Daniel Berrigan: The Price Of Peace Is To Jettison Our Hopes For Normalcy

Pseudo-Success And The Undoing Of America

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/03/pseudo-success-and-undoing-of-america.html

Success

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/02/success.html

TED Radio Hour: Success 

A Great Lineup!

On this program I most recommend Alain de Botton's talk.

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/03/ted-radio-hour-success-great-show.html

“But what of the price of peace?” he asked in his book “No Bars to Manhood.”

I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm ... in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs—at all costs—our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost—because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war—at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Bearing the cross is not about the pursuit of happiness. It does not embrace the illusion of inevitable human progress. It is not about achieving wealth, celebrity or power. It entails sacrifice. It is about our neighbor...

“Daniel and Phil exposed the historical alliance of religious leaders who colluded with structures of domination,” said Kelly, who has spent more than a decade in prison for acts of nonviolent protest.

“The imperial power of Pax Romana ran aground on the shoals of Christian steadfastness,” he went on. “But through the centuries the circle of outcasts and martyrs dissembled. They gained ascendancy to the power they were meant to resist. Daniel and Phil untied, illegally, those held in power’s captivity. They risked retaliation. They touched the idol of the state.”

Dan, who went underground for four months after burning the draft files, was on the FBI’s most-wanted list—the first Catholic priest in the country to hold that distinction. But he and his small circle of activists pushed the clergy—including my father—out of their pulpits and into the streets to denounce the Vietnam War, especially after Dan founded Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam in 1965 with Rabbi Abraham Heschel. He traveled to North Vietnam with Howard Zinn in 1968 on a peace mission and returned home with three U.S. Air Force personnel who had been held prisoner...

Dan provided, for me, the most cogent definition of religious faith.

“The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere,” he told me. “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. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanely and carefully and nonviolently and let it go.”