( The author is a first-year Divinity School student and a resident tutor in North House. )

DRIVING south on Palm Sunday, most of us were a little frightened. We were heading toward Washington, and we planned to spend Holy Week fasting in the jails of the nation's capital.

The six of us from Harvard-Susan Jones from the Ed School, Bill Divine '71, and Charlie Schoenau, Bruce Frivatsky, Randy Fredrikson, and I from the Divinity School-were going to join with other seminarians, clergymen, laymen, and religious magazine editors. Together we would demonstrate a particular kind of meaning for Holy Week 1971 in a nation which is carrying out its own kind of crucifixion in Indochina.

Why had we decided to spend Spring break this way? What did we think we could accomplish? Why not wait until April 24 or Mayday to join mass protests?

Or why do anything?

Isn't this kind of demonstration its own middle-class breed of cop-out?

II

AS A GROUP, we intended to focus the moral conscience of this nation's religious community on American atrocities. We would voice an intense moral opposition to Nixon's Vietnamization-a policy which substitutes American technology for American soldiers, Indochinese corpses for American corpses and at the same time dares to allege the moral adequacy of such a policy. We would emphasize only what should be blatantly obvious, but which seems to be ignored: that the lives of Indochinese are as valuable as those of Americans and that any policy ignoring this fact is morally unconscionable-especially in a so-called religious community.

We hoped to emphasize the frightening analogy between the policy of this nation today and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ 2000 years ago. A crucifixion by imperial soldiers following the rule of distorted law and order in an occupied land. And we would point to the hypocrisy of the religion and politics of those who, like our First Family, "worship" in their Easter finery before a blood-stained flag and an open tomb, not seeing the absolute contradiction between the slaughter of a people thousands of miles away and the celebration of the 2000-year-old crucifixion and resurrection. In this country, in 1971, we saw fasting in jail as the most appropriate way to celebrate Holy Week.

Finally, we wanted this non-violent protest to illustrate that there are viable and active alternatives for the antiwar movement, other than waiting for the next election or bombing the White House. We wanted to exemplify a protest that would be morally and tactically justifiable to most people opposed to the war, workable on a relatively small organizational scale, and consistent with both a strong opposition to American policies and an abhorrence of violent activities.

III

WE JOINED the other demonstrators for the first time at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church for our own Palm Sunday evening worship service. Gene McCarthy and Pete McClosky were there as speakers.

That helped.

Maybe we were doing something significant.

Another speaker, returning after four years in Laos, described the damage our bombs are doing there. Babies with flesh burned away. Mothers with but one breast to nurse them. Thousands of people starving in caves because their food has been destroyed and their homes have been bombed into oblivion.

A huge lump was lodged in my throat. My eyes were full of tears ready to stream down my face. I had heard all of these things before. Never had they seemed so immediate. For an enduring moment, my whole being was pervaded by an overwhelming sense of despair and helplessness. I felt abnormally close to realizing what those endless statistics mean: a million dead, five million refugees, two and one-half times the number of bombs dropped on Europe in World War II. I could only reask the silent question for which there seems not even to be a silent answer.

"Why?"