The following is the forward for John Dear’s Autobiography written by actor and activist Martin Sheen. The following is copyrighted material used with permission of John Dear, S.J.
FORWARD
Although I was Unable to Attend my friend John Dear’s ordination to the priesthood (due to travel misconnections from South Africa), I did arrive in time to attend his first mass, celebrated on Sunday, June 13, 1993, in the packed basement of St. Aloysius Roman Catholic Church in Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the Capital.
Ordained only twenty-four hours earlier, this brilliant young Jesuit stood in front of the largely black and mostly poor congregation, which he had faithfully served during his Jesuit formation years, and gave his first blessing to begin his first mass: “May the grace and peace of God our Creator, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit and the love of the nonviolent Jesus be with all of you.”
Normally a congregation would respond, “and also with you”, but there was nothing normal about this blessing of the priest who gave it. On the contrary, this astonishing reference to the Son of God as the nonviolent Jesus” was greeted with wild enthusiastic cheering and sustained applause, and for good reason; this blessing was the “good news” preached to the poor: Our God is loving and nonviolent. What a revelation! Let’s celebrate!
By choosing such a concept to begin his priesthood, John Dear confirmed what all of us in that church, what is government prosecutors, and what his Jesuit superiors had come to expect from this fiercely independent, spiritually disarming young man. Despite the special occasion, today would be no different from all the ones preceding it, since John began his extremely difficult and often lonely on “the long road to peace.” And he would continue to confront every wretched form of violence and injustice with loving nonviolent resistance in every thought, word, and deed.
Wile this path is the chosen purpose of his life’s work and the major source of his joy, it is not possible to fully comprehend John Dear’s journey without comprehending the journey of his fellow Jesuit, mentor and our mutual friend Daniel Berrigan, SJ. There is no one John admired more than Dan Berrigan, who has been a living example of everything John aspired to become: a committed Jesuit and a peace-and-justice advocate willing to risk his life and freedom by confronting the institutionalized violence and corruption of the state as well as the complacency of the Church and hiss own Jesuit Order.
With faithful adherence to the command of the prophet Isaiah to “beat swords into plowshares and make war no more” the command of Christ to “love your enemies,” Dan’s entire life has been a witness for peace and justice. And while his courageous activism earned him the long promised blessing reserved for the peacemakers, it also flew in the face of America’s hot-and-cold war policies and the nuclear arms race and earned him, as well, a long stretch in a federal penitentiary and criticism from within the Church and from some of his fellow Jesuits.
Clearly john knew what lay in store for him if he chose to follow Dan’s path, yet he did not hesitate to do so. In fact, he embraced it wholeheartedly with his own personal vow of nonviolence taken long before he took the three standard Jesuit vows (Poverty, chastity, and obedience). He, too, would suffer a similar fate of prison, sharp criticism, and the misunderstanding of others.
Since the mid 1980s I have been drawn to share a portion of John’s peace journey, which has led to sharing a few jail cells along the way. Public demonstrations with John have always been deeply personal and spiritually nourishing experiences that enriched my life immeasurably. Whenever I’ve appeared with him at any peace march, protest rally or direct nonviolent confrontation where civil disobedience and arrest, occurred, John always assumed a prayerful leadership role, was often among the first taken into custody, and always remained calm, nonviolent, and even joyful throughout the process.
Our first arrest together happened in New York City while protesting Reagan’s effort to place nuclear weapons in outer space, the “Missile Defense Shield.” This hare-brained scheme was popularly referred to as “Star Wars” and never quite got off the ground—thank heaven!
Many more demonstrations and protests would follow through the years, including arrests in Washington, D.C. at the Pentagon, the Capitol and the White House for opposing U.S. policy in Central America—such as Reagan’s “Contra War” in Nicaragua. There were arrests at Fort Benning, Georgia, protesting the presence there of the School of the Americas (S.O.A.), where many soldiers from Central and South America were trained by the U.S. Army and the C.I.A. to murder and oppress their people throughout Central America and the Southern hemisphere.
John and I shared several arrests in downtown Los Angeles at the federal Building, protesting U.S. involvement in El Salvador’s civil war, the assassination of Archbishop Romero, the murder of the four American church women and the brutal massacre of the six Jesuits and their coworker and her fifteen-year-old daughter all in El Salvador.
There were numerous demonstrations and arrests with John at the nuclear test site in Mercury, Nevada, where nuclear weapons were stored and tested, and at Livermore Lab in Livermore, California, where enough nuclear weapons and their delivery systems are designed and built to destroy the world endlessly.
I came to know and love John Dear through theses intense actions, and we developed a unique relationship. I traveled with him through El Salvador and Guatemala, visited him during his peacemaking service in Northern Ireland during the violent troubles there, supported him during his long prison stay in North Carolina, and despite being twenty years older than him, I came to regard him as a big brother.
All the while I was becoming known as a peace and justice activist, but my personal commitment proved only a shadow of John’s—this made clear by his courageous participation in a risky “Plowshares Action” with Philip Berrigan, which John describes in detail in this book. This action alone changed forever the direction of John’s life and proved to be a point of no return on his long road to peace.
Courage is often described as the first virtue from which so many other virtues flow. It is certainly the most admired virtue and the one most devoutly wished for, and while its source remains a mystery, courage is universally acknowledged as the very best part of the human character. Courage is breathtakingly abundant in John Dear.
How he arrived at such an enviable level of moral and physical courage — reflected in numerous acts of civil disobedience, carried out with disarming nonviolence and joy, and often met with harsh consequences — is simply astonishing. Even more astonishing is that his life’s commitment to peace and justice appears instinctive, springing from an unfathomable source. Surely it is a reflection of John’s deep spirituality. And while he credits the examples of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy as the chief inspirations for his own life, we all have theses examples; yet, the vast majority of us remain dull by comparison.
I suspect that much of John’s character was formed, as it is for all of us, during adolescence, that critical period when every level of physical, emotional, physiological, sexual, and spiritual development begins to emerge. It is then that we glimpse the first real possibility of our independence with an equal measure of joy and dread; we are consumed by a mysterious energy. Then the reality of peer pressure emerges as a powerful common denominator, and while each of us is unique unto ourselves we are nevertheless instinctively drawn together for mutual recognition and acceptance. It is here (I believe) where we come to know ourselves in deeply revealing ways, which often set the course of our future. It is here where the first small conscious act of heroism often occurs, bringing us rejection from the crow, and we decide to subtly “go it alone.” It is here where the ego befriends the truth and the first small step is taken, whether consciously or unconsciously, on a lifelong journey to unite the will of the spirit with the work of the flesh. It is here where I believe a very young John Dear began to indentify himself independently of his peers so that for the rest of his life he would never quite be comfortable unless he was at the very least slightly uncomfortable. And it is here where (I believe) he began to slip out of the grip of fear and into uncertain freedom of faith.
Mahatma Gandhi is frequently acknowledged by John Dear as a principle source of inspiration for his own life. What was said of Gandhi can perhaps be equally applied to John: “Future generations will scarce believe that such a one actually existed.”
Martin Sheen
January 20, 2008