New Book Collects the Poetry of Anne Montgomery, RSCJ, Plowshares Pioneer
People mostly know Sr. Anne Montgomery. RSCJ, as an educator and peace activist who worked with poor youth in New York City and was among the eight individuals who participated in the very first Plowshares action. But she was less well known for her poetry, until now. This new volume of her poetry should help to change that, as Rosalie Riegle writes in her review.
Arthur Laffin and Carole Sargent have published an overdue but wonderful book on Sr. Anne Montgomery’s poetry: Arise and Witness: Poems by Anne Montgomery, RSCJ (New Academia Publishing, 116 pages, $16.00). They began with a lightly edited biography of Sr. Ane Montgomery, RSCJ, published by the Society of the Heart of Jesus website. They should have contacted me as I interviewed Sr. Anne at Jonah House in 2005 and she is featured in detail in Chapter 3 of Doing Time for Peace: Resistance, Family, and Community (Vanderbilt UP, 2012.)
She was one of those who started the Plowshares Movement, putting into practice the words of Isaiah 2:4: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
In our interview, she told me that she was discerning how to respond to the invitation to plan and participate. She said, “I wrote down my pros and cons, Finally I just tore them up and said, ‘In the end, this is an act of faith.’” After spending time at Jonah House Catholic Worker and after much planning, in September 1980, she and seven others entered a General Electric Plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, hammered on two nose cones, poured their own blood on documents, and prayed for peace. This first Plowshares Action established a pattern which was followed, with modification, in most of the over 100 subsequent actions which became known as the Plowshares Movement.
Art Laffin is the historian of the Plowshares Movement, and a great profile of the Plowshares is at the Kings Bay Plowshares website. Laffin and Carole Sargent, who edited this book, should have included more links to his internet work and to Felice and Jack Cohen-Joppa’s The Nuclear Resister, which chronicles all anti-nuclear actions at https://www.nukeresister.org/.
But they have included all of Sr. Anne’s poetry, which is a wonderful tribute to her busy life as an anti-nuclear activist. She spent, I think, about three years in jail all told, but even more important were her many trips to Iraq with the Christian Peacemaker Teams (now called Community Peacemaker Teams). She traveled twelve times to Iraq and also lived in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank where she witnessed the horrifying conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis.
When I interviewed her, she said she had done “6½ Plowshares.” In November of 2009, she added another one when she and four others cut through a fence and entered the vast Naval Base near Bangor, Washington, in an action they called the Disarm Now Trident Plowshares. Anne was 83 and still supported by her religious sisters and by the Catholic Workers.
Calling themselves the Disarm Now Plowshares, the five of them entered the Kitsap-Bangor naval base twenty miles west of Seattle, Washington, which contained over two hundred nuclear warheads. All five were sentenced to “time served.”
Sr. Anne lived in an RSCJ community and volunteered at the Redwood City Catholic Worker House. She was soon diagnosed with cancer and after a few months of treatment entered hospice care at a California RSCJ community in Atherton. Shortly before her death on August 27, 2012, she received the Courage of Conscience Award from the Peace Abby in Sherborn, Massachusetts.
Few knew of her poetry outside of her RSCJ religious order. (I sure didn’t.) So this book, edited by Laffin with Carole Sargent, is a Godsend. And now, to her poems—the real reason you should buy this book.
Her poetry is grouped under the following tiles: Gospel Reflection Poems, Prison Poems, War Zone Poems, Resistance/Witness Poems, and Miscellany Poems. I’ll be personal and choose my favorite four.
The first is titled “Andrew” (p. 32), and concludes with these memorable lines:
I have been coming ever since,
but now—then—always
He is the One
coming,
lifted up
for all to see.
Am I Lord?
But
You said
“Follow me.”
I’m thinking she probably wrote that before her first Plowshares action, and I’m reminded how many times I’ve refused to follow Jesus to Calvary.
She writes “S.C.J.M” (p. 51) to her religious community (it stands for the words RSCJ in French), and I’m reminded of the community I found as a member of the Jeannine Coallier Catholic Worker in Saginaw.
“The tomb is open–…
Shall we be healed then,
In the sunlight-sharpened shadow
Of this stone,
And turning, touch hands
At dawn?
I miss living in a Catholic Worker community and this poem made me feel the loneliness, but I was heartened by attending this fall’s St. Francis CW 50th Anniversary National Gathering in Chicago.
I loved her “From Alderson: Lent, 1985” (p. 57) because I, too, have visited Alderson, stopping to see Kathy Kelly, who was imprisoned there in 2015.
I walk the road,
One mile, more or less,
Up the hill to view
Outside
These sun-tipped hills,
Mocking? hollowed go hold death?
or are they cradles of spring’s
birth, echoing our longing?
And inside:
A distorted mirror of worldwide
Pain:
hospital—
razor-wired detention—
drug unit—
then downhill to the valley of our
ordinary,
mind-numbing
daily
come and go.”
Such contrasts could bring tears.
Art Laffin met Sr. Anne in New York City in 1978. He wrote, “She deeply understood that the call of Isiah and Micah to beat swords into plowshares was not a nice idea for theologians and others to theorize and write about but a divine mandate to be lived!” (p. 74). He should have put that sentence in his dedication to her at the front of the book.
The final word is Sr. Anne’s: “Prayer at this Kairos Time” (p. 95) and it rings and sings with Kairos hope. It begins:
In this Kairos time of crisis and challenge, may we, like Mary of Nazareth, be open to the Spirit who calls us to new ways of incarnating the Word of truth and love.
Yes, yes, and yes!! I hold those words close to my heart in hope.
Cover photo provided by the archives of the Society of the Sacred Heart.
