Death of the Liberal Class - Chris Hedges [89]
Berrigan, unbowed at eighty-seven when I met him, sat primly in a straight-backed wooden chair in his upper Manhattan apartment. The afternoon light slanted in from the windows, illuminating the collection of watercolors and religious icons on the walls.12 Time and age had not blunted this Jesuit priest’s fierce critique of the American empire or his radical interpretation of the Gospels. “This is the worst time of my long life,” he said with a sigh. “I have never had such meager expectations of the system. I see those expectations verified in their paucity and their shallowness every day I live.
“We are talking, even in the length of years I’ve had, we are talking short term,” he said:It is very important to keep that kind of perspective. We haven’t lost everything because we have lost today. The biblical evidence for the survival of any empire is not very large; in fact, the whole weight of biblical history goes in the other direction. They all come down. According to the Book of Revelation, Babylon self-destructs. There is not even a hint of an enemy at the gates. “Fallen! Fallen! is Babylon the Great.” I think we are somewhere in that orbit where the fall of the towers was symbolic as well as horribly actual. The thing is bringing itself down by a willful blindness that is astonishing. I happen to go very strongly with the Buddhist understanding that the good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere. I put a secret footnote in my mind. I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don’t know where. I don’t think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. There is a biblical ignorance about all this that is very revealing. . . . I have come to the conclusion that the stronger a series of events in a lifetime hearken to the Bible, the less one will know about outcome. That was true from Abraham to Jesus. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go. My impression being that the tactic is of secondary importance. If we are talking real, we are talking about a community with a common spirit, the ability to open the Bible with a common understanding. In this world death seems often redundantly powerful. And yet we have the resurrection to cope with.13
The trial of the Catonsville Nine altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience, including the burning of draft cards. It also signaled a seismic shift within the Catholic Church, propelling radical priests and nuns led by the Berrigans, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day to the center of a religiously inspired social movement that challenged not only church and state authority but also the myths and ideologies Americans used to define, enrich, and empower themselves.
“Dorothy Day taught me more than all the theologians,” Berrigan said. “She awakened me to connections I had not thought of or been instructed in, the equation of human misery and poverty and war-making. She had a basic hope that God created the world with enough for everyone, but there was not enough for everyone and war-making.”
Berrigan’s relationship with Day led to a close friendship with the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton’s “great contribution to the religious left,” Berrigan said, “was to gather us for days of prayer and discussion of the sacramental life. He told us, ‘Stay with these, stay with these, these are your tools and discipline, and these are your strengths.’
“He could