But, no, getting back to conscience and action. I remember reviewing Frida Berrigan's book, It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. Frida was the daughter of Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, an ex-nun, and the niece of the peace activist Daniel J. Berrigan, S.J. I loved that book. The language is just beautiful. And she has an anecdote in there about the effects on her childhood from her parents always being jailed for their activism. She was often asked if she felt neglected when her parents were always "away." But, she tells the reader, it was okay because they consciously sat down and worked it out so that their arrests were staggered and there was always someone home for the kids. Right? And so that all came together like a family unit sort of moving forward. And plowshares was sort of budgeted in to the lifestyle.
A lot of people don't realize it, but in the '60s young people in their late teens were being drafted and sent to Vietnam against their will. At home they had no voting rights. You know, it was okay for them to die in the jungle somewhere to make capitalism proud of them, but they couldn't vote. And that caused a lot of stir up, you know, and it was great to see the Berrigans, you know, pour blood over draft records, that kind of thing. And again, that's not just symbolic, it's actually ruining the draft record.
CS: And then they found out later that there were no backups for those records, which I didn't know. So there are people walking around today that are the descendants of those draftees who didn't go to Vietnam because the records were ruined. Yeah. So that that actually weirded them out, not in a bad way. They were like, Wow, they had no idea. And so what a fascinating little twist to a story. Right?
But, going back to the point of conscience, Megan Rice would say that the moment you know that something is wrong on that scale -- human rights abuse, genocide, nuclear war, take your pick -- you're obligated to take action. Now she didn't say you had to do what she did, but she felt that there was an obligation that went beyond the intellectual exercise; that you had to actually do something.
For many, if not most of them, this is what resonates. So they don't ask themselves in this moment, Will I get press? Will people write about it? They don't do press conferences afterwards and try to lure people in. They wait to see the Witness get heightened. Those were Phil Berrigan's words. He said prison heighten the Witness, but that they wait for the Witness to sort of do its own thing.
Fighting the Lamb's War is my personal favorite. That's Phil Berrigan. Yeah, his book really asks you, Why aren't we all outraged? Why aren't we all out of our seats? How is this machine going forth? You know, and he talked about being in Dresden, Germany, and seeing these charnel houses -- basically bodies stacked. He fought in World War Two. He did combat. He killed people. In his own words, he was a highly skilled young killer, and he lived with that, and came home and changed very, very much.
Well, you know, their question for us would be, why aren't we all doing it? I do feel that we all have to do something. I do feel that every person who's morally outraged is obligated to do something, but I believe that they should limit their something to their gifts and their call. The acts of resistance that come from conscience is covered extraordinarily well by a Washington Post reporter named Dan Zak in Almighty: courage, resistance, and existential peril in the nuclear age.
And so now I'm interested in Sister Norma Pimentel. Now she is at the border, US-Mexico border, and she grew up there and she does a lot with migrants, and I feel like that's maybe my next project.
JH: Yeah, it looks like the borderlands could use a little plowshares action.
One of the things that fascinates me about the plowshares that the nuns are doing, is the question of how they find the inner spiritual energy to do it in our relativistic age. Despite the fact that we live in an age where essentially God is dead to many people, diluted Nietzsche vibes are all around us. Of course, Voltaire said, you know, well, if God did not exist, we would find it necessary to invent one. But, at the moment, we appear to be on our own at a time of most need. We need conscience, but we also need the kind of energy required to deal with very complex issues.
CS: I love the fact that culture is collaborative, that you can actually appeal to the conscience of others, including secular people, including people whose faith is very different than yours, including people who may actually be what some would call evil. I don't actually believe that people are evil. I believe actions can be profoundly evil, but I don't believe people are evil. I believe people give themselves over to it. And so in that moment is always an opportunity for redemption and for doing something else.
JH: So, how do people fire up their conscience? Exercise?
CS: One of the most interesting ways to do it is to meditate. Because the media traumatizes us and it can traumatize us into an ill-conceived action. So let's say you're concerned about genocide, you're concerned about something you've read. First of all, don't believe that the media told you the truth. Why would you believe that? Go find someone who's actually involved in the thing. I don't want to hear one more person tell me their strong opinion on the US-Mexico border until they've gone there. Go to the border, go visit. Some people have been working there for decades. Pray with them. Talk to them. You know, I knew a woman who wanted to be a judge, actually. She wanted to be an immigration judge, and they made her do two years down on the border first before they even wanted her on a bench. I mean, to get firsthand knowledge, get the media out of the way. The media is an echo chamber and it's not usually accurate.
Carole Sargent's book Transform Now Plowshares will be available from Liturgical Press in mid-February, just in time for the new year's resolutions. Of her new book, Transform Now Plowshares, Carole Sargent writes:
After the 2016 presidential election I was in crisis (as were many others), and so I sold my tiny townhouse, and sought out peace communities. The Society of the Sacred Heart (RSCJ) had an experimental activist community in Northeast Washington, AKA "little Rome" for all the Catholic groups in the area. Sister Megan Rice was our neighbor and friend, and she inspired me to focus on Catholic sisters and nuclear disarmament. We also knew Sister Ardeth Platte (the Grand Rapids Dominican who inspired the character on Orange is the New Black... the book is more accurate on her than the Netflix series), her protest colleague Sister Carol Gilbert, and others who spent significant chunks of their lives in prison for peace. What a concept. It attracted me, and Megan and I became great friends those last four years of her life. I helped the RSCJ open Anne Montgomery House, named for another antinuclear Catholic sister, arrested many times, who was infamous for actually swimming out to a Trident submarine, climbing aboard, and hammering on it. A Trident sub can unleash hell equivalent to 5 Hiroshimas. She was Megan Rice's mentor in Plowshares, and she co-authored a fine book about it.
I didn't set out to write a book about Megan, but when I googled her one popped up that wasn't available. When I inquired, the author told me he decided to step back, and he graciously recommended me to the publisher. It was a challenge to marshall all that information, but I tried as best I could to listen to the activists rather than interpret. My goal isn't to tell you what I think, but to be a conduit for what these activists believe and do. It is dedicated to Ardeth Platte, in part because I felt the media skewed too much to one story and not the others. Megan and I also agreed to use her media notoriety as a Trojan horse to carry Anne Montgomery's name, inscribing it ever more clearly on public memory. I have a whole chapter on Anne in the book, because Megan often said that to understand her you had to understand Anne Montgomery. Here's an authoritative bio of Anne Montgomery written by an eminent Plowshares activist and a superb historian, Art Laffin: Click Here
You can read an excerpt from Transform Now Plowshares here.
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