Shadow on the rock (Dan Berrigan)

This morning I joined several Catholic Workers and others -- about 18 people total -- at the Pentagon for an hour long prayer service to commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. We prayed for forgiveness for that action, for the 200,000 people immediately killed, the untold number of people who did not die right away but who were affected for the remainder of their lives, for the trillions of dollars that have been spent on the nuclear arsenal rather than on programs that protect and enrich human life, for the damage that nuclear testing has done to the earth, for the fact that humankind now has the terrible ability to eradicate us all.

Shadow on the rock
by Daniel Berrigan, S.J.

At Hiroshima there’s a museum
and outside that museum there’s a rock,
and on that rock there’s a shadow.
That shadow is all that remains
of the human being who stood there on August 6, 1945
when the nuclear age began.
In the most real sense of the word,
that is the choice before us.
We shall either end war and the nuclear arms race now in this generation,
or we will become Shadows On the Rock.

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