Witness in the Atomic Age: In Memory of Sister Megan Rice

November 19, 2021 | By Stephen McNulty MY ‘25

image description: a nuclear power plant at sunset

In 2013, an eighty-three-year-old nun stood before a court facing an odd charge — the year prior, she had broken into a Tennessee nuclear site, in what was perhaps the largest security breach in US atomic history. She and her collaborators were part of the Plowshares movement, a pacifist Christian movement infamous for direct action against US nuclear facilities. Their goal, as it were, was to beat the swords of the military-industrial complex into plowshares, as alluded to in the Book of Isaiah:

And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: 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 any more.

Plowshares activists were famed for this sort of thing — activists had trespassed onto weapons facilities, damaged nuclear warheads, burned draft cars with napalm, poured blood onto military files, and had run the gamut of controversial, flamboyant protests. But this one struck a special chord in the national psyche, perhaps because it was all headed up by Sister Megan Rice — an eighty-year-old nun. And an unapologetic one at that: on the stand, though, she was entirely unapologetic: “Please have no leniency on me,” Sister Rice said during the trial. “To remain in prison for the rest of my life would be the greatest honor you could give me . . . I had to do it. My guilt is that I waited 70 years to be able to speak what I knew in my conscience.”

While some of the Plowshare activists went a bit overboard, there’s something striking in Sister Megan’s response and attitude towards protest. She vowed that if attacked during the break-in, she would never strike back or offer any self-defense. And as the police came? She stood waiting for them to handcuff her, singing “This Little Light of Mine.” There’s a haunting similarity between her passivity in the face of attack and the spirit of the early Christians, who sang hymns while being fed to the lions. I see in her the spirit of Paul, writing one of the most joyful books in the entire Bible — his letter to the Philippians — from the dark caverns of a Roman prison cell. Both held steadfast against what they saw as idols: for Paul, the Roman emperor; and for Sister Megan, the machinery of the largest military in human history. While those comparisons don’t fit perfectly, I think there’s a lot to learn from her example about witness in the public sphere and about the idols of our own day.

As anyone who’s talked to me for the past month knows, I get into the Christmas spirit quite early. What better way to do so than by listening to beloved Christmas hymns? My favourite has to be “Do You Hear What I Hear?” Its lyrics seem innocuous enough:

Said the night wind to the little lamb

Do you see what I see?

Way up in the sky, little lamb

Do you see what I see?

A star, a star, dancing in the night

With a tail as big as a kite

With a tail as big as a kite

Innocuous, that is, until you learn that the song was released in October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “A star, a star, dancing in the light” isn’t just about Jesus. It’s also about the threat of nuclear war, looming right overhead. Do you see it, dancing in the night?

The next verses, though, pull us right where we need to be — to the baby Jesus, “sleeping in the cold.” One can sense the pivot. “A star dancing in the night” and a “voice as big as the sea” lead into a “child, a child, shivers in the cold.” The child, the implication being, is Jesus — the one to whom we, like the Magi, must come with “silver and gold.” We go from the loud to the soft: how do we notice God, laying timidly in a manger, amid the horrifying pall of the atomic age? Do we have the spiritual clarity to “pray for peace, people everywhere?”

I don’t mean to say that everyone ought to be a pacifist. In fact, I struggle a lot to grapple with the moral and spiritual implications of conflict nowadays. Nor am I advocating for us, by any means, to engage in the sorts of activities Sister Megan did. But with her recent passing, I’m reminded yet again of how important it is to see past the machinery of modern arms and geopolitical conflict. When she was able to do just that, she found a child, the Child, shivering in the cold — one that clamoured for her attention, spiritually and even politically. And it gave her an incredible, almost irrational joy — the sort of joy that causes an eighty-year-old nun to sing “This Little Light of Mine” in handcuffs, pleading for a harsher sentence.