A Great Ring of Pure and Endless Light: A Reflection on the Icon of Philip and Daniel Berrigan

Daniel and Philip Berrigan were two of the most photographed faces of modern American Catholicism – at protests, in prison jumpsuits, handcuffed, holding children, alone, together, in groups of fellow war resisters, and most famously on the cover of the January 25, 1971 Time magazine with the caption, “Rebel Priests: The Curious Case of the Berrigans.” And now they appear together in an icon, the work of renowned iconographer and Franciscan Brother Robert Lentz. An icon has a very different purpose than a photograph. An icon is not intended to be like a photograph, freezing in time a moment of history. An icon is a window into eternity, a sacramental presence, a conduit of divine energy, a radiant flame of holy light in a darkling world.

            Dan is depicted in clerical garb – a dress which he rarely wore in life, except for the occasional protest. At his wake he was dressed in full mass vestments, his Jesuit vow crucifix resting in his hands- prompting one of his nieces to comment that it was the first time she had even seen Uncle Dan dressed that way. But despite a tendentious relationship with both, the priesthood and the Society of Jesus meant everything to Dan. While sovereignly disinterested in rubrics and missals, Dan’s life was Eucharistic to the core. He wanted nothing more than to witness to a God who looked at the world and said, “Here is my body, broken for you.” And to say this in face of the American empire that looks at the world and says, “Here is your body, broken for us.”  As his nephew Jerry remarked at his wake, “Uncle Dan lived in the heart of God and reported back to the rest of us.” Dan looks small and frail next to his robust and athletic brother. From childhood, he never enjoyed vigorous health. But his penetrating gaze in the icon, his face, in the biblical expression, “set like flint” speak of his tireless moral energy. Dan’s right hand is raised – in a priestly gesture of blessing? Surely that. But equally the gesture for “halt.” As Dan testified at the 1981 Plowshares 8 trial, “Our plight is very primitive from a Christian standpoint. We are back to where we started. Thou shalt not kill; we are not allowed to kill. Everything today comes down to that — everything!" His body, his life, his words – each were a “no” to war and the fruits of war, “Everything begins with that no, spoken with the heart's full energies, a suffering and prophetic word, a word issuing from the nature and direction of things.”  Dan’s lips can also be seen upturned in the beginning of a wry smile; perhaps a reminder of his generous and fierce wit.

             Phil is dressed is workman’s clothes, the vestments of the common priesthood of sweat and craft. For many years, Jonah House, the Baltimore resistance community founded by Phil and his wife Elizabeth McAlister, supported itself by house painting; and later by reclaiming an ancient cemetery from decades of neglect. Phil’s left arm pulls Dan into an embrace. And pulls him as well into a company of resistance. It was Phil that drew his brother into active resistance by an invitation to join the group that became the Catonsville 9. It was an invitation that was to become a life’s call and one that Dan knew as a signal grace. As he wrote in a 1978 letter to Phil, “What a blessing to be beckoned along so gracefully and gently – yet irresistibly too, like God’s own nudge.” Phil’s furrowed face and deep eyes speak, too, of moral resolve.

            Following iconographic convention, Lentz inscribes the names of Holy Daniel and Holy Philip in Church Slavonic near their heads.

            In iconographic symbol, saints who hold scrolls are proclaimers of divine wisdom. They are prophets who are especially prescient in sight and insistent in calls to conversion and action. Phil’s scroll carries his words, “The poor tell us who we are. Prophets tell us who we could be. So we hide the poor and kill the prophets.” These were the two holy books to which Phil gave deep contemplation. He rigorously judged American society from the perspective of how the impoverished, the imprisoned, the marginalized were faring. He was also a man who kept a bible in the glove compartment of the car and the briefest family trip was an opportunity for a scripture study. The biblical vision of Shalom consumed him; “We Christians forget (if we ever learned) that attempts to redress real or imagined injustice by violent means are merely another exercise in denial — denial of God and her nonviolence towards us, denial of love of neighbor, denial of laws essential to our being.” 

            Dan’s scroll reads “Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children,” taken from his statement  in the name of the Catonsville Nine. His poem “Some” interrogates the Plowshare 8 about their motivations:

“Because of the children,” they said, and
“Because of the heart, and
“Because of the bread,”

“Because the cause is
the heart’s beat, and
the children born, and
the risen bread.”

Dan staked his life on the proposition that no order was good if it did not promote a world of wildly beating hearts, a world of flourishing children, a world of tables heavy with feasts.

            The heads of Dan and Phil are framed by interlocking golden haloes. In iconography the golden halo is the Uncreated Light, the glory of God, which shines through the life and the body of the saint. Perhaps Lentz links the haloes to show that the brothers’ paths of holiness were intertwined. They were uncommonly close even for brothers. Dan once wrote to Phil of his sense of being blessed in his relationship with Phil and his wife Elizabeth McAlister and their children “…a sense of you, my heart’s dearest, a sense that lies on all my life like Christ’s own hand blessing me every day and hour. Sometimes I think of all of us in ‘the great ring of pure and endless light’…We bless one another, in trying to live the way we do.” The haloes are that great ring of pure and endless light.

            Often the entire background of icons is gold leaf, so that the image is pervaded by God’s glory. Lentz chose to make the background green. Green is the color of the Life-giving Spirit in iconography. If you want to know where God is – look where things are growing, where barren branches have green buds, wherever there is freshness, and fertility, and the swelling of growth – there is God. The way of holiness of the Berrigans was to put themselves completely at the service of the Life-Giving Spirit.

            Iconographer Fr. William Hart McNichols was a close friend of both Dan and Phil Berrigan. He painted a cross on the cover of Phil’s coffin with lettering from the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the peacemakers and the persecuted.”  In reflecting on icons, McNichols wrote, “We are formed by what we gaze at.”  Much of what we gaze at, television and Smartphone screens, forms us to be consumers. When we gaze at an icon we are formed to become what the icon is – a radiant presence of the God of Life. Spend some time gazing at the icon of Holy Philip and Holy Daniel. Let your gaze wander, notice what attracts or intrigues you and let your heart be stretched by the symbols. Let the greening Spirit revive the lifeless places in you. Let the icon question you. Whose arm draws you into a shared journey of peacemaking? How do you raise your hand, your life in a gesture that puts a halt to war?