"There are two wars going on!" – I can still hear Phil Berrigan’s booming voice calling a meeting that had descended into personal chatter back into order.

Phil held everyone to the same high standard to which he held himself: absolute faithfulness. To him, all life was sacred, and we owed it to our Creator to fight with every fiber of our being against the culture of death promulgated by the Empire with its addiction to money and power. Jesus showed us the path to take – the path of nonviolent resistance – and showed that that path required a readiness to be nailed to the cross.

But there was a humility to Phil. He saw himself as a simple servant of God, just doing what everyone else required, never admitting the unique courage and

vision he possessed. One of his favorite prayers was "I believe. Help me in my unbelief." He sought guidance in the scriptures and in the communities of

resistance he built around himself..

I remember the first time I met Phil, I went to visit him in Cumberland County Jail in Portland, Maine, where he and five friends were being held for disarming the missile launchers and controls of an Aegis class destroyer with hammers and blood. Driving up I was awe struck by the idea of meeting one of my heroes, eager to hear him dispense his wisdom. But we ended up spending most of the time talking about my own first arrest, a week earlier, at the Indonesian embassy, protesting the occupation of East Timor, and his son Jerry’s arrest at the Pentagon.

Treating me as an equal, and refusing to allow himself to be put on a pedestal, Phil instilled in me a sense of my own responsibility to resist the killing our government was and is doing in our names – in Iraq, in Colombia, in Afghanistan, wherever bombs shattered buildings and tore through human flesh. He never tried to command others to follow his path. He just lived out a life so brave and loving that the call to walk in his footsteps could be irresistible, and always invited anyone who would listen to new acts of nonviolent resistance.

Phil had a prophet’s vision and rough eloquence. He read the signs of the times and shaped actions that could cut through to the essential nature of the crimes he spoke out against. When U.S. pilots weredropping napalm on Vietnamese villages, he poured instead on draft files. When Ronald Reagan threatened nuclear Armageddon in a horrific misreading of the book of Revelation, Phil turned to Isaiah’s more loving vision of the end-times, taking a hammer to a nuclear warhead to make real the prophesy that "They shall beat their swords into Plowshares." And always, these actions involved what he called the three philosophical convertibles: nonviolence, resistance and community. He created communities through acts of resistance rooted in nonviolence and infinite love. As a pagan, I learned most of what I know about building powerful rituals from this de-frocked Catholic priest.

And he was faithful to the end, using his last words to speak out against our government’s policies of nuclear terrorism.

We owe it to Phil’s memory to strive to maintain the same clear vision, the same sense of purpose, the same loving resistance. He would often say that our government was helpless to disarm itself, and so we had to disarm it. He’s no longer hear to cajole us into this sacred duty. Or to remind us that the disarmament of weapons is always inextricably intertwined with the disarmament of our own wounded hearts. Phil’s gone. We’re left to disarm the Empire ourselves.