Renegade Priest

One of the best days I spent living in Boston was going to hear Daniel Berrigan at the Cambridge Meeting House. It was October or November, the leaves were finally starting to turn after false starts and fake-outs. There was a breeze and the air was chilly, but the weak afternoon light made it seem warmer. After it was over I walked down to the Charles River and just enjoyed being by myself, thinking about whatever I felt like. You never know when you'll be at your happiest, and usually it's when it's least expected.

Berrigan is a Catholic priest better known for his activism than his poetry. He was staunchly opposed to the Vietnam War, spent time in hiding and on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for vandalism of government property (read: draft cards). He's still very active and anti-war, from nuclear proliferation in the '80s to the Iraq War.

But that afternoon he was very soft-spoken, very hushed, he read calmly and steadily. It helped that everyone else was silent, rustling and coughing just got absorbed in the whiteness of the walls and the plainness of the space. It was hard to believe that somebody that's such an agitator and troublemaker could also be so serene.

He seems to follow in the tradition of Donne, Herbert and Hopkins: priests who felt called to poetry. This one of his has stuck with me for a long time.

The Crucifix

Daniel Berrigan

(for an eighty-sixth birthday)

I

I remember today a Quebec roadside, the crucifix
raised crude as life among farming people,
its shadow creeping, dawn and twilight, over their lives.
Among wains, haycocks and men it moved like a savior.

So old, so scored by their winters, it had been staked out
perhaps by a band of ruffians on first Good Friday.
The way it endured, time would have bruised his fist in striking it.

What time had done, breaking the bones at knee and wrist,
washing the features blank as quarry stone,
turning the legs to spindles, stealing the eyes

was only to plant forever its one great gesture
deeper in furrow, heave it high above rooftops.

Where time had done his clumsy worst, cracking its heart,
hollowing its breast inexorably,--he opened this Burning-glass
to hold the huge landscape: crops, houses and men, in Its fire.

II

He was irremovably there, nailing down the landscape,
more permanent than any mountain time could bring down
or frost alter face of. He could not be turned aside
from his profound millennial prayer: not by birds
moved wonderfully to song on that cruel bough:
not by sun, standing compassionately at right hand or left.

Let weathers tighten or loosen his nails: he was vowed to stand.
Northstar took rise from his eyes, learned constancy of him.
Let cloudburst break like judgment, sending workmen homeward
whipping their teams from field, down the rutted road to barn

still his body took punishment like a mainsail
bearing the heaving world onward to the Father.

And men knew nightlong: in the clear lovely morning he will be there,
not to be pulled down from the lanscape, never from his people's hearts.