A Weekend with the "Giraffe Heroes"

What I saw at the 60th anniversary of Thomas Merton's "Spiritual Roots of Protest" gathering.

I’m afraid I’ve left Solidarity Hall’s Street Catholic section quiet for some time. But a recent retreat experience has restarted my engines. Which is exactly what retreats are supposed to do, of course.

My newfound energy comes out of spending three days with a group of about forty peace activists of various ages and experiences. Before the weekend, I knew only one fellow attendee, my great friend Edgar Rivera Colon (his brilliant podcast is here), who among other guises is a mystagogue, a guide of souls.

Back in early December, he invited me to a weekend at the mountaintop Kirkridge Retreat Center in Bangor PA, in the Poconos. Here’s Edgar’s description of the background to this gathering:

Sixty years ago, Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic and scholar, Thomas Merton discerned the moment to ask, what are the spiritual roots of protest? He convened a retreat with some of the leading faith-based nonviolent activists of the time, including Daniel and Philip Berrigan, John Grady, Jim Forrest, Tom Cornell, A.J. Muste and John Howard Yoder, among others. Martin Luther King, Jr. intended to participate but travelled instead to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

This is the famous retreat held over Thanksgiving weekend in 1964 at Merton’s Gethsemani abbey in rural Kentucky. The agenda Merton proposed would not be about strategy or tactics of peacemaking but rather an exploration of the spiritual roots of that work.

Merton identified three themes he recommended for reflection:

1. conscientious objection to war (a practice in which Catholics in 1964 were not yet as well represented as Mennonites, Quakers, Church of the Brethren);

2. the challenge of technology (especially nuclear weapons);

3. and a provocative question, By what right do we protest?

In the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, followed by Pope John XXIII’s “Pacem in Terris” encyclical on nuclear nonproliferation, Merton had moved beyond the goals of most peace advocates of the time. Instead of merely eliminating—or at least reducing—nuclear weapons testing, he had come to see the task as complete disarmament and the total abolition of war.

In these months the peace movement and the civil rights movement were gradually intersecting around a shared sense that new levels of protest would be necessary.

This history is ably recounted by Gordon Oyer (whom I met at the Kirkridge retreat) in the volume whose cover appears at the top of this post. Working from participants’ notes, Oyer reconstructed the spirit-filled conversations which inspired the group to confront the dominating powers and principalities which, we must note, have only grown stronger today.

As Oyer recounts in his book, the three days together at Gethsemani modeled something unusual for its time—namely, interreligious (meaning, at this date, simply Catholic and Protestant!) collaboration for peace work that would blossom in the coming years: the Berrigans’ Catonsville MD draft card burning, the advocacy of Clergy and Laity against the Vietnam War, the work of the Catholic Peace Fellowship with conscientious objectors, the March on the Pentagon, and much more.

When I told Edgar I would love to participate in the retreat, I truly had no idea what was coming. I found myself in a warm group of activists and contemplatives, of all ages and races, many of whom already knew each other well. Many Catholic, some not.

Some of them—especially the veteran resisters—had long ago proven themselves to be fearless people, what you might call “giraffe heroes” who stick their necks up high. People whose last name, I noticed with a touch of awe, was Berrigan.

Several were quietly famous within the American peace community, notably in the resistance to the covert wars of the 1980s in Central America and in the Plowshares anti-nuclear movement. Kathy Kelly, a gentle-spoken older woman from Chicago, recalled a protest action at the School of the Americas in which she was arrested, her hands ziptied painfully behind her before being knocked to the ground while a soldier knelt on the small of her back until eventually ordered to stop. I learned she had been arrested literally dozens of times, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Veteran peacemaker and Catholic Worker Art Laffin described getting in a canoe with friends near the Connecticut navy base where the Trident nuclear submarines were stationed, rowing out to a sub, and then boarding it. The group proceeded to pour blood on a missile warhead, hitting it several times with a hammer (recalling the biblical phrase “they shall beat their swords into plowshares”), and then kneeling to pray before being arrested and carried away.

The topic of the Gaza genocide was also foremost in our minds. Given the history of connections between the Catholic peace movement and the nonviolent organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, it was fitting to have their executive director, Ariel Gold, with us as she described how their work has led to her being expelled from the state of Israel.

I was wonderful to meet Frida Berrigan, daughter of Philip Berrigan and thus Dan Berrigan’s niece. She’s the author of It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood--a funny and striking memoir of nonviolence and family love.

Here’s a taste of Frida’s style, as she’s answering an interviewer’s question whether she is a “lapsed” Catholic:

I’m not lapsed: I am a Catholic in waiting—waiting for my Church to remember the Gospels, to be a justice- and peace-seeking community, to be fully inclusive of women, and to be welcoming to people who are not heteronormative. Pope Francis is a step in the right direction, but there is a long way to go.

Sixty years on from Merton’s retreat and likewise feeling ourselves on a dark threshold, we asked, “Is this a dead-end time? Has every contradiction been pushed to its limit? What is our hope?”

One elder reminded us: we need to imagine our “agitated” ancestors at this moment. And after all, someone else added, “Success is not a name of God. But we can be pockets of creation, seed pods of the new world.”

For a few days, it all felt like the scene in Acts where the tongues of fire descend and suddenly everyone is truly hearing and understanding each other.

Some other observations that I took down:

• “We need to practice enemy love. Which like all love is a discipline. And it always contains risk.”

• “To do this work, you need more than just a good heart and good ideology.”

• “As Grace Lee Boggs told us, the time has come to grow our souls.”

• “We are working at the point where God and the Holy Spirit enter the world system.”

• “We need long obedience in the same direction. It’s like the Middle Eastern proverb: the one who plants dates does not eat dates.”

And possibly my favorite from the weekend:

• “That moment when you realize your individual spiritual journey is actually a mass pilgrimage on your way to becoming an ancestor yourself.”

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See you next time—peace.