Barbed Wire and Beyond

In charge of the Supreme S.A. Command
Special Commissioner Friedriche
published in Dachau
June 2, 1933

Who, in heaven's name, were these two people? It's tempting to wonder aloud. Were they just dear friends out for a walk and a talk only to happen upon some new construction along their old familiar road? Were they conscious political voyeurs looking to be titillated by the suffering of others? Or were they conscientious citizens, refusing from the "git go" to be good Germans? Were they perpetrators or bystanders, innocent or guilty?

Such questions one might contrive to answer with a short story, imagining the dialogue between the two and their angry captors. In my version of the story, these friends are local Christians. They took note in the newspaper last month about the opening of this curious facility in the suburbs. Already the thing has begun to haunt them, intruding on their conscience, their dreams, and now their conversation. They muster each other's courage, maybe even praying first. "Let's at least go look." And the visit, as the published report attests, is a real eye-opener.

When they are sent home chastised and duly intimidated, perhaps they pray some more. I suppose it's possible, in fact, that they went back again and suffered a solitary fate which the papers neglect to report. In my fanciful version of events, they return (against all common logic) with a whole confessing congregation of sisters and brothers. I picture this crowd standing early one morning with candles along the stretch of fence, praying once more and looking deep into the barbed wire.

I knew a man once, as it happens, a Russian. His own memories were of Soviet fences and walls. He said, "If you want to deal with the nuclear arms race, the first thing you're going to have to come to grips with is barbed wire." That is a true saying. And I've often thought of it since.

Another friend of mine, Peter, who years ago cut the fence at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and went in to pray, talks about barbed wire as an idol. If so, the cutting of the fence is a true act of iconoclasm.

Am I saying that barbed wire is more than barbed wire? Or fence more than fence? Of course not. But when the powers string it up, it gets charged with authority and fear. A circle of space is laid claim to.

The power of barbed wire is not so much in the physical barrier, but in the authority it defines and projects. The wire is revered as sacrosanct. It is a petty idol set up to mark and guard the threshold of profanely "sacred" space. Rituals of security and clearance attend it. We bow to its power by turning our heads. No looking or thinking or questioning beyond this point. The barrier is really to consciousness itself.

Among the political and theological issues here is the question of sovereignty. That barbed wire, and the law which runs through it like an electrical charge, are simply the front for bigger idols behind. The claim of the nuclear-armed powers is to more than just a circle of turf or even a realm of technology; the claim is to history itself. They pretend to direct it, manipulating events with the perpetual threat of death. They fiddle with the fate of the earth. Any challenge to those big claims will sooner (most likely) or later meet up with the lesser pretensions of barbed wire.

Some years ago a Methodist church in Detroit publicly declared its sanctuary a political refuge for resisters to draft registration. This declaration is simply an acknowledgment of what every act of Christian worship proclaims: that God is sovereign in our lives and in history. The claim of the church has been that when push comes to shove, the long arm of the law, or better, the reach of political authority, stops at the sanctuary door. A limit is affirmed.

All this comes back around to barbed wire because in recent decades Christians have been taking their prayer and worship to the boundaries of nuclear weapons facilities. By this means the way of the cross is lifted up as a real alternative to the way of massive violence. Our stand on the question of security is clear: we celebrate the sovereignty of God in history over against the arrogant and truly blasphemous claims of the powers. Divine sovereignty is enacted in a liturgy of trespass. No legal right is being asserted as such; a holy truth is simply demonstrated.

A very good film came out some years past called Day After Trinity about physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific city of Los Alamos, and the making of the first atomic bomb. The film tells the story of Oppenheimer, who was driven and single-minded in his preoccupation with the breakthroughs and necessities of building the bomb. The biographical account begins with his poetry and politics, passes through the scientific enthusiasm of the Los Alamos days, and ends showing him tragically broken (even his security clearance withdrawn) on the trash heap of the McCarthy attacks. It is, the filmmakers imply, a tragedy of classic proportions.

But we might be more precise. At one point, a young scientist reflects that Oppenheimer had made a "Faustian bargain" with the Pentagon's General Groves, who was able to offer him all the resources in half the world to do history-making physics on a grand scale, in simple exchange for certain successful products. Oppenheimer delivers, it seems, heart and soul. With both political fervor and scientific fascination, he is captivated and captured. His personality changes. The metaphysical poet becomes the great administrator. His ego inflates. I hope I'm neither unkind nor unfair to say, at least on the evidence of the film, that this is a classic instance of possession in a very concrete and demystified sense.

This possession, be it moral, spiritual, or political, can happen to entire cities as well. The top secrecy of Los Alamos was a great barrier to the release of any news and information about what happened there, but that same security and secrecy was an even bigger barrier to the penetration of certain concerns into the premises. The New Mexico desert and another strand of barbed wire are the perfect elements for moral isolation. Here again, I can't help picturing a handful of foolish American Christians trekking across the desert in their tennis shoes with a banner that says, "Stop!" and bearing leaflets that invite people to consider what they are doing and who will feel the fire of grand physics. Such a Christian walk and prayer, regardless of liturgy or rite, may freely be called an exorcism. The intrusion of the simplest light is nothing less than the casting back or casting out of the power of dark.

Letting in the Light
It has been noted that with an amazing and unwitting consistency, people who have entered high-security nuclear weapons facilities for prayer and disarmament actions have commonly been instructed by the fifth chapter of Ephesians. They have attended there by way of preparation and meditation. The passage itself has become a source of light and a beacon to discernment. "Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is a shame even to speak of the things that they do in secret; but when anything is exposed by light it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light" (Ephesians 5:11-13).

Darkness: string up a circle of barbed wire and the most hideous crimes and horrifying weapons can be prepared and hidden within. Light: walk in, eyes and heart open. Look around. Pray, and maybe weep. Do the time.

Such deeds of worship and faithfulness are more often akin to holding a candle over the abyss than to lightning over the moral landscape (as we always wish). Still, if they are undertaken and offered in the gospel spirit, there is an element of exposure and true light, whether that can be readily calculated or not.

One element of exposure may come because trespass actions and their like yield some attention by the press. If the things they do in secret are mentioned in the headlines, all to the good. The papers might, thereby, fulfill some vocation to illuminate the truth, instead of aiding secrecy with silence. However, a caution is in order against measuring light by the column inch or confusing true illumination with news airtime. In the end this exposure runs quickly thin.

The public prayers of Christians are forever to God and not to the cameras. An action faithfully discerned and offered as a prayer, whether noticed by the media or not, may shed light that is unplanned, unexpected, and even unnoticed. More often than not, the light born to dark places comes back to the community of faith. It is among ourselves and the church that so much light is wanted.

Bishop Leroy Matthiesen of Texas, who in the early 1908s urged members of his diocese to leave their work at the Pantex plant, testified about this kind of unexpected light that brought his own awakening to the dark truth of the arms race. He explains that he used to drive regularly by the Pantex plant near Amarillo, where the components of all U.S. nuclear weapons were assembled. The facility is a mere four miles from Saint Francis parish where he was pastor before becoming bishop.

He confesses to never thinking seriously about what went on inside. It just blended, for him, into the landscape of business-as-usual. It was just another fence on the treeless, wind-swept pasture and crop land of his parish. Then a handful of Christians early one morning transgressed that fence to pray inside, setting off an alarm and landing in jail for a year. It was as though a light went on for Bishop Matthiesen.

No one is talking here about credit or causality or even political effectiveness; there is simply a rejoicing in the work of the Spirit in and through events.

In speaking of the faith community, there is the suspicion that trespass turns quickly back on ourselves. One very tough question to be met here is the matter of secrecy in the movement. There are certain actions worthy of consideration, prayer, and embodied deed which do require an element of discretion simply to pull off. Surprise is a needful part of the entrance and the drama. The doves may need to operate with the craftiness of serpents. But (said with some trepidation) there is also a subtle temptation to draw our own circles of darkness. By justifiable degrees it's easy to mimic the masters of security, even to parody their rituals, drawing lines through the faith community.

The remedy for this temptation is not some absolute principle, Gandhian or otherwise. It has more to do with accountability to friends and community and, needless to say, the Lord of Light. It means a readiness to take the consequences - sticking around to take the heat with the light. There is a need, finally, to stand with our lives exposed.

We are not, ourselves, let it be remembered, the light. The preface to John's Gospel identifies the light with Christ Jesus. He is the one shining in the darkness and not overcome. It is abundantly clear that the light is not at all welcome in the world. He is not recognized or received, but hated and rejected. From the standpoint of the world and its claims, the incarnation is an intrusion, a divine incursion. It is, I suppose, a kind of cosmic trespass.

I am led to think of the way the New Testament speaks of the Lord's coming as a "thief in the night." The metaphor has always been troublesome to me. It evokes a little cringe. Our Lord the cat burglar. The point, of course, is the unexpected timing of things, but I suspect a further implication. Perhaps this glorified "breaking and entering" implies the breaking of our false securities. Our lives are penetrated and vulnerable. We are broken into. Here again, we find the truth sneaking in our back door.

The implication of every trespass action is the confession of our own vulnerability. People often cite (and often unfairly) the qualms that Dorothy Day reputedly had about the draft board break-in by the Catonsville Nine in 1968. Her sense of golden-rule nonviolence caused her to picture the same moral incursion into the front parlor of the Catholic Worker. I don't have the same qualms, but do regard the practical application as a spiritual insight. The Worker, of course, endured such intrusions (they poured in the front door) as part of its daily life.

Dan Berrigan, who was part of the Catonsville action, once told of being at the Pentagon with a symbolic action. A military officer stormed angrily up to him and said, "How would you like it if we did this at your house?" The implication that the Pentagon was his home is interesting in itself, but there is something provoking in the question. Berrigan, responding instinctively, promptly offered his address and said, "Why don't you come over for dinner and we'll talk?"

The practical flip side of trespass is hospitality. It is no coincidence that so many of those who cross lines open their front doors to the homeless and the stranger. And the spiritual flip side of climbing and cutting barbed wire is our own openness and vulnerability to truth.

In a liturgy of trespass we need to leave our arrogance behind. We are not the children of light facing off with the children of darkness. The sovereignty of God is not to be proclaimed as if it were really our own, as if it were a moral front, as if it were a theological extension of our certainties and claims.

God's sovereignty dictates our humility. It is practically another name for it. Before the barbed wire we need to pause, take a deep breath, and imagine that we may truly need to be forgiven for our trespass.

And then, with that freedom, in the end before God, we go ahead and act boldly. My prayer is that we do precisely that.

Bill Wylie-Kellermann was a Methodist pastor in Detroit and a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.