The Spirit cannot be locked in symbols, verified and certified liturgies, canned sermons, cliched texts, or bureaucratic structures. Windfree, burst loose, the Spirit is. And Christ Jesus, there is no place, no creed, no coffin, no clamps that can hold him. Daniel Berrigan, released from Danbury Federal Penitentiary, bears the imprint of his prison experience. Gregory and Deborah Harris are artists whose imagery provides the ignition for Berrigan's poetic text, Jesus Christ.
Bitterness and prophetic judgment show through in these pages. No wonder, either. To be named in Jesus Christ and be so afflicted is to know:
The cross is cloudlike, chameleon, an always proliferating litany of human suffering embraced and comprehended in this Man, fastened to this petrified relic; his burden, his empery and shame.
And Dan Berrigan has seen the splattered bodies twisted on Vietnam's roads, felt communion with the lost, soul-sick prisoners in Danbury, prayed for the wearied and wounded antiwar community. What's the sense in a world that gets more upset about a damaged Pieta than the dreadful, dying, crying victims of war? Berrigan knows. Misplaced values.
For this poet and this artist couple, Jesus cannot be "defunked" or domesticated. The Scriptures tell it like it is — he was considered mad. A loony maker of peace, sharer of sorrow. All weighed down with the woes of respectable religious folk who turned the other way when the Samaritan stumbled by. Berrigan asks if it is madness to follow in the steps of the uneasy rider of the Cross. To be a fool for Christ today is an alternative to death of the soul:
Ancient Christians, in absurd lightness and alacrity of soul, confronted by fire, sword, beasts, judges, lockups, gorgons, noonday devils, cuffs, hacks, invoked — life. The indefinite untranslatable and most sweet respiration of the blue air into one's soul; the conspiracy with cosmos, creator and community; in Caesar's icy eye, a criminal act. But in gospel mandate, gift, discipline and joy.
Jesus Christ by Daniel Berrigan is a spiritual pacemaker for anemic Christians who know, deep down in their souls, that there's something more to the faith than warmed hearts or denominational squabbles.