Most of the international tributes to Daniel Berrigan SJ (1921- 2016) have a similar perspective. In addition to outlining his unfailing commitment to peace, they almost all contain a personal story of a life-changing encounter that the author had with Berrigan – at a rally, a demonstration, a book signing, or simply walking into him on the street. Writing in To Dwell in Peace, his 1987 autobiography, the then 67-year-old Daniel Berrigan, in conversation with his much younger self, writes about a critical life-changing encounter of his own. This is the moment when the “great light” of education first illumined his world:

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I sit in slack harness, at sixty-six years. A smile breaks on a phiz the child would hardly know for his own. Wrinkles and ruts aplenty, the plowing of the garden of experience.

– Do you remember, I ask the child, the year you started to breathe?

He is puzzled momentarily, but he takes my meaning: I do, he answers. And his grin matches my own.

– Do you recall the face of that nun?

Of course. She was beautiful, not in the way of convention; but of suffering, dignity, self-possession.

– Why this talk of a “great light”?

Because it was the first time, in my cursed desert, the first time I encountered a teacher who was also a human being. Remember how long those years, and how deadly?

– I think I do. I think you know that I do. I think you recall, moreover, that those were by no means the last time someone fastened on a mask of cruelty and terror and boredom and ego and threat and rote-and then, straightfaced, announced that EDUCATION was underway.

Indeed. But we were talking about one month in a child's autumn. I knew in my mother a woman of grace and evenhanded love. But I had known no other like her. And the question rises in me whether one such as she is sufficient. Especially when one's life is delivered over, for months and years, into the hands of drones, wasps, jellyfish – and now and then, a certified scorpion. To each and all of whom, if it can be credited, someone, something, has unaccountably conferred a name of moment and dignity and responsibility: teacher.

– It took no time at all, that apotheosis; there was no warning.

On that first day she came briskly into the room. She had piercing black eyes that held nothing but kindness in their depths. A largeness, a scope. She stood there, and surveyed us, and a smile broke; on her face, and ours. We knew at that moment that we were well received, that the year ahead would be a good one.

She would take us at our word, at our conduct, beginning from that hour. And her expectation was a simple one: that her knowledgeable good sense would draw the best from us. (Would also draw the worst from us, like a healing purge.)

It came to this: I wanted to learn, after all. That was the light she kindled.

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From: To Dwell in Peace, Harper and Row/Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1987. (p. 59)

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Paul Elie, a graduate of Fordham, writes a tribute to Fr. Berrigan, SJ in The New Yorker. Read it here.