An Interview With Daniel Berrigan
Americans don’t generally think of the consequences of war. We have grown calloused souls, with the help of a duplicitous leadership, an inert Congress, a morally cloudy church, and the jingoistic media. Add to this our historically embedded racism and you have a poisonous brew indeed, hardening hearts against thought or concern for the slaughtered innocents of Iraq.
Auntie Barba Dear Auntie Barba, What kinds of questions does Saint Peter ask…
Last year I was robbed twice.
In 1913, my great-aunt Adela ran away with a boy intent on joining Pancho Villa’s revolutionary Army of the North. She was sixteen. The Revolution promised freedom from tyrants such as Díaz, Huerta, and her own father the rurales captain. Only her youngest brother did not disown her.
I did not begin training as a psychiatrist with an open mind.
When I was twenty years old, I had the opportunity to witness the cremation of a human body. It was springtime in Virginia, when the air is laced with the fragrance of magnolia and cherry, and I was still young enough to think of death as merely a normal rite of passage.
We’re on this Greyhound bus heading down to an American football stadium in New Orleans for the England v. USA preliminaries of the World Soccer Championships. About ten of us all told, England supporters every last one. We’re feeling beery and belligerent as always, and we’re chanting the usual, ENG — LAND, ENG — LAND, ENG — LAND.
When a gust of wind touched down in the fields and swept across the open road, my car shuddered and the steering wheel jerked back and forth under my hands. The minister in the car in front of me turned on his headlights, so I turned mine on too. The cars behind me followed suit, fifteen cars with their headlights on at ten o’clock in the morning. Beside the road, the winter wheat swayed and twisted, whole sections flattening out and rising again as the wind passed on.
I’m forever telling myself how lucky I am to have you for a grandson. Your grandmother always said you were one in a million whenever you came to stay with us for a week in Florida. You ate what she gave you without any complaints, you fixed up the sofa bed every morning, and you always asked if there was something you could do for her to help. She loved introducing you to everyone at the clubhouse
Growing up in an affluent California suburb, I had limited contact with minorities. I surrounded myself with others just like me, and we created a homogeneous, tightly-knit group from which we excluded all those who didn’t “fit.” When my mother tried to talk with me about global events, I brushed her off, assuring her that what happened halfway around the world didn’t have any connection with my life.
Once again, as in the sixties, many of us sense the door of collective awareness opening, albeit slightly, allowing for the possibility that our lives together, as a society, could be lived with more consciousness and compassion.
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