What Daniel Berrigan Taught Me
By Brendan h. O’Connor
Daniel Berrigan, from the Daniel and Philip Berrigan Collection. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
When I met Daniel Berrigan, I would say I was already political, in one sense. I already knew about him and regarded him as a Catholic antihero, a Robin Hood figure whose exploits—burning draft cards with napalm! hammering on nuclear warheads!—were immortalized in outlaw ballads like Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard.”
Meeting this radical Jesuit priest in person was something else entirely. I was 15 or so, washing dishes and cleaning cabins at a summer camp in the Adirondacks where Berrigan periodically led retreats on the Old Testament prophets. The rest of the time, he worked with AIDS patients in a hospital in New York City.
The indomitable nun who ran the camp fretted aloud about his health—needlessly, since he lived another twenty years to 94. He was a skeletal figure, baggy Levis hooked on scarecrow hips and a bolo tie dangling over an elegant, vaguely Latin American-looking button-up shirt. He had a purity of presence that I’ve never felt with anyone else, a deep attentiveness and exceptional sensitivity to others coupled with a deliberate speaking style of uncommon, quiet intensity. His presence was more than pure: It was complete. And while there was nothing in it to condemn you, it made you want to be more present, more attentive, more fully human.
Just being around him felt like a rebuke to what Jesus called “the world,” a gentle denunciation of everything cheap, thoughtless and exploitative. It also made me realize that there were other possible callings—more serious and less forgiving—beyond the callings I’d been taught to listen for and expect: untroublesome priest, untroublesome teacher. It terrified me to think of living up to his example.
Who was more political than Dan Berrigan? And yet there was no one less political, when you got right down to it. Thinking about this contradiction helped me work through my own discomfort with political identity. Thomas Merton argued in his Journals that one can recognize the necessity of acting politically while resisting the compulsion to define oneself primarily in political terms, and this is how I saw Berrigan. In his presence, you thought (as Yeats said of Maud Gonne) “Why, what could [he] have done, being what [he] is?” “Gentle” seems too strong a word for the man. How else could he have acted, faced with the moral devastation around him? And what must it have cost him emotionally and spiritually to embrace confrontation, even nonviolent confrontation?
His was a politics, if you could call it that, of utter simplicity, a politics that moved feelingly through the world. It wasn’t until much later that I would encounter Berrigan’s dialogues with the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who had opposed the war peacefully from the other side; I wasn’t familiar with the Zen saying that compassion is like a hand reaching back to adjust a pillow in the middle of the night. That was Berrigan’s politics: His “political” actions didn’t follow from the dictates of a rigid ideology, nor were they the product of rational debate; they were instinctive compassion, compassion itself, however awkwardly and inelegantly expressed.
If my limited contact with the “radical priest” didn’t bring about a political awakening, it certainly suggested the possibility of living politically without seeing myself as a merely political being. It also released me from the belief that the right hand constantly has to be explaining what it’s doing to the left hand, contra Jesus.
Later, as I moved out into the world on my own, the memory of this teenage encounter would reassure me that I wasn't required to explain or justify compassionate action—for example, the way my political commitments began to flow organically from my love and concern for my students—in terms that the world could understand. Your politics, like Berrigan’s, could aspire to be the hand reaching back to adjust and readjust the pillow, fumbling in the darkness of human ignorance for its next compassionate move.
This essay is part of our Political Awakening series this month.
Brendan H. O'Connor received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and is currently an associate professor in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. He is a linguistic anthropologist and anthropologist of education who studies issues of language, identity and education in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, primarily in relation to Mexican American and other Latinx students and families.