Daniel: Under the Siege of the Divine

In DANIEL,Fr. Daniel Berrigan,priest,poet,prophet takes on that strange book of the Biblical prophet Daniel.As in his earlier works,Isiah,Ezekiel and after this in Jeremiah,Berrigan seamlessly[well,most of the time]relates modern day society with the doomed cultures of which the prophets spoke.Daniel Berrigan has been,for some,a pain in the neck,a,burr,for others, as a previous reviewer wrote, the sanest man of the 20th century. What struck me in this book is how GROUNDED Berrigan is in the scriptures, unlike many catholics of his or any generation.Poetically, Daniel Berrigan once more shows how these ancient, musty texts are alive,not simply relevant but breathing.If he is not the sanest man of the 20th century,he's damn close.

While serving the Catonsville (Maryland) Presbyterian Church in the early 1980s, I often would make lunchtime pilgrimages (three blocks!) to the Knights of Columbus building where Daniel Berrigan and eight others poured napalm and blood on draft files more than a decade earlier to protest America's involvement in the Viet Nam war. Always I sensed myself to be standing on holy ground, for, despite the lapse of years, the asphalt still contained the imprimatur of gospel proclamation.Daniel Berrigan is a poet, prophet, and priest. Sometimes he is more poet than priest, other times more prophet than poet, still others more priest than prophet. But, oh, how these vocations all are mixed in him so that, in my estimation, Berrigan was the sanest person of the twentieth century.In these twilight years of his life, Berrigan has written a progression of books about the major prophets of the First (Old) Testament. He is harvesting a lifetime of dogged fidelity to the gospel of Jesus Christ and these books ("Daniel: Under the Siege of the Divine;" "Isaiah: Spirit of Courage, Gift of Tears;" "Ezekiel: Vision in the Dust;" and "Jeremiah: The World, the Wound of God") bear and share the fruit of his radical obedience. Ostensibly about the biblical prophets of long ago, these books are as up-to-date as this morning's sports page. Taken together, they are a clarion call to people of faith and conscience not to be seduced by the spirit of the age nor to acquiesce to the principalities and powers of the "empire.""Daniel: Under the Siege of the Divine" is really a book about "seeing"- seeing deeply, seeing truly, seeing beyond the appearances of things to the truth of things. Not only is scripture's vision of "the new heaven and new earth" in which peace will reign and "all manner of things shall be well" championed by Berrigan in this book; we are given "prolonged glimpses" of the paths we must walk in order to "get there from here."What Berrigan proposes out of his spiritual encounter with the biblical Daniel is "dangerous faith"- dangerous to the empire because it subverts the present arrangement of things in which the powers-that-be are so heavily invested and to which they want so desperately to cling, and dangerous to those who seek to speak truth to those powers because the empire is not in the least bit loathe to strike back."Daniel" is Daniel at his best. Herein, Berrigan eloquently and passionately demonstrates that the first step in saying "yes" to life is saying "no" to death in all of its multi-faceted and seductive forms, no matter what the cost. To me, the power of the gospel is that, in Jesus, it was lived. That gives me hope that I, also, however imperfectly, can move out of the house of fear and into the house of love. Berrigan is our contemporary guide.

For thirty years, Daniel Berrigan has spoken truth to power, and in the process has paid the price of scorn and jail. In our day, when our social ethic is as unsteady as jello, when the mantra of our morality is "it depends," who better to remind us of some powerful, prophetic truths than this modern "Daniel?" Berrigan translates the word of his namesake into a poetry sweet enough for even the M-TV generation to understand. The message that justice and love are our tickets to peace is just as true now as in "Daniel's" time. This book should be required reading for anyone who believes that the truth of nonviolence is still true.