You have to look at the illustration on the front cover of this joint biography. It shows the three subjects wearing flannel shirts, looking guileless. This is how they appeared before and after they broke into an enriched uranium facility armed with flowers and bibles.

In July 2014, Sister Megan Rice wrote to supporters from her place in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center on behalf of her and friends Gregory Boertje-Obed, who was being held in the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, and Michael Walli at the Federal Correctional Institution McKean in Bradford, Pennsylvania. She explained:

“On July 28, 2012, after thorough study of nuclear issues, and because of our deepening commitment to nonviolence, we engaged in direct action by cutting through four fences at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the U.S. continues to overhaul and upgrade thermonuclear warheads.”

She continued: “On that day, two years ago, when we reached the building where all U.S. highly-enriched (bomb-grade) uranium is stored, we prayed and also wrote messages on the wall, such as ‘The Fruit of Justice is Peace.’ (Realistically, the higher and stronger fences built as a result of our nonviolent incursion can never keep humans safe from inherently dangerous materials and weapons.) We acted humbly as ‘creative extremists for love,’ to cite one of our most important and revered leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Megan Rice has since died, but Carole Sargent tells her story and the story of these three activists and what inspired them to do what they did. Some of the story Sargent tells involves the inspiration of the founders of the Plowshares Movement in 1980, brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan. For more on Daniel Berrigan, see our Remembering Spiritual Masters Project.

Megan Rice was a sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a Roman Catholic religious order for vowed women. Boertje-Obed and Walli remain vowed members of the Catholic Worker Movement (in Duluth, MN and Washington, DC), which was founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. Carole Sargent calls them and those who follow their inspiration “principled citizens from various walks of life who make choices according to prayer and the call of their well-formed consciences.”

Their story will challenge you to find ways to make your own religious or spiritual convictions more real in your life.