Divine Disobedience

As I mentioned in Whither the Church? and in Mass Movement, I have been reading Francine du Plessix Gray's 1970 book, Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism (a book for which there is no online image available). The book assembles several articles Ms. Gray wrote for The New Yorker about radical Catholics in a radical time in America. Among them are "Catonsville Nine" leaders Daniel and Philip Berrigan, two priests for whom burning draft records in protest of the Vietnam War was as natural as breathing.

I delved into this book in hopes of stoking my own reviving commitment, in faith, to doing good works to better the world. But it's not really working.

The reason it's not really working makes itself known to me when I read, on page 79, "There is a moral fundamentalism in the Berrigans which follows this passage from the Book of Acts with total fidelity." "This passage" is one which du Plessix Gray has just quoted:

They [the early Christians] remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers ... the faithful all lived together and shared out the proceeds among themselves according to what each one needed. (Acts 2:42, 2:46)

The Berrigans took this mandate, "the socialism of the Gospels" (Acts was originally the second part of Luke's Gospel), with "a disturbingly literal reading," a "simplism":

"Read the Gospel, get poor, get with it," Daniel [Berrigan] blithely told a student who had asked him how to live the Christian life. "It's just that simple." (p. 80)

I don't believe in literal, simplistic, fundamentalist readings of Scripture, whether by the Christian left or the right.

I read the early Christians' divesting themselves of material security as a metaphor for the throwing away of crutches in general, as it were ... for what a New Ager would call "claiming one's power."

In my view of faith (see "Throw Those Crutches Away ... " for more) it only really begins to be faith when it gives us the power, with God's help, to create our own reality. When we do what the proverbial faith healer is wont to tell us to do —"Throw away those crutches and walk!" — then and only then are we living a life of faith.

If material wealth is in fact a crutch we lean on, it blocks our spiritual growth. That's the kind of thing the Gospels are telling us in saying man does not live by bread alone.

But literally throwing bread away — becoming poor for its own sake — mistakes a metaphor about discarding whatever is blocking our spirituality for a universal commandment which may or may not be applicable, depending on the individual person and whatever it is that acts as a crutch in that particular life.

We all have different crutches. I suppose it is possible to use one's "social commitment" as a crutch, too.

Then again, I don't want to sound like I'm against efforts on behalf of social justice. All I'm really saying is that they are not for one and all the universal elixir Daniel Berrigan implied when he told his student how to live the Christian life.