An ode to Daniel Berrigan

“If you have met Daniel Berrigan you have met Christ, because he dwelt within him.” So says one of the many voices whose harmony make Bill Wylie-Kellermann’s chorus of reminiscence for Berrigan sing. This patchwork quilt of poetry, prophecy, and prose doesn’t so much argue for Berrigan’s canonization as assume it—and thereby challenge the conventions of sanctity, as Berrigan himself couldn’t see a convention without perceiving its militaristic bias, its racist subtext, or its hypermaterialist presuppositions.

Reading this commonplace book of the extraordinary, an eyewitness account of the shaking of the imagination, puts me in mind of what the evangelists must have been working with when they compiled the Gospels. Berrigan’s explosive 1973 address to the Association of Arab-American University Graduates is his Sermon on the Mount. The direct actions he was involved in are his cleansing of the temple. Like the Gospels, his body of work includes the odd scrap of reworked prophecy—Berrigan wrote commentaries on every one of the Old Testament prophets. Then there’s the iconic 1968 action at Catonsville, Maryland, in which Berrigan, his brother Philip, and others burned draft files in a performance of sacred liturgy—call that his Q source. Put it all together and there you have a Gospel.

Yet Wylie-Kellermann resists the harmonization of an even narrative, preferring 12 chapters, each of which adopts a different perspective on this multifaceted man. The risk is repetition; the prize is a restless and relentless account to match the man himself.