"Know Where You Stand, and Stand There"

Notes on Daniel Berrigan's Poems and Another School Shooting

I had been re-reading and studying afresh Daniel Berrigan’s work this summer, paying special attention to the two poems I’ll share in this essay, “Credentials,” and “The Trouble With Our State.” I’d only just finished a draft of the essay, notes really, a few days before two acts of violence—one a shooting behind the school I work at, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, another the more well-known mass-shooting at Annunciation Catholic School and Church just a few miles south—rocked my world.

After the long week of teaching and tending ended, I opened my notebook to these two poems and notes and realized—as I have before—that Berrigan and his work was talking to this moment, too.

Credentials / Daniel Berrigan
I would it were possible to state in so
Few words my errand in the world: quite simply
Forestalling all inquiry, the oak offers his leaves
Largehandedly. And in winter his integral magnificent
order

Decrees, says solemnly who he is
In the great thrusting limbs that are all finally
One: a return, a permanent riverandsea.
So the rose is its own credential, a certain
Unattainable effortless form: wearing its heart
Visibly, it gives us heart too, bud, fulness and fall.

I am in awe of this poem, and the feeling I get reading it is that the poet is himself in awe of (and jealous, too) of those magnificent creations he renders here, the oak and the rose.

Daniel Berrigan was of course a Jesuit priest, and it’s hard for me not to think of the fellow Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” where fish, dragonflies, and stones testify as simply as the rose and oak do in Berrigan’s poem. “What I do is me,” as Hopkins puts it in his poem, “for that I came.”

But though these two poems might “rhyme” in the way they admire the self-witnessing of beings in the natural world, they veer from each other when they touch on us, the human beings.

While Hopkins expands the frame to include Christ “playing in ten thousand places,” Berrigan begins his poem wondering at his own particular “errand in the world.”

That phrase “errand in the world” invites us as readers to connect the words of Berrigan’s poem with his life, specifically the bold actions he took on behalf of peace. “I couldn’t not do it,” he said of his burning of draft files in 1968, in protest of the Vietnam War, his part in the famous Catonsville 9 action. Like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, his prophetic words cannot be separated from his actions in the world. Like them, Berrigan spoke from the place where he stood. And as a coherent prophetic witness, Berrigan’s words and actions call everything we Americans hold dear into question. As

David Dark

said so eloquently in a 2019 podcast episode about Berrigan, the Catonsville 9 action, and Berrigan’s life and witness generally, is a “buried memory”—repressed, actually—in American history.

I found myself immediately drawn to this poem based on the title alone. Credentials. We Americans love our credentials, don’t we? By what right and authority are you saying these things? In our meritocratic eyes, how can you prove you’ve earned the right to speak? But for Berrigan, the rose talks back to this idiocy, is “its own credential…/ wearing its heart visibly.”

This is the prophetic way, and of course includes Jesus himself, who never did satisfy his critics as to his pedigree and credentials. And the rose “wearing its heart visibly” aligns with all prophets inside and outside of religious traditions, who testify nakedly, vulnerably to the truths they see. “I can’t not do it,” they all say, in one way or another.

The three-part gift from the rose that gives us heart is intriguing too: “bud, fulness and fall.” Fall. Like any prophetic word or blessing in the scriptures, this witness of the rose cuts two ways, points at the same time to the beginning, the fullness, and the end. Like the oak tree’s roots—“riverandsea.”

It’s a fearless poem. A clear-eyed poem. I imagine it as the kind of poem Berrigan might have recited to himself, a gift of the spirit that kept on giving him courage and strength. Anyway, I take heart from it and in Berrigan’s witness, especially in these dark days.

As I was reading and re-reading “Credentials” and the other poem I will share with you in a moment, I also took the time to watch the documentary, The Holy Outlaw, filmed as Berrigan was on the run, a fugitive from the law following his participation in the Catonsville 9 action.

A number of others, inspired by the Catonsville 9, orchestrated similar actions during this time, and the filmmaker interviews a pair of priests from the Milwaukee 14, who confiscated and then burned approximately 10,000 draft files in that city.

I was struck by the comments of one of the priests interviewed, Father Robert Cunnane, who mentioned that the two common ways of thinking about Berrigan were as that of a “nut” or a “prophet.” Father Cunnane said he actually preferred the “nut” viewpoint to the one that saw Berrigan as “prophet,” because the language of “prophet” makes his action seem somehow out of reach, beyond normal human grasp. But for Father Cunnane and his thirteen other very human collaborators in Milwaukee, the action they took was very much in grasp, as straightforward as taking paper from another person—admittedly by force—and then burning it. Like Berrigan, the much less famous Father Cunnane said a version of “I couldn’t not do it,” when referring to his own participation in this illegal action.

I note that poetry, like prophecy, sometimes gets a similarly “mystical” treatment that, in my experience, is accompanied by a dismissal. Oh, poetry. That’s a lovely thing, but far beyond my ability to read and understand, much less write it myself. This attitude irritates me, as does the poetry that unnecessarily hides its insights or its urgency. Some poetry of necessity will be difficult to understand, will take work. And doubtless there are poems of Daniel Berrigan in this category. But I defy you, reader, to be confused by the lines I give you below. You may not like what they say, but they are clear as daylight, or a storm cloud.

The Trouble With Our State
The trouble with our state
was not civil disobedience
which in any case was hesitant and rare.

Civil disobedience was rare as kidney stone
No, rarer; it was disappearing like immigrants’
disease.

You’ve heard of a war on cancer?
There is no war like the media
There is no war like routine
There is no war like 3 square meals
There is no war like a prevailing wind

It blows swiftly, whispers
Don’t rock the boat
The sails obey, the ship of state rolls on.

The trouble with our state
—we learned it only afterward
when the dead resembled the living who
resembled the dead
and civic virtue shone like paint on tin
and tin citizens and tine soldiers marched to the
common whip

—our trouble
the trouble with our state
with our state of soul
our state of siege—
was
civil
obedience.

This is not a complicated poem, though it strikes deep. As the reversal at the end of the poem makes clear, the “trouble with our state” is that we, the citizens in it, obey its dictates blindly, drinking in the fear of resisting them with our morning coffee—“Don’t rock the boat” much more in our bloodstreams than “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

Berrigan was nothing if not political in his approach to art and artmaking, and of course this poem is political. Even directly so. But to dismiss him and this poem as the work of a “radical lefty” as we might justifiably dismiss Trump’s supporters who stormed the capital on January 6, 2021 as “radical right wingers” is inadequate. The radical nature of Berrigan’s witness had political ramifications and motivations, of course, but its roots were in the gospels of Jesus Christ, not any political ideology.

There is no war like a prevailing wind. And what an evil idiot wind has blown our way these past weeks. I write these words in the aftermath of yet another school shooting, this one in my backyard, and at a Catholic school. What would Berrigan say to this fresh horror?

I don’t know. I know that Berrigan did say of his own courageous action at Catonsville and encouraging others: “Know where you stand and stand there.” (Thanks again to David Dark who reminded me of this and expanded on this saying in the podcast I’ll link you to below.) What this saying means to me now is to stand in grief. To stand with tears on my face as I try to get ready to teach in a classroom. A classroom, which, as it happened, a day before the Annunciation shooting, has windows that looked out on another shooting the day before. A person gunned down on the streets we walk down every day—and many others wounded. The street blocked off with police tape.

Know where you stand, and stand there.

I told a colleague the other day, walking up the steps to school in the aftermath of both shootings that I felt numb. But I don’t want to feel numb.

I learned that David Dark, that beautiful teacher and scholar I’ve been quoting here repeatedly has published a book with a simple title that speaks to the moment I am stumbling into, trying to stay conscious and sane: We Become What We Normalize. (None of this is normal. Dan Berrigan reminds me it is important to keep some (sane) measure of anger always burning, to say no, actually, none of this is normal. Not the active shooter drills. Not the lockdowns. Not the violence followed by the vigils. Not the political opportunism in response to it all. Not the violence so many of us fund and benefit from in places we don’t see. Not the mass deportation of human beings. Not the building of concentration camps. Not the armageddons and genocides we continue to create in different parts of the world while we mourn our own neighborhood apocalypses. None of this is normal.

So, at this moment, at the start of another school year, I’ll stand with my one voice, amidst the numerous others standing beside me, students, teachers, staff members. I’ll feel the tears on my face and the anger in my belly. I don’t know what to say yet, but I know where I stand, and I’m standing there.

*Poems by Daniel Berrigan used with permission of the Daniel Berrigan Literary Trust.

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Notes:

-Please do continue to support the students, faculty, and staff at Annunciation School in Minneapolis. Donate here.

-Here’s the podcast I referenced earlier, from 2019, where

David Dark

talks about his essay on Daniel Berrigan with The Project on Lived Theology Podcast.

-Finally, in case you missed last week’s special issue on our first new One Subject Press title, Scott F. Parker’s Teaching without Teaching, check that out here. And if you’ve already read the book, please do leave a review wherever book reviews are found.