Weak from a respiratory infection and solitary confinement, Luis Barrios was waiting in line to see the doctor at a federal prison in Lower Manhattan one day last spring when a reminder of his outside life appeared. It was a group of graduate students in criminal justice, taking a tour of the Metropolitan Correctional Facility.
Priest, professor and provocateur, the Rev. Dr. Luis Barrios had landed inside the jail with a two-month sentence for trespassing onto a military base in Georgia in a protest against a training facility there for soldiers from Central and South America. From the barricades to the bastille, Professor Barrios was traveling territory familiar from what he estimates are about 65 arrests for various forms of civil disobedience.
The graduate students hailed from Professor Barrios’s academic home, John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Professor Barrios recognized one who had been part of his study-abroad program in the Dominican Republic. Later in his sentence, he met a correctional officer who had taken one of his courses.
Time for the fabled New York Times correction page. The writer mentions Rosemary Radford Rutherford but methinks he means Rosemary Radford Ruether. As for the article itself, I give Fr Barrios top marks for living out his commitment and paying the cost. It takes guts. But I wonder about the fiery unmitigated passion behind it all. I was affected more than I realised at the time years ago by reading Meister Eckhart, who has a concept of Gelassenheit which means a kind of letting-go, of being released from clinging, docile to the work of God in oneself. At the time I thought it too quietist, but I came to recognise later that it linked to the whole concept of apatheia in the mystics, which means not apathy but turning from assertiveness towards a deeper openness to what God wants. I remember discussing this with a wise old Franciscan. I told him that as someone who believed in social justice, I found it hard to make sense of this talk of letting-go. Surely God wanted passionate commitment from us? He replied quite simply: ‘The surer we are of ourselves as people standing in the light of God, the less need we have to shout to make our point.’
I’m puzzled that he was in solitary confinement.