Death Shall Have No Dominion: Daniel Berrigan of the Resurrection

Abstract

Death Shall Have No Dominion: Daniel Berrigan of the Resurrection Bill Wylie‐Kellermann At this writing…Dan is the only remaining brother of the six; I believe that he is in close communication with his own dying and the life that awaits him and all of us. Like Phil, like Jerry, it looks to me as if Dan is in touch with the life that lies beyond this one. Elizabeth McAlister, Preface, The Berrigan Letters I once had a conversation with Dan Berrigan (+ April 30, 2016 +) about his death. We were talking late into the night at the Block Island hermitage that William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne had built for him while he was two years in Danbury Federal Prison in 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 was fitting for the topic. On the wall above us was an exorcism poem which he had hand‐lettered in a style familiar to Catholic Worker and resistance houses across the country. At landsend where this house dares stand and the sea turns in sleep ponderous, menacing and our spirits fail and run landward, seaward, askelter, + we pray you protect from the law's clawed reach from the second death from envy's tooth from doom's great knell all who dwell here. I'm certain I was the one to broach the topic of death. When we met in my seminary days in the early seventies, it was in the wake of notorious assassinations; Medgar Evers and Viola Liuzzo, Fred Hampton of the Panthers, Malcolm, King, the Kennedys. There was a certain youthful grandiosity in imagining that he or Phil 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 God, to 94!) I probably mentioned Bonhoeffer or King and the way the blood of the martyrs is seed of movement or church, even yearning secretly myself for some sort of “meaningful death.” He gently countered with Albert Camus’ good life and the absurdly random car crash of his death. So, I was as much chastened as honored when he turned the conversation into a Block Island poem: Drinking one night, Kellermann and I talked the moon down, ‘Think of mad racers we're at the mercy of And stuttering engines of air craft so high the guardian angels peel away— Then street knifings. And bloody so on. It's certain we exist courtesy of bellicose junkers, by merest suffrance.’ Significant death? Gold leaf of history, cosmetic on a split skull. In point of fact, Dan had himself once wondered over the sort of death I imagined him. In 1970, instead of submitting voluntarily to the Catonsville prison sentence he had gone underground, slipping away from a very public event, under the noses of federal agents, in the oversized Bread and Puppet effigy of one of the apostles, Peter or John. During that notoriously public four months, he wrote a letter to the Weathermen, a cohort of war resisters whose tactics many found violent. There he said, “And this is why we accept trouble, ostracism, and fear of jail and death as the normal condition under which decent men and women are called upon to function today. Undoubtedly, the FBI comes with guns in pursuit of people like me because beyond their personal chagrin and corporate machismo (a kind of debased esprit de corps; they always get their man), there was the threat that the Panthers and the Vietnamese have so valiantly offered.” Our last conversation, less than a year ago, was again partly about Dietrich Bonhoeffer (+ April 9, 1945 +). The new Charles Marsh biography, so honest and revealing, was out. He'd not heard tell. His underground sojourn coincided with the appearance of the earlier definitive and elephantine biography by Bonhoeffer's beloved companion and student, Eberhard Bethge. It was actually on the twenty‐fifth anniversary of Bonhoeffer's death by hanging in the Nazi prison of Flossenberg, that Berrigan went openly missing in 1970. That day...