itellyouarise

The prayer of the martyrs ought to be outlawed, forbidden on our lips.  In the middle ages, popes placed whole towns under interdict. No public prayer, no eucharist, no baptisms, no burial service for the dead – until public crime was expiated.  The Church could not continue the work of Christ while the will of Christ was violated, despised.  In somewhat the same way today, the pope should order all churches closed, all services suspended in those nations which prepare nuclear war.  A universal interdict! For the nuclear arms race threatens the greatest crime since the crucifixion – the Hiroshimizing of all the earth, a firestorm, the finis of the human adventure…

…The moral void precedes the cosmic one, and prepares for it.

…What could be more contemptuous of the God of creation than the presence of the Beast in the sanctuary?

…”Every time a bomb falls in Vietnam,” wrote a Catholic from Saigon in 1966, “every time a village is burned or a child maimed, all your fine Christian words, your words about peaceable Christian intentions and good faith, are put to naught.”

…His works are otherwise…

– His works are performed in the desert, where people are at the end of their rope, without armies, weapons, protection, money, self-assurance, magic rites, strange gods.
– His works are a liberation. They unmask our inward slavery, out fitful wills, our egos, our violence.
– His works are penitential. They include a willingness on our part to endure his absence, his silence, his furious anger.  They will not allow is our fifty-fifty compromise; so much for Caesar, so much for God. (For those who serve God, there is nothing left for Caesar.)
– His works are gracious, in the root sense of the word. His favour does not wait upon our “ups” and “downs,” the narcotic of our moods, nudged this way and that by the tides of this world. “Turn to us that we may turn to you.” His is the first move. Indeed how else could we be moved?

…when we pray, we pray to an exiled king, a renegade among the peoples, a raging holy one, steeped in dishonour.  He is the sport and mockery of all, pushed to the edge of the world, edged out of consciousness.

…Grant us at least the presence of your absence.  Let us taste that void, at the heart of the raucous yelling of prisoners, the void between the bars, between the hours that hang around like days, the days that stand like years. Touch our hearts that die in your absence. Bitter, bitter.

excerpts from pages 50-68, Beside the Sea of Glass, Daniel Berrigan

A stunning invocation to authentic practice and expression of faith both for non-violence/nuclear disarmament but also any other issue of justice.