Exodus. Daniel Berrigan
sacred stuff of blood or ashes renewed our sacramental tradition and changed forever the way we view our Christian vocation of evangelism before the Powers (Eph 3:10).
Meanwhile, Dan’s literary corpus has undergirded his prophetic embodiments, maintaining a mystical vision at the heart of strategic public gestures. The perennial temptation for activists is to force the connection between organizing and efficacy; to evaluate our work according to empirical results; to link hope (or despair) to this or that drift in the political current. Dan, on the other hand, is always insisting—it threads throughout this reading of Exodus—that there is no simple relationship between our initiative and divine redemption. With Gandhi we must remember that we sow seeds only, and leave the fruits to God. Between our deeds and our dreams is an opaque veil of unknowing, the consciousness of which keeps us from becoming that which we oppose. This is why we should always endeavor, as one of Dan’s riddles put it, to say “yes and no to the whole damn thing.”
Because Dan understands the difference between the “dead letter” of managerial logic and the life-giving Spirit of political imagination (2 Cor 3:6), his writing and acting tend toward the parabolic. This is one of his most animating gifts to us, impoverished as we are by capitalism’s relentless advertising fantasies, commodity fetishism, and religious spiritualizing. If the social function of parables is to “deconstruct” and “reconstruct” consciousness, then Dan is a master craftsman.
Theologians rightly insist that all language about God is necessarily metaphorical, an assertion that deeply offends modernists, rationalists, and imperial engineers. But the truth is, only metaphors—carefully chosen and preferably biblically grounded—are strong enough to bear the horrors of the militaristic State, elastic enough to encompass the divine dream of liberation, and big enough to surround our deepest hopes and fears. Nothing less can inspire and sustain action that would be simultaneously revolutionary, nonviolent, and humane. Critical analysis, philosophical idealism, or ideological fervor alone cannot hold together the personal and the political, the past and the present, the prophetic and pastoral.
Dan’s mediation of undomesticated mystery is thus deeply priestly, offering a refuge for imagination that cannot be locked down by the dehumanizing structural adjustments, technological messianism, or scientific demythologizing wrought by the totalitarian ideology of Progress. Dan continues to insist that Pharaoh let the people go. But he long ago up and left for the wilderness.
¶
The last time I saw Dan was in 2003 at a Catholic Worker retreat in California (though I pray there might be another meeting yet, I am mindful of his eighty-six years). He was walking us through a poignant reading of Jeremiah 36. It struck me then that Dan himself is a kind of American Baruch. Like Jeremiah’s amanuensis, he listens carefully to the prophetic Word; inscribes it lovingly; declares it publicly; and accompanies it underground when it is pronounced heretical to the logic of national security (Jer 36:15–19). And if and when the rulers of State or church contemptuously whittle the scrolls of truthtelling into the courtroom firepit, Dan obeys the mandate to write it all down again, over and over for as long as the denial prevails (Jer 36:20–28). In this way he has faithfully embodied the vocation of “reading of America biblically” inherited from William Stringfellow, Abraham Hesche, and Thomas Merton, with the accompaniment of Irish mystics and Jesuit martyrs.
I believe there is a sort of poetic justice that, at this stage of his life, Dan would turn his attention to Exodus. This wise, old wild tale speaks exactly to our historical moment (as it did equally for early Christians and desert monks and radical reformers and Abolitionists), particularly to resurgent perceptions of American omnipotence. Exodus is “biased beyond doubt,” Dan points out; “it dwells compassionately on those left out of the imperial records” (see page 3 below). It is, as such, good news for the poor, and a warning to the Project for a New American Century and their ilk.
To be sure, Dan refuses to gloss over the difficult parts of Exodus, from the curious vignette in which Yahweh tries to kill Moses (31) to the texts of terror that seem to represent “an invitation to genocide” (164). Indeed, Dan’s reading ends on a note of ambiguity: “A shadow stands and will not dissolve” (161ff). Yet “our story must include its own version of the sins of Exodus” (159). For each character in this ancient epic is archetypal; the epic’s setting amidst empire and its discontents is distressingly contemporary; and its plot of surprise and deliverance is still the stuff of hope.
What better companion, then, with whom to wrestle again with the ecstatic and traumatic tale of Exodus than this poet, practitioner, and priest? Dan is rightly revered among us. He is an oak of an elder: skin as thick as bark, leaves that can prick, a reach that defies gravity, providing cover for whoever would sit with him. He has been a kind of axis mundi in our lives, offering communion with both heaven and earth. And we need trustworthy elders as much as we do the saints, to pass on understanding like an heirloom. Again I say: We would not be here but for Dan’s faithful work and witness over half a century. I honor him without apology. And I commend to you his reading of our oldest sacred narrative of liberation, which still beckons us to freedom.
Ched Myers
Sept 11, 2007
Exodus 1–3
My attempt at transcending scholarship is simply a literary critic’s final reliance upon her or his own sense of a text, or what I have called the necessity of misreading. No critic, whatever her or his moldiness or skepticism, can evade a Nietzschean will to power over a text, because interpretation is at last nothing else.1
—Harold Bloom, American literary critic
A passion; to make the text mine.
Better, by assumption, maybe by impertinence, to make it—ours.
—D. B.
Oral culture is “verbomotor.” Exclusively oral peoples are utterly unaware of anything like a neutral world. Primeval chaos is never far distant, nor is death. Everything they are familiar with is committed, noisy, and passionate for good or ill. . . .
And [that is] why sounds in general and words in particular are felt as powerful and dynamic actions to which a practical, canny response of action is required in return . . . .
Given the essential dynamism of a sound world as it issues reports of the spirit world—in thunder, flood, wind and voice—one can understand why the word of God . . . is a word of power. The Hebrew sense is paradigmatic. “My word, is it not like fire, a hammer that shatters the rocks?” (Jer 23:29).2
—David Toolan, SJ
¶
So we begin; or more to the point of Exodus, so we continue. Or (closer to the “orality” of the people and Moses, and before the written word became a final arbiter of what events will live on, and what recede)—so we too go forth.
¶
The contradiction will be damocleian sharp, and humiliating to boot. The thunders broke, and Yahweh spoke. One writes of this, but at second or third—or thousandth—remove. It is by no means guaranteed to the author that the thunders broke—on him; or that Yahweh spoke—to him.
The commentator remains safely sequestered in words, words, like a cocoon dreaming of birth—or perhaps like an academic in the famous groves, dreaming of whatever such eminences dream of. Tenure? A crown of laurel?
The text in sum, invites a woeful deconstruction of bombarding realities. So, one thinks ruefully, is the soul deconstructed in the act of writing—a task looked on (and so rightly) as the original artful dodge.
¶
At least let the investigator keep a measure of good sense, walk humbly, conscious of ironies, hearing to his own discomfiture (and benefit), the sound of divine laughter.
Intemperate mirth? It well may be. And this, knowing that the rollicking One, as far as is known, never wrote a word—indeed is known famously and obscurely (but tellingly to our purpose), as Pure Act.
“I don’t know, I’m not sure” . . . the would-be equivalent of a confession. Confess it then; woe