tribute

Joyce Hollyday 12-29-2021
A white man wearing a black turtleneck crinkles his face with exuberant laughter

From the documentary Seeking Shelter: A Story of Place, Faith and Resistance

FOUR DECADES AGO, when I was a young editor at Sojourners, Daniel Berrigan wrote a poem for a special edition of the magazine. The note accompanying it read: “Here’s the poem—my first on a word processor. Seems a bit jumbled. Might have got a food processor by mistake.”

Berrigan has been described often as poet, prophet, and priest. The note reveals another alliterative trio that marked his life: humor, humility, and hospitality. Though I never saw him use a food processor, over the years I enjoyed several delectable dinners he whipped up in his apartment in New York City and his cottage on Block Island, accompanied by his droll wit. Berrigan was engaged in an unflinching, lifelong facedown with the world—observing its worst inhumanities and fully understanding its unlimited capacities for destruction—but he also knew how to be tickled by joy.

Bill Wylie-Kellermann is among those in Berrigan’s close circle who feasted regularly at his table, drawing sustenance from the food, lively conversation, and prophetic insights. Celebrant’s Flame: Daniel Berrigan in Memory and Reflection (Cascade Books) is Wylie-Kellermann’s moving tribute to the man who was first his professor, then his mentor, and ultimately his beloved friend. It is a treasure trove of poems and letters, sermons and speeches, reflections and court testimonies, even a seminary paper—a patchwork sewn into a beautiful whole.

Bob Fitch / Stanford University Libraries

Bob Fitch / Stanford University Libraries

On April 30, 2016, Catholic peacemaker and activist Daniel Berrigan entered life eternal. He was a teacher and friend to many in the Sojourners community. Read more reflections on Dan's life and legacy in the August 2016 issue

I ONCE HAD a conversation with Dan about his death. We were talking late into the night at the Block Island hermitage that his friends William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne had built for him while he was two years in Danbury federal prison, a consequence of the 1968 Catonsville draft board action. He had by then foresworn scotch, on doctor’s orders, so I was being introduced to Manhattans dry, which were somehow allowed. The place suited the topic. On the wall above us was an exorcism poem that he’d hand-lettered in a style familiar to Catholic Worker and resistance houses across the country.

I’m certain it was I who broached the topic. When we met in the early ’70s, it was in the wake of notorious assassinations: Medgar Evers and Viola Liuzzo, the Panthers, Malcolm, King, the Kennedys. There was a certain youthful grandiosity in imagining that he or others who were such troublesome peacemakers would be similarly targeted. I braced my heart. I told him so. (Then he turns around and lives, thanks be, to 94!)

Stephen Kelly 6-30-2016

The Berrigan brothers: Dan, left, and Phil.

On April 30, 2016, Catholic peacemaker and activist Daniel Berrigan entered life eternal. He was a teacher and friend to many in the Sojourners community. The following article is adapted from the homily Steve Kelly gave at Dan's May 6 funeral Mass in New York City. Read more reflections on Dan's life and legacy in the August 2016 issue

IN THE STORY OF LAZARUS, told in John’s gospel, seemingly Jesus arrives too late. Humanity, doomed like Lazarus, is sealed under two tons of stone. Is this then an inspired picture of how God sees us? Humanity sealed up in death? Death taunting Jesus until Jesus has a visceral reaction? The hand of death moves the chess piece toward checkmate.

The complexity of the lie goes: “Once you are dead, once afraid, how will God guide you?” If afraid, how can one obey the guidance, dependence on the one who sent him?

“Greater love has no one than to lay down one’s life for a friend.” So God does know what it’s like to encounter death’s whiplash version. Always, everywhere, each time, each encounter, risks are included.

Jesus went the distance in this anguishing scene. To see him at work is to see life itself overcoming death, because he, as a human being, cooperated, obeyed the guidance of the one who sent him. He loved, he lays down his life.

Now there is a different moral power in town. God is going to crack death’s veneer, a chink in the armor. Through Jesus’ obedience, the crumbling begins, and the hidden, insipid hold of death is broken.

Frida Berrigan 6-30-2016
Pavel L Photo and Video / Shutterstock

Pavel L Photo and Video / Shutterstock

WHEN I WAS BORN—the first child of Dan Berrigan’s brother Phil and Elizabeth McAlister—my uncle sent my parents a sheaf of poetry. On it, he wrote a note: “Dears, I send these with trepidation. They are uneven; but then so is life, no? Love, Daniel.”

My parents put the dozen or so poems in a book and gave them to me on my eighth birthday with their own note: “We don’t expect you to understand all of them yet but you can now begin to read and grow with them.” Yet. Right. I am now 34 years older than I was when I first opened the little red bound book of handwritten poems, and I don’t understand them any better.

But now that my dearest Unka has passed from this world, I hold on tight to this collection and try really hard to understand. It is going to be tough. The poems are full of words the dictionary either fails to define or further confuses—supramundane, Blake’s child, Dante’s paradise (what are boys from middle school doing in Unka’s poetry?), “the bodhisattva is neither stuporous nor sleek / he is crucified.”

Fragments of these poems cycle through my head all the time, a sort of back rhythm to daily life, especially when that daily life was graced with Unka.

Uncle Dan and I would walk—down New York City’s Broadway and through Riverside Park. He breathed in such love for the natural world, even amid the Upper West Side’s hustles and bumps. He saw everything, and found the beauty that was there. The only people that made him mad were delivery men riding bikes on the sidewalks—he had been knocked down once by them and he worried about the elderly—and people who lost themselves in their phones.

Jim Wallis 6-30-2016
Bob Fitch / Stanford University Libraries

Bob Fitch / Stanford University Libraries

WHEN WE LOSE a Christian peacemaker such as Daniel Berrigan, as we did in April, it gets very personal for many of us. Berrigan shaped and motivated a Catholic peace movement that became a fundamental and foundational influence on Sojourners and on me personally.

During my early years at Michigan State University, friends were drafted, others feared they would be next, and the Vietnam War consumed the attention of an entire generation. Then I learned about Daniel and Philip Berrigan and the small group of Christian protesters they were inciting. They were the only Christians I had heard about who were against the war in Vietnam.

Here were some Christians who were saying and doing what I thought the gospel said—and what nobody in my white evangelical world was saying or doing. The witness of the Berrigans helped keep my hope for faith from dying altogether. African-American Christians fighting for justice and that “Berrigan handful” of Christians fighting for peace paved the way for my return to faith.

Daniel and Philip Berrigan rose to national prominence after they and seven others burned 378 draft files with homemade napalm taken from a draft-board office in Catonsville, Md., on May 17, 1968. The result was jail sentences for the group and, eventually, Daniel’s play “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine.”

Jim Wallis 6-03-2014

Glen Stassen

MY DEAR FRIEND Glen Stassen passed away on April 26. Glen was a key ally, a kindred spirit, and a deeply respected member of the Sojourners board. In my view, Glen was the most important Christian ethicist of his time because he taught us what it means to follow Jesus.

Many years ago a tall, thin, and very bright young man came to visit Sojourners community in Washington, D.C. He told us he was an ethics professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and that he wanted to live with us and volunteer serving the poor. Glen stayed in one of our households and served on our food line, distributing bags of groceries to low-income families just 20 blocks from the White House. From my first conversation with him to the last, Glen Stassen never stopped talking about Jesus—and how Christians must not just believe in Christ in word but also follow him in deed. His most influential book, Kingdom Ethics, co-authored with David P. Gushee, was also the passion of his life and work.

Before Glen became a professor, he had a promising career in nuclear physics. He loved his work, but he was not willing to work in weapons development so he left to attend seminary and become a biblical scholar. Eventually, Glen formulated a powerful vision of “just peacemaking.” Using the creative and critical practices of conflict resolution, Glen’s framework guides us toward effective and faithful actions to both prevent and end wars.

In everything he did, Glen sought to bring Christian ethics to public life. Working with Glen on the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, I quickly discovered that he was not just an ethics theorist but a gifted practitioner who knew how to mobilize movements and change public policy. As a true disciple of Jesus, Glen wanted to change the world.

Pete Seeger (1919-2014)

WHEN I MOVED out of my Sojourners magazine office in 1988, I took with me two signed review copies of books. One was Roll the Union On: A Pictorial History of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. It was inscribed to me personally by H.L. Mitchell, a founder of the STFU, so I felt entitled to keep it.

The other book bore no inscription, just a simple black ink signature above the Simon & Schuster logo. It was called Carry It On! A History in Song and Picture of America’s Working Men and Women, and the co-author who signed it was Pete Seeger. I’m looking at that signature now, as I write this on the day Seeger died.

I told myself that I kept that book because I thought it might come in handy. After all, it had 11 translations of “L’Internationale” and all the words to “Solidarity Forever.” But really I kept it for the signature. I liked the idea of having something that I knew had come from the hand of someone who had ridden the rails with Woody Guthrie. Seeger was our living connection to the culture of the 1930s when, for a moment, radical dreams about a country owned and operated by its ordinary citizens seemed almost ready for prime time.

Of course, that moment passed, and those dreams were shattered by the Red Scare and the Cold War that followed. But Seeger came out on the other side with his integrity and ideals intact. Despite being honored by the last two Democratic presidents, he never renounced his radical vision of what America could be. Seeger left the Communist Party in the early 1950s and frankly acknowledged that he should have done so sooner, but he never stopped calling himself a “small c” communist. In 1994, he told The Washington Post, “Our ancestors were all socialists: You killed a deer and maybe you got the best cut, but you wouldn’t let it rot, you shared it.” Still, he was a pragmatic radical, who added that socialists should recognize that “every society has a post office and none of them is efficient. No post office anywhere invented Federal Express.”

WHEN I MOVED out of my Sojourners magazine office in 1988, I took with me two signed review copies of books. One was Roll the Union On: A Pictorial History of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. It was inscribed to me personally by H.L. Mitchell, a founder of the STFU, so I felt entitled to keep it.

The other book bore no inscription, just a simple black ink signature above the Simon & Schuster logo. It was called Carry It On! A History in Song and Picture of America’s Working Men and Women, and the co-author who signed it was Pete Seeger. I’m looking at that signature now, as I write this on the day Seeger died.

I told myself that I kept that book because I thought it might come in handy. After all, it had 11 translations of “L’Internationale” and all the words to “Solidarity Forever.” But really I kept it for the signature. I liked the idea of having something that I knew had come from the hand of someone who had ridden the rails with Woody Guthrie. Seeger was our living connection to the culture of the 1930s when, for a moment, radical dreams about a country owned and operated by its ordinary citizens seemed almost ready for prime time.

Of course, that moment passed, and those dreams were shattered by the Red Scare and the Cold War that followed. But Seeger came out on the other side with his integrity and ideals intact. Despite being honored by the last two Democratic presidents, he never renounced his radical vision of what America could be. Seeger left the Communist Party in the early 1950s and frankly acknowledged that he should have done so sooner, but he never stopped calling himself a “small c” communist. In 1994, he told The Washington Post, “Our ancestors were all socialists: You killed a deer and maybe you got the best cut, but you wouldn’t let it rot, you shared it.” Still, he was a pragmatic radical, who added that socialists should recognize that “every society has a post office and none of them is efficient. No post office anywhere invented Federal Express.”

The Editors 2-18-2014

In remembrance of Pete Seeger

Caroline Langston 10-30-2013
Stone cherub in London cemetery, nagib / Shutterstock.com

Stone cherub in London cemetery, nagib / Shutterstock.com

For some months now, I have been ruminating on the writer John Podhoretz’s eulogy in Commentary magazine for his sister Rachel Abrams upon her death, from stomach cancer, at age 62. Commentary effectively being the Podhoretz family house organ, and the Podhoretzes effectively being the mythological family of the origin of neoconservatism, the essay would be of interest to anyone interested in cultural and religious sociology — or at least to me.

I, too, come from a family that has also tended to think of itself in somewhat mythological, contrarian terms — This is what Langstons are like — so a meditation from the heart of another large, bustling family is an immediate and natural draw for me.

But lay that all aside. The eulogy wins, and haunts, because it is the passionate remembrance of a sister by her brother. Despite their being part of a prominent East Coast family, its focus is relentlessly on the small acts of family and home that transfigure quotidian existence. Podhoretz dwells lovingly on Rachel as a housewife, a lifetime foul-mouth, an exuberant and dedicated mother, an artist, and finally a writer who let loose with political commentary in her late fifties as online blogs began gathering steam.

“I loved you, Rachel,” he concludes poignantly, in words I could read over and over. “I liked you. And oh, oh, oh, how I admired you.”

So much of that poignancy is derived from direct address to his sister, who is no longer there to receive it. Having just hit 45, Dante comes to mind: midway-through-the-journey-of-our-life-I found myself within a dark wood for the right way had been lost. Who can know how our days are numbered? The lesson for me is that I should tell of how I love my brother John, even as he lives.

the Web Editors 7-04-2012

Andy Griffith and Ron Howard (as Opie) from the Andy Griffith Show. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)

In a poignant first-person essay in today's LA Times, actor and director Ron Howard, who as a child played Opie on The Andy Griffith Show, tenderly remebers his mentor and friend Andy Griffith, who died Tuesday at the age of 86.

Howard recalls:

He was known for ending shows by looking at the audience and saying "I appreciate it, and good night." Perhaps the greatest enduring lesson I learned from eight seasons playing Andy's son Opie on the show was that he truly understood the meaning of those words, and he meant them, and there was value in that.

Respect. At every turn he demonstrated his honest respect for people and he never seemed to expect theirs in return, but wanted to earn it....