Peace Behind Bars: A Peacemaking Priest's Journal from Jail

Rating:
Summary: Four walls do--and don't--a prison make
Review: John Dear is a youngish Jesuit priest who's the clear successor to the Berrigan brothers when it comes to peace activism. Past director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, author, speaker, agitator, Dear is also a graceful and sensitive author. His *Peace Behind Bars*, the journal he kept in prison, is my favorite. It's an utterly honest, utterly human, document.

Dear spent 8 months in a North Carolina jail after his conviction for a Plowshare action. His journal is a record of the time there, which he shared with Phil Berrigan. The journal doesn't whitewash how trapped and hopeless Dear at times feels. He's honest enough with us and himself not to try to play the hero. Reading the book at times gives one an uncomfortable sense of sympathetic claustrophobia. But the journal also attests to Dear's discovery that the suffering God he serves is also found in prison--and, indeed, perhaps best found in prison. Here, for example, is what Dear writes on Christmas Day, 1993: "Being in jail on Christmas is not just counter-cultural, but anti-cultural. The culture has no sense of Christ's spirit. People spend billions of dollars in an orgy of consumerism, exchanging presents while ignoring the plight of the poor and the demands of discipleship." Imprisonment gives one the distance from that culture to remember that Christmas is about this: "God has become human, and it follows that all human life is sanctified." (p. 44)

I can think of few spiritual memoirs that are up to the high standard of stuff written by Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, or Henri Nouwen. This is one of them, even though it hasn't received the attention it deserves. Highly, enthusiastically, recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Four walls do--and don't--a prison make
Review: John Dear is a youngish Jesuit priest who's the clear successor to the Berrigan brothers when it comes to peace activism. Past director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, author, speaker, agitator, Dear is also a graceful and sensitive author. His *Peace Behind Bars*, the journal he kept in prison, is my favorite. It's an utterly honest, utterly human, document.

Dear spent 8 months in a North Carolina jail after his conviction for a Plowshare action. His journal is a record of the time there, which he shared with Phil Berrigan. The journal doesn't whitewash how trapped and hopeless Dear at times feels. He's honest enough with us and himself not to try to play the hero. Reading the book at times gives one an uncomfortable sense of sympathetic claustrophobia. But the journal also attests to Dear's discovery that the suffering God he serves is also found in prison--and, indeed, perhaps best found in prison. Here, for example, is what Dear writes on Christmas Day, 1993: "Being in jail on Christmas is not just counter-cultural, but anti-cultural. The culture has no sense of Christ's spirit. People spend billions of dollars in an orgy of consumerism, exchanging presents while ignoring the plight of the poor and the demands of discipleship." Imprisonment gives one the distance from that culture to remember that Christmas is about this: "God has become human, and it follows that all human life is sanctified." (p. 44)

I can think of few spiritual memoirs that are up to the high standard of stuff written by Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, or Henri Nouwen. This is one of them, even though it hasn't received the attention it deserves. Highly, enthusiastically, recommended.