Life & Mortality Quote by Daniel Berrigan

Spoken by a Jesuit priest who spent decades marching, getting arrested, writing poems, and confronting the machinery of war, the wish to die with boots on is a declaration of vocation. It refuses the drift into comfort or quietism and insists on a life spent moving toward trouble for the sake of peace. Boots signal readiness, endurance, and the abrasion of long roads. They are not slippers. For Daniel Berrigan, they also carry the productive tension of a martial image reclaimed by a pacifist: the footwear of soldiers turned toward nonviolent resistance, toward liturgies in the streets, toward prisons and draft boards and nuclear sites where conscience must be made public.

The phrase carries an old American flavor, the frontier and the cowboy legend of a death in action rather than in bed. Berrigan borrows that idiom and baptizes it, aligning it with the biblical vision of feet shod for the gospel of peace. To die with boots on is to meet mortality not as a retreat but as culmination, the end of a long obedience in which prayer becomes protest and poetry becomes indictment. It names a refusal to retire from moral witness, even as the body ages and the risks multiply.

Placed against the arc of his life, the words distill a pattern: burning draft files at Catonsville, enduring jail, eluding the FBI as a fugitive, returning again and again to teach and to organize. The desire is not for a dramatic end but for integrity, a unity between belief and action that holds to the last breath. It urges a spirituality with soles scuffed and laces tied, a faith found where wounds are. In a world tempted by abstraction and resignation, it is a simple, stubborn prayer: let me keep showing up, feet on the ground, until I cannot.