning. He eventually talked Dan into joining some other anti-war protesters, and they went a bit farther than just carrying signs and singing songs: they entered a government building, went into offices and carried out draft records, and in the parking lot, poured homemade napalm onto the records, setting them on fire. “Better paper burning than people burning,” or something to that effect, was part of their defense.

They became known as the “Catonsville Nine,” named after the Maryland town where the resistance was carried out, and Berrigan even wrote  a play about it – the first play I ever saw in college, with no idea who any of the characters were when I saw it – and I felt myself fortunate to find the script in book form in the mid-’80’s. Dan, after being found guilty in court, made the decision to go underground. He spoke to groups, held meetings, and managed to elude the FBI for a bit, but was captured at Stringfellow’s house on Fire Island. Yeah, he was a jailbird, he admitted. I think he was in prison with some of the Nixon staffers! Must have made him smile occasionally.

I met him at Duke University, where I was a seminary student, and thanks to my friend the Rev. Carl Frazier, I walked with Berrigan to his lecture in Duke Chapel; I have remembered for years that what Berrigan said when we walked out of the Divinity School building and into the courtyard in front of the Chapel: “It looks like they decided to bury God standing up!” Typical Berrigan.

While I lost some of my enthusiasm after that (based on some rather harsh things he said that night), I have several friends who went on retreats with him, and their admiration for his deep spirituality is something I trust to this day. He always believed and wrote that spirituality and activism have to go hand in hand. It’s not a unique message, but it’s always been consistent with Berrigan’s understanding of faith. And because of that faith, he served prison time, got out, was NOT a model citizen, broke into missile plants and poured blood on the warheads, and continued to be a thorn in the side of complacent Christians and the American government in general. Always, because of his faith.

The difference between Dan and other activists of those times is that he always held that tension between faith, prayer, and activism. While others “grew up and moved away” from the resistance to war and violence that made many of them give up, Fr. Dan Berrigan never seemed to lose hope. He held us – comparing us to the Romans of Jesus’ time – responsible for the suffering in the world, for the injustice, for the poverty, for the hatred. He made us angry at him, but he was frequently correct and regularly unmerciful to the “ruling class.” He’d defend an underdog in a heartbeat, but when it came to comfort and joy, he chose another direction.

In all of this, I find a great deal of hope. It is the same hope that I find in so many of my younger minister friends: a contradictory hope, yes, because these days seem dark as any Fr. Dan could create in his poems and essays and parables. Like him, they hold the tension between prayer and activism. Like him, they wear the disguise of “American clergy,” but underneath the masks are prophetic spirits who believe that the status quo is not the present state that God wants or with which God is pleased. There is more to us, we should be better, and here at the beginning of the 21st Century, it might just be time for our morals and our spirituality to catch up with our wonderful technological achievements. Maybe.

There is story I was told about him in my seminary days, how wherever he went, he carried a satchel, a leather pouch or purse of sorts. In the midst of whatever was going on, he would at some point pull from the satchel bread and wine. Where I come from, we call it Holy Communion, and it draws us together, reminds us of whose we are. It’s not just a personal moment with God, it’s a community thing, a sign of family, that we’re more than just “me.”

Whether the story is factual or not, it’s certainly true. Dan reminded us that it’s us, and we’re God’s, and what’s happening in the world “ain’t right.” But there’s always God, and when there’s always God, there’s always hope.

Hope, hope, hope. And love. It’s like bed and board, Daniel said. Some things you can only do together.

Rest in peace, Fr. Berrigan. And thank you.