Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . COVER STORY . Berrigan's Legacy . July 20, 2001

Daniel Berrigan gave the following talk, "Courage is a Verb: Do It," earlier this year at the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University. It is based on a verse from the Book of Isaiah and will be included in a volume on courage that is forthcoming in the Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion series, published by the University of Notre Dame Press:

And God will judge between the nations, and will render decisions for many peoples. And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift sword against nation. Never again will they learn war. (Isaiah 2:4)

I suppose in the lexicon of most believers there are one or two commanding texts, words that beckon up and away from "the paralysis of analysis," as Dr. Martin Luther King [Jr.] had it. Beckon us to -- doing it.

At that point, perhaps we touch on the point of Christianity itself, as Kierkegaard wrote. Surely he was the great and dour decrier of a Christianity that remained "an inert truth," as Whitehead would put it, or a Christianity that remained merely "notional," as Newman would put it. In any case, a religion dead and buried in the mind. A religion that put to naught an essentially commanding word and summons.

"Do it." To me, this text of Isaiah has been pure summons. A vigorous text designed to set the human in motion. Stand there indeed, but do something!

The congruence between the times in which the oracle was first issued and our own times is striking, unsettling, close. Isaiah spoke in the eighth century before Christ, a time of imperial darkness, of wars and rumors of wars, of duplicity in high places. Isaiah entered deliberately upon this scene of desolating power.

His method was, to say the least, unsettling to conventional religion and politics. A religious figure, and the most political of men! Isaiah refuses to separate public responsibility from the voice of God within.

It was all quite simple. He had seen God; therefore --

It was, and is, a terrifying equation. He had seen God; therefore he had a message for the king and the people. The premise and conclusion were forged with a fiery, dangerous simplicity -- the simplicity of a saint or a madman.

Isaiah seemed to have enjoyed a vogue -- for a while. He was heard in the corridors of power, he had audience at the throne -- for a while. Then the war with Assyria broke; it proceeded bloodily and was hardly resolved. Prelude to more violence; never an end of it; a war like every other war. And the fortunes of Isaiah were altered. War was resumed; his message darkened. Now he spoke only of doom and defeat, words perennially unwelcome to imperial ears. Isaiah said, "The first war was only a first act. You shall now be invaded. Samariah will fall." So it transpired. And worse. Eventually, a siege was laid to Jerusalem by Sennacherib of Assyria.

In those terrible years, Isaiah was, in one way or another, a presence to be reckoned with. The imperial adventurers, whether foreign or domestic, felt the sting of his prophecy. He played a variety of roles; sometimes he reminds us of a court fool, sometimes of a dog impeding the wheels of the rampaging chariots. And sometimes he is an honored oracular presence, dwelling inordinately on bad outcomes to dubious enterprises. And oftener than may be thought healthy, he derides the foolish inflations of royal ego.

And then, something else. He utters an oracle that seems to issue from a burning bush or a fiery epiphany. Isaiah announces -- the impossible. The necessary impossible, the absolutely crucial impossible; the impossible that must come to pass. That which shall come to pass precisely because it is impossible.

"They shall beat their swords into plowshares." It is as though he were holding in suspension two fiercely incompatible elements in a terrifying experiment. The necessary must somehow be joined to the impossible.

Swords into plowshares. The oracle is absolutely crucial to the lives of nations, to the lives of individuals, to honor and a civilized sense of humanity. To the fate of the earth. But the oracle is also impossible of fulfillment.

Therefore, the conclusion of Isaiah. Because the task is crucial, necessary, and because it is radically impossible -- therefore it is true. It will come true. God has sworn it.

"They shall beat swords into plowshares." The oracle entirely surpasses the human, even while it engages the human. Even while it commits, invites, commands, exacts vows, demands conversion of heart.

It is in the unlikely suspension of these two, the surpassing of the human and the exaction laid on the human, that the truth of God is manifest.

Indeed, the oracle surpasses the human. Is anyone in need of instruction on the subject of our helplessness, our lassitude, our sleep of death, our psychic numbness, our inertia of soul, before the universal, dreadful nuclear predicament?

And yet, and yet. The oracle, like a resurrecting command, beckons forth this very helplessness, this acceptance of dumb fate, this rehearsal of death. It implies this: You are not helpless, you are not objects of fate, you are not dead. Your despair is to your shame.

Further, understand that it is not God who will beat swords into plowshares; it is yourselves. It is you whom the times have beaten, literally (your spirit, enterprise, imagination, your very humanity) into the form of death, into that death before death which we name despair. Disarm. It must be done, and it cannot be done. And if it is to be done, it must be done by God, and it must be done by ourselves.

The task is literally impossible to our resources, to our will. More than fifty years of nuclear impasse testify, pitifully, cynically to the impossibility. Nuclear disarmament? It is beyond all political wit and witlessness. It is impossible to Russians, Americans, French, British, Chinese, Germans, Israelis. As impossible to Olaf Palme as to Ronald Reagan. Impossible to uncommitted nations and communist and capitalist nations. The kingdoms of darkness and the purported kingdoms of light are equally plunged in darkness.

And perhaps most striking of all, beating swords into plowshares is impossible to conventional Christianity. Such religion has offered the stalemated world, during most of these years, by no means a suffering or witnessing church. It has had no oracles to offer the benighted nations. Indeed, the church could not, in any semblance of good faith, echo the oracle of Isaiah. No, the church has been the aider and abetter, the co-conspirator, the hand that laid a blessing on the forging of swords. A blessing that is a curse.

And yet the oracle sounds, with absolute assurance. "They shall beat swords into plowshares, their lances into pruning hooks." "They" shall do this, which is to say, ourselves; in this generation, in our lifetime, our adulthood -- in no other. Shall our children be safe, our world salvaged? It is, literally and brutally, now or never.

I fear falling into another sort of fatalism here. As though in saying "now or never" I were saying something like this: The famous clock of the nuclear scientists is ticking away, a time bomb. We stand to lose everything, unless we muster our resources and lay our weight to a great fulcrum, a nuclear accommodation -- an Icelandic freeze, so to speak. All are agreed there are too many nukes; very well, let us reason together; let us find an acceptable number of nukes to live with, to be "comfortable" with. Let us seek a marriage of convenience in Armageddon.

This is too easy in principle. It is also frivolous in political understanding and doomed in practice. The oracle of Isaiah stands against all such absurd "peacekeeping," a nuclear winter in the soul, pure numb desolate terror.

Isaiah stands against; so does God. The oracle proceeds neither from expediency nor psychological necessity nor imperial arrogance, however veiled; not from Armageddonists nor from nuclear nightmares or daymares; not from the spirit of blackmail, rancor, ideologies bloody or bloodless. It proceeds from a different source than these polluted ones. It proceeds from the fidelity of God.

The word implies a promise; disarmament shall happen, it is irresistible. No human will, no malevolence, no nation, not the most powerful imperium, can prevent it. The tone is absolute, for the promise is uttered by God, and God is faithful.

I have an image awakened by the text. First of all, a hand. Or better, many hands. The hands of women and men and children. Hands of farmers, hands of former warriors. Indeed, the text implies that all hands are symbolized by these two; the converted warrior, the veteran who casts his medals away; and then the farmer, cultivator, nurturer, cherisher, the "compleat ecologist," the lover of children and of all the living.

In any case, such hands, armed only with hammers, come down with force against a bared weapon. They bend it around, blunt its cruel edge, neutralize its threat. And more, for they are not mere destroyers. They transform instruments of death and maiming and blood. Transform them into something new, useful, pro-human. And yet more. In the act, those who beat the sword into its new shape are themselves transformed.

As a little child, each spring I stumbled along after the plow, as my father turned the earth up, black and huge, one furrow upon another. A new, mild, breathing odor arose in the suave air, after the killing north country winter. I imagined that the giants of the earth were turning over in sleep, just short of awakening.

Or I thought of the furrows as great coils of woven rope. A vast weaving of the tegument of the world was being enacted before my eyes.

The child, it must be admitted, was not notably useful to the work; he went along, free and feckless, a contemplative of the new season, wandering, humming to himself, falling behind, catching up. Sometimes he had a sense of walking on black waters; the furrows dipped and rose, his unsteady feet were treading a kind of heavy earthen surf.

Was the earth breathing? He remembers breathing the earth; that overpowering odor, the released soul of the soil.

That world of the child, measured by later times, was small and restricted. It held before him a truth, but a partial one. Which is to say, he thought the whole world was like his world; that plowing the earth was the normal function of humans; that the odor of the earth was of soil, not blood or brimstone.

He had much to learn.

Only later, when he saw his four brothers enlisted for war, the truth, the reversal of the oracle of Isaiah, struck. The war was, in the cruelest of phrases, world war, total war. "For the duration," as they said, the able-bodied laid down the plow and took up the sword.

Even that awful fact did not exhaust the event. In effect, the plows were not abandoned in wartime; they were beaten into swords. Swords had become the symbol of the human itself; the swordless, the unarmed (and more stigmatized, the disarmed) were simply less than human. They were shirkers, deserters, draft evaders, fit to be ostracized or jailed, or both.

And if here and there a plow turned up the earth in those years, it turned up corpses and land mines and the discarded rusted tools of peace.

During the war, the nation was conferring a new name on my four brothers. They were no longer farmers, steelworkers, students. They were warriors. That was their honor, the new vocation conferred on them by holy mother state. Their lives took on an unlikely static beat. Their lives, like their clothing, went from multiform to uniform. So did their minds, their obedience, their civil baptism. They were pledged to kill, or to support those who killed.

The boy learned something else. He learned a cruel new climate in which he must live. It was not yet a nuclear winter; and yet the air was like a sword at the throat. No more springtime; no climate of peace; always war, hot or cold. Hot war, Korea, Vietnam; and cold war in between. Never a season for plowing; always the season of the sword.

He had much to learn, and he was so slow a learner! It came to this: As long as the sword was in hand, the human vocation was violated. God lent neither presence, approval, nor blessing. In wartime other gods, Mars or Vulcan or Jupiter, were in horrid charge worldwide.

This is the way it went, our lifetime.

For decades, the gods plowed the earth with a sword blade; then they sowed the earth with dragons' teeth: nuclear mines, bunkers, laboratories. And there sprang up a new and unheard of race -- nuclear warriors.

Thus was a new history forged, an utterly spurious normalcy, a new sin. The new sin was the original sin in a new form, newly made original.

And most appalling of all, conceived in the sin of war, a new species of human was born. Call it the "normalized inhuman."

This phenomenon, the new human, as presented and authenticated, was a permanent figure of terror. The human was now one with the nuclear warrior.

All other forms of the human, those which long centuries of travail and glory had created, were thus placed in question. The believing human, the compassionate human, the just human, above all the peacemaking human -- these became peripheral to the main chance. They were severally tolerated or suspected or indicted or jailed. They were, in a sense, in the human race, but not of it.

And what of the nations, more specifically of the nuclear nations? Under such assault, the assembly of humans became, in concert, a suicide club; a mutuality of perfectly balanced hostility teetering, bickering, lying, invading, cozening, controlling. The nations fulfilled to the letter the dark description of the inhuman in Paul's letter to the Christians of Rome.

The ecology of the world, too, was monstrously altered; it became a forest of drawn swords laid to the throats of the living.

And still, that oracle of Isaiah. Heartening, despite all; the oracle was issued in a time analogous to our own. The lifetime of First Isaiah was as dangerous, as petrifying to the spirit -- mindless, captive to illusion, appallingly belligerent.

Indeed, nuclear developments have merely underscored once again the ancient stereotype and impasse faced by the prophet. A world at war, a world prepared for another war, a world grown inept in the sweet uses and skills of peace.

An unlikely time to issue a word of hope!

Indeed, the worst time, Isaiah dares imply, is the apt time! The kairos of God, the epiphany of God's hope, enters the human scene at the moment when hands drop in helplessness, when all resources fail. The time when nothing can be done, when the new gods own the world -- this is exactly the time of the toppling of unsteady thrones.

If only we believed!

I summon to our side the suffering servants of the oracle, those who have taken the hammer in hand and beaten the nuclear sword into a plowshare. I summon Helen Woodson, mother of seven. Sentence: twelve years. Summon the Frs. Kabat, Carl and Paul. Sentences: twelve and eight years. Summon Larry Cloud Morgan. Sentence: eight years. Summon Richard Miller. Sentence: four years. Summon Darla Bradley, Jean Gump, Larry Morlan, Ken Rippetoe. Sentences: eight years. Summon John Volpe. Sentence: seven years. And so on, and so on. Since 1980, over sixty Plowshares actions, over one hundred resisters. In former West Germany, England, Sweden, Australia, the U.S.

I summon them to our side, to our worship and intercession, sisters and brothers, Christians and Jews, prisoners and ex-prisoners of the oracle. Summon them: parents and grandparents, nuns and priests, Catholic workers, missioners, chaplains, teachers. Summon them to our side, where they belong. Ignored as they are by the media, derided by prosecutors, scorned by judges, their fate of no great concern to churches and synagogues.

In a lesser mode, but still a painful one, I summon my brothers Jerome and Philip, repeatedly jailed for nonviolent resistance.

These women and men have made a beginning in the sorry and thankless task of fidelity to the oracle. No great claim, and yet through the courage of a few, the claim is repeatedly verified. They have made a human future less unlikely for all. They laid their hammer to the sword, and the beginning of a new creation has dawned in our terrifying world. The sword is turned aside; the plow renews the earth.

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