Daniel Berrigan, who expressed his theology through activism as much as his writing, interpreted biblical visions of God’s future as calls for discipleship in the present. To him, apocalyptic scripture provides a connective tissue between today and the end of history. “To exist at any given point of time is to exist at the end of time,” Berrigan said in his 1970 book, No Bars to Manhood. “It is to contain and embody in oneself the spiritual resources that will be purified and vindicated at the end. The human is called, by choice, by moral struggle, to make the end of things present to one’s life” (83). In this view, a passage like Isaiah 2:1-5 informs how a Christian is to enflesh God’s spirit here and now.

But because today’s context differs from those that produced the Bible, Berrigan says, people have no concrete blueprint to copy, no code that makes clear how to translate scripture into practical witness. It becomes necessary, then, to engage in trial and error. The human is a wrestler in this view, a spiritual scientist in the laboratory of life. To become fully human is to engage in a messy process. While on the run from the FBI after burning draft files in the Catonsville Nine action of 1968, he wrote in Dark Night of Resistance that “to live as a human is to face the whirlwind” (48). The storms of historical circumstance strip us of the ability to simply copy prophets, saints, and saviors. “About methods in such times as these, no one knew,” he said when on trial for the Catonsville action. “We improvised our lives as we went along” (The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, x).

Yet the facer of the whirlwind is not wholly without an anchor. Berrigan’s theology agreed with Jesus’ words: “The one who looks at me is seeing the one who sent me.” And so too could one find a divine voice, however incompletely, in passages like today’s from Isaiah. How then can we interpret this text, a revelation of God’s will for the future that can seem anachronistic in the age of advanced warfare? Modern militaries long ago moved on from swords and spears. What would it mean to turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks in the age of nuclear stockpiling? 

Answering this question required changing a community’s spiritual geography, moving towards becoming “the Church at the edge,” as he called it in a 1966 essay. This ecclesial metaphor invokes the kind of danger the prophets and Jesus’ group of disciples found themselves in. Not only is the true church at the periphery – of society, of institutions, of respectability, of the difference between the human and the divine – but it walks along a precipice. The church is at risk or it is not at the edge, and therefore not faithful to its inception. (This subtle distinction yields a different ecclesiology from Pope Francis’ call for a “church at the margins,” which similarly calls it to tend to those placed on the outskirts of society but lacks the element of danger, of precarity.) It is also what Berrigan named “a Church at the edge of new opportunities” opened by risk and suffering, and his model for it was the poor churches in 1960s Latin America joining movements against oligarchy and fascism (“Church at the Edge,” 13). In them he saw an apocalyptic consciousness, people bearing sacrifice for others in concrete ways. They are part of the “revolutionary” remnant, shouldering the true church’s message and helping detonate “the bomb” buried in such communities (No Bars to Manhood, 36).

Berrigan argued that only in such a place could a church begin to grapple with the words of the prophet Isaiah, “They will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; one nation will not raise the sword against another, and never again will they train for war.” 

Imagine the scene, the promised spectacle of nations coming before the mountain of God: Heads of state arrive with their nuclear footballs, military generals with their command lines. To the foothills stream the Hancock Air Base personnel with their MQ9 Reaper drone pilot equipment and the MIT scientists with their robotic dogs. Police departments emerge prostrate from their federally-provided tanks, Pentagon officials from their banal cubicles, and the FBI from their spy operations against activists for racial justice. Guantanamo guards lay down their electrical torture wires, officers drop their tear gas cannisters, and ICE detention facility employees present the cruel cages that have been used to kidnap children from their parents indefinitely at the bidding of ‘pro-family’ politicians. Henry Kissinger personally fetches all 5,800 nuclear warheads he nurtured and raised, abashedly pointing the rockets away from the high, sacred summit.

All metal, all mechanical flotsam gathered before the mount lay in uneasy hope. Planners and politicians bend their knees, don dunce cap and sackcloth and ash, and request to climb the holy path. “We know the way of the wicked will perish,” they confess, “so we want to be instructed in God’s ways.” Torah flows forth and God judges the nation states, their leaders, their populations. The officials and bigwigs turn their drones to peace cranes, their missiles to missals. Nations no longer even prepare for war after that day, using those trillions of dollars for building up instead of shedding blood. 

Imagine, who enjoys what newfound freedoms? Imagine too, the open hands to be held, how the world-house walks God’s path together. But imagine finally, if you can, the sacred teachings coming not through a heavenly blast but a human ambassador of the Word, a community living God’s future now. How might they present themselves?

Liz McAlister, the longtime Catholic peace activist, may be a helpful example. Born in 1939, she became a sister with the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. An art teacher, she joined those opposing the Vietnam War and participated in the draft board raid movement that destroyed draft files sending young men to war. After marrying Josephite anti-war activist Phil Berrigan, the two co-founded Jonah House in Baltimore in 1973, doing gospel-based resistance against nuclear weapons and the culture of nuclear idolatry. She persistently protested at the Pentagon, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, and the White House while raising three children, serving significant prison time, and helping to teach those who came to join Jonah House’s activities. 

Jonah House sparked what became the Plowshares movement, started in 1980 when eight people prayerfully entered a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania and damaged nose cones designed for nuclear weapons. It was a creative enactment of Isaiah’s call from today’s reading to turn swords into plowshares. McAlister joined a plowshares action at Griffiss Air Force Base in New York in 1983, receiving a three-year prison sentence. She continued to act as support for more actions after her release, and again joined the Kings Bay Plowshares action in 2018 in Georgia. Speaking of possessing nuclear weapons on their website, she says, “We must pull it back; we must turn it around; we must stop it – for God’s sake, for the sake of the children, for the sake of life on earth.”

On April 4, 2018, McAlister and six other long-time Catholic Workers and activists entered Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia to incarnate Isaiah 2 once again. Chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., who staunchly opposed the existence of nuclear weapons, the group now known as the Kings Bay Plowshares came with the words of Pope Francis into the heart of a military missile shrine. They chose this particular site because it houses six nuclear-capable Trident submarines which have the capacity to cause 3,600 levels of damage that was dropped on Hiroshima. But the group pointed out that the weapons are in use even when not detonated. “Nuclear weapons kill every day through our mining, production, testing, storage, and dumping, primarily on Indigenous Native land,” their action statement reads. “This weapons system is a cocked gun being held to the head of the planet.”

Their witness extended beyond April 4, as they used their court date to put the legality of nuclear weapons on trial, and even the state admitted that their action was both nonviolent and sacramental. When they were found guilty, hundreds of supporters sang “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice” in the courtroom, processing down the halls and through the metal detector and outside. The seven – Liz McAlister, Clare Grady, Martha Hennessy, Steve Kelly, S.J., Patrick O’Neill, Mark Colville, and Carmen Trotta – continued their action while serving sentences of varying lengths in federal prison. Throughout the prayerful and direct witness, their animating piece of scripture has been, as their action statement concludes, “Swords into Plowshares!”