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He Tried

a reflection about Philip Berrigan
by Elizabeth McAlister

2008

A number of times in the last years (often enough to be memorable) Phil said that he'd like to have the words I TRIED engraved on his tombstone. (Living in a cemetery full of tombstones, that thought is apt to cross one's mind). Standing on the deck as Phil was struggling for every breath (we went out there not just to have a smoke but because we needed to leave the room, we needed to breath), Dan and I agreed to disregard that request of Phil's - it was, we thought, something less than serious.

But "I tried!" is something of a measure - one of the measures - of Phil's life.

He tried and He learned

1. He tried to be the red-blooded, all American - I didn't know the boy or the young man. I heard some of the stories and his coming up was storied. Handsome, athletic, personable. But reflecting on his youth, Phil referred to himself as a slow learner - slow to learn of ubiquitous injustice or the bankruptcy of the culture or the gift of life. But learn he did; and as learned he rejected that road quite totally and encouraged others – especially our kids - (strongly at times) to do the same. The kultur, he called it.

2. He tried to be the good soldier fighting the good fight - Phil enlisted in WWII; he sought paratrooper training believing that that was where the action was; he saw the devastation of Europe first hand; but he learned that it was not a good fight and he learned what war does; so he began what became for him, a life-long study - he would be a peacemaker.

3. He tried to be the Catholic priest - the high ground held out to Catholic young men. He chose the Josephites because their ministry was to Black Americans under the boot of a culture that was racist in its foundation, its history, its policies, its very core. He learned to confront his own racism (and own it) and to serve its victims - in prison and in the neighborhood.

4. He read the Word of God and he tried to embody it - moved by Jesus' word: Blessed are they who hear the Word of God and put it into practice . And this, for Phil, was the turning point. God's word led him to peacemaking, resistance, community, deepening faith. Opening that scripture alone or with other people was his favorite work; it occupied hours of every day for the rest of his life.

5. He tried to stand up to a complicit Church, a Church which proved itself every bit as much a structure of domination as the culture it was supposed to confront and supplant. He learned that one must not only criticize the church but be the church for which one longs.

6. He tried to stand up to a criminal state. His critique was informed, revised, deepened. He read voluminously. He wrote - probably daily – always by hand. Among his writings are daily journals. Everything he learned deepened and expanded his original insight. He had a way of writing that not only put current crimes and atrocities in relief, but also in the glaring light of the gospels. No one does it as well. He remembered names and dates and statistics and interconnections as few others. All of us are poorer because he does it no more.

7. He tried to be a community person, a builder of community. He asked the question: "How do we move from dissent to resistance? How is that reflected in life-style? How do we sustain it?" And he answered: "Community!" The draft board communities - ad hoc as they were - were such an effort. Jonah House Community. The Atlantic Life Community. The Plowshares Communities. There were times when he was tempted to throw in the towel on each of those efforts. But he never did. And he emerged from each crisis grateful for community; grateful for each of you (though admittedly, he sometimes had a weird way of showing that) - grateful for the people with whom he lived and worked, the people with whom he acted, the wider network of love and faith and hope, his brothers, you. He learned our need of one another, voiced it, lived it, and died surrounded by it.

8. He tried to be husband and father and he was. Our kids taught him (taught us) a lot, stretched him/us. And thank God. We'd be worse codgers without them. As we confronted nuclear weapons it seemed right that we try to be something other than a nuclear family. What does nuclear do to family? I like to think that family that included others and was included by others was somehow better; I know it was more rewarding. And I think our kids feel that way too. I highlight this reflection/reaction/insight – not sure what to call it – of son Jerome. When 40 people showed up for Sunday liturgy two weeks before Phil's death and 60 people the next Sunday, Jer stood in the hall protecting Phil's privacy. “That morning,” Jerry wrote, “I became a little more undone when 40 people arrived for liturgy. Some were strangers! In my indignation and grief I allowed myself all sorts of public sphere/private sphere imaginings and then I remembered: our family is very large, always has been. Most of these people love Dad deeply. There is nowhere else they should be. I have to let them in – it is my need as well as theirs!”

In all these ways he tried - and because he tried, he was tried - many times, for greater and less serious acts of peacemaking. He was tried by his friends; he was tried by his order; he was tried by his church; he was tried in the press; he was tried in the courts; he was tried in jail and in prison. In his last prison term he was placed in the SHU no less than 3 times - none of them a consequence of his own conduct:

  • He arrived at the prison before his paper work and so was placed in SHU (special housing unit or solitary lock down) and forgotten. It took many a phone call to extract him.
  • His cell mate was part of an escape attempt; the other two made it out but his cell mate didn't. Was Phil in conspiracy with him about the escape? It was a week or more before it became clear that the cell mate was Mexican and spoke no English; Phil had maybe 16 words of Spanish. There was little if any communication.
  • At 11:00 on 9/11/01 Phil was escorted to SHU and kept incommunicado for 12 days. It took calls from Senators and Lawyers to extract him that time.

And because he kept at it, he was jailed and/or imprisoned many times, even for the less serious acts of peacemaking. Once it was 2 days - he and Martin Sheen were barely processed into the DCDC when they began processing them out; 10 days here; 30 days there; 60 days; 6 months; a year; 27 months; 6 years was the longest, for his first draft board action. The resistance and the jail had such continuity that he began to understand his times out of jail or prison as time in minimum security. I can't say that he coined that application; I can only say that he used it often.

I picked Phil up at FCI Elkton in Eastern OH at the end of his last prison sentence. It was December 14, 2001. We had breakfast nearby and began the drive home. We talked of the next phase of life: how does one age graciously. We ruminated on how important it was to learn and live the ageing process. By the time we got home, he was ill and from then on, he was never fully well. We attributed it to the hip (bone on bone) and to living with constant pain. Even as he challenged himself and his physical limitations, he accepted them. The fall, the broken arm, delayed the hip replacement surgery. Only when it was clear that recovery was stymied did we seek a deeper reason; only then did we learn of the cancer that had been eating at him for years.

It's cancer so how are we going to deal. At Jerry's instigation we sat down to talk. I'll fight it. Maybe I can beat it. And maybe I can' t. And that's OK. I've lived a full and a good life. I have no regrets. He was as good as his word. He fought it - for a time. When doctors would hospitalize him to build him up to whack him down again, we told them: "We're ending treatment. We're going home. We're entering the next phase. We know what it means. We want to do it as humanly as we know how." Shortly thereafter, Phil said, "I think I'm dying!" "I do too! How do you want to approach it? What do you want?" He must have thought about that a lot because the moment came when he told us what he wanted - in detail - and then he focused on the work that remained for him - how to die with faith and hope, with love and dignity. He taught us much about how to live; and then he taught us much about how to die.

Phil was the first person I ever heard say that conspiracy was not a crime. "Take it back. Own it," he said. Breathing together for the sake of life is our proper work. Knowing this, living it for so long, made his last day with us all the more wrenching. His breath was so labored and long we could no longer breathe with him; we had to sneak in breaths in between his or just leave him for a time to catch our breath.

But we are here - not there; and we can breathe together; we can conspire; we can build and deepen community; we can resist and laugh and play and pray; we can keep each other's courage up; and…. we can "LOVE ONE ANOTHER!" After long deliberation, that is the statement we had engraved on Phil's tombstone. Last week we had a memorial liturgy together. We read the passage from John's gospel in which that new commandment is found. And we reflected that it calls us to go beyond every concept of enemy and enmity, to build the beloved community in the image of Christ. These are the words that Phil, in imitation of Christ, continues to speak to us from his grave. I think they say it all.