in which the author reads Dan Berrigan’s Pentecostal reflections on Catonsville (To Dwell in Peace, 1988) and intersperses some 21st-century wonderings. Dan in bold.

 

“The act was pitiful, a tiny flare among the consuming fires of war.”

 How often have we walked and wheeled away from an Action, a Protest, a Rally, a Speak-Out and uttered similar words (in our heads or out loud)?

“The act was pitiful.”

“All we could muster was a tiny flare?”

“20 attendees? Last year, we would have had 200.”

Because sometimes every pitiful act we flare up doesn’t feel like Anything At All against the white supremacist machinations of city hall, against the military industrial complex, against looming and present climate crisis, against the Supreme Court’s patriarchy, against the churn and burn and turn of capitalism’s creeping asphalt. Against the consuming fires of war.

“But Catonsville was like a firebreak, a small fire lit, to contain and conquer a greater.”

 Firebreak (noun): an obstacle to the spread of fire, such as a strip of open space in a forest.

Alternate definitions:

·      A hole in a pipeline

·      A letter to a prisoner

·      A prison razed and salted (see also: the Third Precinct)

·      Mutual aid, filter boxes for the wildfire-adjacent apartment.

·      The union on strike

·      Childcare provided so the union can go on strike

·      Someone grips your hand while you march together to block the street. They’re crying and you feel a little braver

·      A space to celebrate Black children

·      A strip of open space in a forest

·      A forest in a strip of open space

“The time, the place, were weirdly right. They spoke for passion, symbol, reprisal.”

Passion—what to do with that in the between-times where movements contract and rebuild? (go to the statehouse or the courthouse?)

Symbol—what to do with that when meaning has been given over to the masses?

Reprisal—what to do with that?

“Catonsville seemed to light up the dark places of the heart, where courage and risk and hope were awaiting a signal, a dawn.” 

How long have courage and risk and hope lived in the heart (whose heart?)

When did they retreat there? When the handcuffs and the tear gas and the batons and the indictments for the marchers came down?

What was their signal? Their dawn?

“For the remainder of our lives”

How long, O Hᴏʟʏ Oɴᴇ?

“the fires would burn and burn, in hearts and minds, in draft boards, in prisons and courts”

In court support, in solidarity actions, in mistakes made, relationships formed and re-formed, in the pang of apologies that should have been spoken after mistakes in a movement meeting, in a friend who comes over to clean for you when you’re hungover on politics, in the embers that glow after the rest of the retreat has gone to bed, being stick-poked and prodded, in prisons and courts. In the day, and the night, and the next day.

“A new fire, new as a Pentecost, flared up in eyes deadened and hopeless,”  

In the eyes of those James Cone called “the penniless and jobless, marginalized and despised.”

In the queer and trans kids reading books burned and banned by Moms for Fascism,

In the eyes of the workers, scoping out a new world in the shell of the old,

in the asylum seekers braving Biden’s border bans for their babies,

in the Black liberationist and the prison abolitionist and the intersectional feminist and the tired old socialist arguing with the crust-punk anarchist 

“the noble powers of soul given over to the ‘powers of the upper air.’”

I can’t find the passage Dan’s quoting here, and I wonder what to make of this release, this giving-over.

Is it surrender to divinity, a Stringfellowian defeat of death-by-the-State? What powers move in the upper air? Can we trust them, and can they still navigate the choke-smoke of our smokestacks? Must we surrender the power of our soul? Of our souls?

“‘Nothing can be done!’ How often we had heard that gasp: the last of the human, of soul, of freedom.” 

There’s that soul again, pushed down and repressed and backed into a last-gasp. By the white neoliberal milquetoastery of “nothing can be done.” Of “please do anything but that.” Of “protest like this and not like that.” Of “nothing can be done.” Gasp. Wheeeeze.

Indeed, something could be done; and was. And would be.

And would be and would be and would be.