by C. R. Spicer
Sr. Megan Rice, a visionary and steadfast anti-nuclear resister who painted peace slogans on the Y-12 nuclear bomb factory in Oak Ridge, TN, in 2012, died October 10.
I remember my drive with Sr. Megan, Michael Walli, and Greg Bourtje-Obed in the dead of night to the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge.
I’m reminded of a former young man in a similar ride. Brandon Walsh, who rode in the car on the way to the Catonsville raid, but was not a raider, said he remembered the tension. The looming lawbreaking was thick ice. Then Berrigan, all Daniel, said, “Think of it as a beautiful day and we’re going on a picnic.” “Then it all occurred natural,” said Brandon. Lithe in her way too, puckish Megan reared to the edge of her seat, full of gump, and cracked her wide-open smile “Isn’t this great!” It cut the tension, not the umbilical cord.
“The umbilical cord … has not yet been cut ….The past only becomes transparent when the present can practice self-criticism ….Until that time the past must either be naïvely identified with the structure of the present or else it is held to be wholly alien, barbaric and senseless, beyond all understanding.” — Georg Lukács
Megan, you became a picture of a picnic-goer, a rambler up a ridge. You whispered open sesame in the words of Isaiah. You cast out the darkness around the bomb. Like a negative made in the camera obscura, you let your skin into pitch-black spaces. On your photosensitive flesh burnt the in-beam of light. Into court, into Congress, and into jail, unto death. Shadows cast by daylight walked with you like glowing lanterns.
Megan, with her cosmic sense of history and unshuttered spirit, set foot up the pitched slope. At the Uranium Processing Facility, she knocked her hammer. She entered the haunted house and opened high windows. So, feelings tie satisfied within us, coiled ‘round in a conscience crest.
One in spirit, Fr. Dan Berrigan and Sr. Megan Rice return to the womb.
Megan spoke for Mass. Peace Action on multiple occasions, including at an event in 2017 with Dan Zak, the Washington Post journalist who wrote about her work. She appeared at our Presidential First Use conference in 2017 with Prof. Elaine Scarry and Sen. Ed Markey. She accepted Mass. Peace Action’s Peacemaker Award in 2019 with Michael Walli and Christopher Spicer on behalf of Transform Now Plowshares. Read Dan Zak’s obituary notice in The Washington Post — Ed.
— C.R. Spicer is a stay-at-home dad, member of Massachusetts Peace Action, organizer with Witness Against Torture, Somerville Human Rights Commissioner and Pastoral Council Member of the Paulist Center of Boston. For more writing see crspicer.net
