Last weekend, Pax Christi Metro NYC honored Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ as part of its Peacemaking Through the Arts Winter Benefit. Outside, the weather was icy, but, inside, friends gathered from as far away as Montreal, Canada, to celebrate Dan. I was invited to give a “testimonial” about a man I had known since birth. It was a tough assignment, but I thought I would share it with the Waging Nonviolence community. I did not really talk about all his many accomplishments; those are well documented in many places, including his autobiography, To Dwell in Peace. Here is what I said.

It is hard to sum up a life in a few sentences, especially when the man living that life so boldly and so fully is sitting in the front row and is smiling wryly and with tolerance. This assignment makes me think about retirement—it brings up a lot of iconic images, doesn’t it? You know; the gold watch for years of dedicated service, the gilded plaque etched with platitudes, the break room or Elk Lodge or church hall party. And then the life afterwards: golf, fishing, carnival cruises, and a fun and stimulating hobby like carving duck decoys or learning French.

Some people never retire. Dan Berrigan has never retired. And we are here to say thank you and thank God for that.

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A picture of smiling people from the Fiddleheads Food Co-op website.

I am the loose tea buyer at my local food coop. Oh, stop—it’s not as glamorous as it sounds.

All I do is maintain an inventory of about 30 kinds of teas—black, green, herbal and medicinal. I am learning as I go, since coffee (black, hot and copious) is my beverage of choice. The teas come in pound bags and I transfer them into attractive jars, refilling the stock as needed and keeping the area tidy. The whole job takes 10 to 15 hours a month, and I earn a 15 percent discount on my groceries. When I took over teas, I also absorbed most of the “medicinal herbs” that were sprinkled throughout the nearby loose spices area. So now my bailiwick includes everything that you mix with hot water before consuming (except the already-lamented coffee). Every time I walk into the store, I take a few minutes to tidy up my area and make sure the teas are still in alphabetical order.

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We had a big birthday bash for my step-daughter a few weeks ago. It was great: a big gaggle of kids, music, pancakes, a rainbow cake and lots of balloons. I appointed myself balloon maven and—armed with a how-to guide from the Klutz series and a hand pump—handed out wonderful balloon hats to the youngsters.

They were a hit. But I had not studied my guide very carefully, and once they started clamoring for dog and cat and dragon balloon animals, I was deeply out of my element.

“A wand, what about a magic wand?” I improvised with the first little boy who asked for a dog balloon. I whipped it up quick and handed it to him with a Harry Potteresque flourish. “There, now you can do magic.”

“Cool,” he replied, “a sword!” and he dashed off to engage his little brother.

Soon all the kids were crowded around my knees demanding (politely) swords in all the colors of the rainbows. “I will make you a magic wand,” I insisted to each, manipulating the top of the long balloons into fanciful wand like shapes. “Okay, but I am going to turn it into a sword,” they said again and again, undoing my handiwork at the top of the wands and swashbuckling their ways across the church hall. It went on like this all morning. The only child I could get to request a magic wand was my very own Rosena, and even she used it like a sword the minute it was in her little hands.

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The defendants file in—some looking neat and upstanding, some in their best approximation of the same. They all look tired. Sleeping on the floor of a church can do that to a person.

The white haired, slightly amused and always alert judge, the white noise machine when the lawyers confer with the judge, the stern and fit marshals, the wall to wall carpet and wood paneling. Yes—we are in a DC court. Take off your hats, gentlemen and ma’am, no knitting allowed in the court.

The matter before the court is unusual. The defendants are representing themselves, with legal advisors on hand. They stakes are high—if convicted, they could face up to a year in jail.

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I am trying to get excited about Christmas—which is right around the corner (as though anyone needs a reminder), but I can get a bit “bah humbug.” Christmas music drives me nuts, I think most decorations are tacky, and all the manic shopping and false cheer turns my stomach.

I blame my parents, who never once took me to the mall to visit Santa Claus when I was young. I also never wrote the old man a “wish list.” So here I am, at 37, sitting down to write my very first letter to Santa Claus.

Dear Mr. Claus,

I hope this letter finds you and the missus well. I know you are known by many names—Kris Kringle, old Saint Nicholas, but I will call you by your American commercial name for the purpose of this letter.

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It is going to be a long, cold winter. That is what meteorologists are warning throughout the country. AccuWeather.com’s Long Range Forecasting Team says the United States should be preparing for “another brutal one” this season, with the Midwest bearing the brunt of the assault.

For most in the northern parts of the country, preparing for winter means making sure your oil tank is full, checking your storm windows or sticking sheets of plastic over your windows and plugging any new drafts. But, this year, it might be time to take the fight to stay warm to Washington, D.C.

Why? Because inside that cold, cold Beltway, they are spending money on war instead of keeping Americans warm! Sounds simplistic? Well, listen to this.

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My dad died nine years ago this week. Talking about waging nonviolence and little insurrections.

In life, as in dying, my dad was a peaceful warrior.

In the fall of 2002, after months of feeling lousy and only very slowly healing from hip surgery, Phil Berrigan, priest, peace activist, father of the plowshares movement and three kids, went to the doctor. The verdict came back harsh: advanced (stage 4) and aggressive liver cancer that had metastasized to his kidneys. The doctors said they could treat it with chemotherapy, but the chances of a full recovery were slight. Dad was up for trying chemo and wanted to let the doctors—oncologists at the top of their game at Johns Hopkins—a chance, but after one round of chemo, he said “no more.”

Friends from far and wide offered alternative cures, advice, great stories of teas and herbs that (against all odds) allowed them to live cancer-free. But, our dad sat us down and told us that he was seeking healing, not a cure; putting his faith in God and in us—praying for healing and for the faith to be strong in the months to come and asking us to start preparing for a life without him. He was not afraid, he told us. He loved us and he was sad, but he would be ready.

And then, with clear eyes and a lot of compassion, he got down to the hard work of dying with dignity.

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Protesters against Guantanamo in Washington, D.C., on January 11, 2008. Photo by Keith Ivey, via Flickr.

In a world full of injustice—from battered women to clubbed seals to the Club of Europe, from neglected children to nuclear weapons to mountain top removal, from torture at Guantanamo to torture at Bagram to torture in Chicago’s prisons to the torture of the death penalty, from famine in Somalia to deforestation to families being broken by Arizona’s immigration laws—how do you choose what to work on?

Most people choose what affects them most personally, what they feel like they can change, what breaks their heart. Some people choose what seems most strategic: if this small thing changes here, it might move all these other things along in the right direction. Some people race from topic to topic to topic, needing to be everywhere and in the middle of everything. Some combo of the first and second stance seems like the right place to be, right?

I start with all this because I have been thinking about Guantanamo. The notorious and often forgotten gulag is in the news again this week because the Senate voted on Tuesday to retain a provision within the National Defense Authorization Act that would allow the military detain terror suspects on U.S. soil and hold them indefinitely without trial. In addition, the measure—which passed in a bipartisan show of fear-mongering and brutality—would close the door to civilian trials for terror suspects and place restrictions on resettling the dozens of men at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release.

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Brian Terrell addresses a judge at Kansas City’s Municipal Court during a trial over a protest against nuclear weapons in 2010.

Standing in front of a judge is intimidating (to me anyway). It seems a whole lot easier to cross a line, refuse to move, or lie down in the middle of the street, than stand before a judge. I would rather be trussed up in handcuffs and crammed into a crowded police wagon than stand before a judge. They are often world-weary and judgmental (I guess it comes with the territory). I would rather stay in the grubby holding cell and drink the water that comes out of the little fountain on top of the stainless steel (seat-less) toilet than stand before a judge. They don’t really appear to be listening to what the people standing before them are saying. They often look out from heavy eye lids and one gets the sense that they think they have heard it all before. It is easier to hold a big sign or wear an orange jumpsuit or participate in street theater or leaflet the tourists or engage in conversation with an angry and alienated guy, than try and explain my motivations and thinking to a judge who I assume doesn’t have the time or interest to care.

I haven’t had a lot of chances to stand before a judge, but I am always really scared when I do. The most recent time, I emerged from more than 24 hours of “processing” in leg irons (I put “processing” in quotes to convey how much it sucked). We had been arrested early in the afternoon on January 11, 2008 at the Supreme Court, trying to unfurl a banner that said “Justice Denied.” In total, there were more than 90 of us inside the court building and on the steps outside, many dressed in orange jumpsuits and the rest wearing orange tee shirts under our jackets. Inside, after the banner was snatched away from us, we knelt down and began reading a statement together that described what men at Guantanamo had experienced of “U.S. justice.” We decided not to carry identification, symbolically and in a real way taking the names and identities of individual men at Guantanamo into U.S. courts and shedding some small bit of privilege and control that comes along with having a U.S. issued ID.

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I can’t remember the first time I heard the phrase “hunger strike.” I think it must have been when my dad went to Northern Ireland in the early 1980s to try and visit the men held in the Maze prison. My brother and I had a record of Irish political songs (are there any other kind?) and one told the story of Bobby Sands and the other men who refused to cooperate with the terms of their imprisonment. They refused to wear clothes, eat or use the bathroom. (They called it “being on the blanket” because they wore blankets instead of prison uniforms.)

In my child’s mind, I did not understand why anyone would do all of this—isn’t being in jail bad enough? Later I learned that they refused to eat or cooperate until they were recognized as political prisoners. The British government, which was occupying Northern Ireland, treated them like common criminals—no different from anyone else who had broken the law—but they saw themselves as a rival military force who, once apprehended, had to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions strictures on holding prisoners of war. That is why Bobby Sands died, because the British would not treat him like a prisoner of war.

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