May Is the Month for Protest—Daniel Berrigan Would Agree

Several years later, I had moved to New York. One Friday night, some friends showed up at my tiny apartment for a late dinner and with them was Dan Berrigan. He was in good form. Sufficient alcohol was consumed during the evening that unfortunately I recall little of what actually was said but I do remember Dan’s post-midnight recitation of another great Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins:

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —

Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

In the following years, I lost touch with him and apparently that was not uncommon. He took the advice of the great Catholic philosopher and author Thomas Merton and, in the words of Georgetown senior fellow Paul Elie, became “a figure of radical purity and apartness.” The man once so visible, once so potent and public a symbol of dissidence, quietly continued to write and protest (and get arrested), as he kept his vows, studied and taught scripture and humbly ministered to those who needed his faith. The just man justiced and kept grace.

May is historically a month for protests. It’s the month of Chicago’s Haymarket bombing in 1886; of Paris in 1968, when students and workers almost brought down the government of Charles de Gaulle; of May 1970 and deaths at Kent State and Jackson State, the resulting student strike that closed colleges and universities across the country.

And now in yet another May of turmoil we protest the death of Dan Berrigan, mourn his passing but celebrate all that he did and said and wrote, while celebrating, too, all those like him who speak out and strive to make this country a land of peace and justice that’s honest and wise and decent and compassionate. You know, the things that truly make America great.