Friends on a Raft in the Storm

The friendship of Daniel Berrigan and Thich Nhat Hahn was momentous in measure. Both practicing poets, trained in spiritual disciplines, nonviolent resisters creating community, variously exiled, facing a war at personal cost, they had much in common across distance and culture.

January 22 marks a year since the death of Thich Nhat Hahn, the monk and Vietnamese Zen master so widely known as an anti-war activist and teacher of mindfulness – for him one and the same. During Holy Week, 1974 Dan and Nhat Hahn sat together for tea and conversation in a quiet suburb of Paris. Their wide-ranging exchange, was transcribed and published as The Raft is Not the Shore (Beacon, 1975/Orbis, 2001). My beloved original copy is marked and worn, held together with purple tape. The more recent edition is likewise marked and loved anew. Their sharing began with a discussion of death. Perhaps the season and the war ongoing could only make it so.

Nhat Hahn observed that one who does not know how to die, does not know how to live. Moreover and striking, it was he who noted that Christian scriptures distinguish death (small “d”) as a part of life, but also recognize Death (Big “D”) as a power over against life. Little wonder they should return to the topic on Good Friday, under the heading of “self-immolation.”

Near me is a signed print with tattered edges by Vietnamese artist Vo-Dinh depicting Nhat Chi Mai, student and member of Nhat Hahn’s Order of InterBeing, who immolated herself May 16, 1967 in response to the U.S. war. It hung on Dan’s wall, among a host of friends and family. The monk describes her love of life and the care she took in preparing to burn herself publicly. Friends thought she’d fallen in love and was preparing to marry. She bought a dress; wrote letters thoughtfully set aside.

There were similar acts here in the States, largely unknown: Alice Herz here in Detroit, Norman Morrison outside the Pentagon, among them. Dan was deeply impacted by two – a young man in Syracuse at whose dying bedside he sat, and Roger LaPorte, a young Catholic Worker friend, who offered and suffered it outside the UN. Dan stirred an ecclesial storm when his memorial homily at the New York Worker declined to name it a suicide, but rather a hopeful act of self-sacrifice. With Nhat Hahn, he goes on to suggest the death of Jesus “can in a very deep sense be called a self-immolation.” He went consciously, in freedom, for the sake of others. “No one takes My life from me, but I give My life freely.”

In this conversation, the storm of Death surounding death, is the U.S. War in Southeast Asia.

My copy of the original paperback has no Introduction, not that one wasn’t written. John Bach, a friend of Dan’s who did time with him for draft resistance at Danbury and participated in his little prisoners study group, was solicited. The publisher, however, deemed his detailing of the war to be “not in accord with the mood of the book.” Their attempt to excise his scathing account (and even the chapter on self -immolation as well!) was met with resistance and refusal, so the book suffers in silence.

Somewhere in my files I have a sheet, I believe it was mimeographed, listing the precepts of Nhat Hahn’s Tiep Hien order of “engaged Buddhism.” (Think of Engaged Buddhism within the Buddhist Church as similar to the Catholic Worker here). Dan shared it with our class saying they studied it while in prison. I love the first precept: “Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones.” But you can feel all of them beneath the voice of Thich Nhat Hahn in this dialogue no matter the topic: prison, exile, memory, economics…

Friendship is here. Love and community are invoked, palpable in these pages. On Holy Thursday, they shared communion; Nhat Hahn reflected,

One time I meditated on the Eucharist. Suddenly I found the message of Jesus so clear. The disciples had been following Him... had the chance to look in his eyes, to see Him smile…But it seems they were not capable of being in real contact with that marvelous reality…I think the message is so clear, so clear to a Buddhist monk. We eat a lot; we drink a lot; but what do we eat? We eat phantoms; we drink ghosts. We don’t eat real bread – reality. We don’t drink real wine. But if Jesus said, “This is My flesh, this is my blood,” it’s a very drastic way of awakening us from forgetfulness, from ignorance…When you preform the rite of Eucharist…your role is to bring back life and reality to a community participating.

And it happens so here. In a quiet Paris suburb. In the reading of a book. In the hearing of a word. Thanks be.