The Time's Discipline: The Beatitudes \u0026 Nuclear Resistance by Philip Berrigan

The Time's Discipline: The Beatitudes \u0026 Nuclear Resistance Reviews

• 
  Steven H

  THE TWO ACTIVISTS DISCUSS COMMUNITIES
  
  Philip Berrigan and his wife (and former Sister) Elizabeth McAlister wrote in the Introduction to this 1989 book, “Jonah House came into being in 1973 from the merger of two communities, one in resistance, the other in prison for resistance… Long reflection… prayer, study… brought us to joint conclusions: first, our country’s addiction to war was long-term, maybe terminal; second, resistance would become needed more desperately than even the most genocidal years of the Indochina War; third, the resistance communities of the Sixties and Seventies were too shallow … to serve as models for a lasting community; fourth, some of us would have to accept God’s Word as a handbook and try to embody it. We sensed something further: if we didn’t begin with community, Big Brother and his culture would digest us as free lunch. And, if our community were not grounded in faith, we risked abandoning resistance altogether.” (Pg. xvii) Later, they add, “Redeemed by the Beatitudes… our book offers selections of the common life of faith, prayer, equality of relationship, risk, care of the poor, protest, and resistance.” (Pg. xxii)
  
  They explain, “We chose to explore building a nonviolent movement in our country. That meant developing resistance communities whose members would learn nonviolence as it applied to their own lives as well as to the public arena. Communities… would study the sources of nonviolence and resistance, would look at current events and appropriate responses… for confronting or diminishing violence. Such communities would relearn our cultural heritage and find ways to reduce complicity in institutionalized violence.” (Pg. 11)
  
  They observe, “By … 1980, it appeared that a slow public awakening had begun---a gathering sense that people and the bomb cannot co-exist… The bomb, we discovered… was a symbol of the state’s malign will to place people on borrowed time, mark them as living dead---enslaved and futureless.” (Pg. 23)
  
  Phil acknowledges in a 1977 letter written from prison, “Liz and I have had our marriage interrupted by repeated imprisonment. Now, we have children … obviously not with us, but, rather, cared for by sisters and brothers in resistance at Jonah House. Predictably, separation like this… is filled with anguish Especially for Liz… Her anguish would also include concern for her mother and family---less well attuned than mine to prison as witness to the Lord..” (Pg. 37)
  
  They note, “Our own struggle toward gentleness and nonviolence is thrown into consternation, however, as the evidence mounts of official treachery, violence, and hypocrisy. Our children probably learn most of their foul language as we watch the evening news together. Rage gets a foothold. At times we’d like to scream and smash the tube like and ancient kings who murdered the messengers bearing bad news. The only words that feel appropriate at such times are the words of Jesus or the prophets when they confronted the leadership of their day.” (Pg. 60)
  
  They state, “How do Christians witness to Christ as Lord in face of the lordship of the bomb? This is our consuming question. Once the question is seriously posed, a serious truth emerges: the imperial apparatus is incapable of change, self-control, or reform. Obsessed with itself and with its organization of privilege, it blunders along like a blind colossus, spreading its delusions as truth, threatening, and destroying. And the last to see the truth are the functionaries of the Big Lie.” (Pg. 83)
  
  They assert, “The government cannot defend its people… it exacts payment for a profound imperilment, payment for the prospect of mass suicide. The gravest failure of the Pentagon is its total impotence to deliver on its promises (defense and deterrence)… For the truth is, there is no defense, there is no protection no warding of a nuclear attack.” (Pg. 103)
  
  They explain, “The Beatitudes give the very shape to our lives and ministry!... We long to share the insights we have gained on our way, a way made easier by others making similar (or different) journeys. We admit to our discomfiture that under each beatitude yawns a chasm: how we are called to live and how we, in fact, do live. The obvious gap may or may not be bridged in later life. If it is, it will be because of … God’s Spirit, who gently assaults our perverse desire to control our lives and to limit that Spirit’s access to our hearts.” (Pg. 119)
  
  They ask, “Where does the Christian minister stand vis-à-vis the pathology of the times, as the times reflect the presumptuous claims and sanctions of the state? Today, as in the past, the minister of the Gospel confronts a sick world and its violence through nonviolent living, and through communities of resistance. We have Christ’s own insistence on the mystery of sin, and its infidelity to God’s sovereignty and power.” (Pg. 131)
  
  They observe, “in the 1970s and 1980s we have witnessed … a world-wide outbreak of fundamentalisms… Usually such movements would be short-lived, such is the nature of fundamentalism. But, in an era of potential nuclear omnicide, we can expect them to become permanent fixtures in our collective experience. But the gravest fundamentalism … is ‘NUCLEARISM’… It is a religion in which the bomb is the new fundamental, the new source of salvation…” (Pg. 138)
  
  They state, “What strikes us about the scientists is an astonishing political naivete and a blind enthusiasm for scientism, as though science indeed were the art of the gods… The bomb is of course value free. The scientist must have latitude to experiment, especially if political salvation supports him. So there was no … regret for the 400,000 Japanese dead, not the slightest openness to vexing moral questions.” (Pg. 165)
  
  They conclude, “It is often with a sense of failure that we have had to admit to feelings of racism, sexism, classism toward the other prisoners---feelings we thought had no home in us… In love’s light we can learn of ourselves and how far we have to travel to be disarmed people. Maybe we have to experience this failure in ourselves to grow strong or to reach the deeper inner person. And maybe there’s a wisdom that comes from failure that nothing else can provide… our work is not dismantling but living out the new life Christ inaugurated. This life… finds us in failure, more receptive, less grudging and plaintive.” (Pg. 197)
  
  This book will be of great interest to those studying the Berrigans, and their movement.